Hip to be dull

Break out the cribbage boards and fondue sets

by Kris Frieswick

Like almost everyone else I know, I spent this New Year's Eve firmly planted on my couch. The real turn of the millennium found me watching videos, drinking champagne, and eating fondue with a friend. Normally, admitting this would make me feel like a pathetic loser, but this year I couldn't think of anything I would rather have done. Maybe I was burnt out from last year's Millennial Foolishness. Maybe I was hung over from partying too late the Saturday night before New Year's Eve. But I prefer to think that my complete indifference to anything rambunctious portends a greater cosmic shift. I believe that this New Year's Eve was a harbinger of a year during which it will be hip to be dull.

Am I placing too much emphasis on one night spent on the couch? I don't think so. There are many other signs of the dullness to come. The tech-stock market took us all on a wild ride for the past four years and made us believe that vast wealth was not just possible, but a God-given right. Now it has imploded. Barring any further heroic interventions by Alan Greenspan et al., I believe it will stay imploded until the companies that constitute it start making some money, which should be a while. The domino effect from this implosion is already affecting every other aspect of the economy. Massive layoffs, so popular in the early to mid '80s, are roaring back into vogue. The red sports car that was our economy has just gotten a great big flat tire, and we all have to get out and walk.

Then there's the new presidency of George W. Bush. Not only does his cabinet bear a striking resemblance to his father's cabinet, but it even features a designee for secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who's reprising a role he held under President Gerald Ford. What could be duller than that?

Face it. We, as a nation, are exhausted -- we're so spent, we're even recycling presidencies. For the past few years, we've been running around like chickens with their heads cut off, creating new paradigms, eschewing convention, spending money like it grew on trees, taking risks with our professional careers and our families' long-term fiscal health in a bid to grab a piece of a great big smoke-and-mirror pie. We're just beat down. And now we're sitting on the sidewalk, battered and worn out with mud on our clothes, looking around and asking ourselves, "What the hell was that all about?"

There's only one thing you can do under these circumstances. Nest. Embrace your inner dullard. Get back in touch with that person you used to be before you became corrupted by 60,000 stock options and had the word "chief" added to your title. Retrench. Reset your inner metronome from prestissimo to largo, or at least andante. See if you can remember what it feels like to take a long, deep breath without interrupting it to check your e-mail.

TO HELP ease yourself into this brave new dull world, take these simple first steps. After work tonight, go to a drugstore and buy a rubber ducky. Go home and take a hot bath with your new little friend, then put on your jammies and flip on Partridge Family reruns. Pour out a big bowl of Cap'n Crunch and hunker down. Contemplate your feet. When's the last time you actually stopped and looked at your feet? They're in pretty rough shape, aren't they? Clip your toenails, but do it in the bathroom. Being dull doesn't give you permission to be a pig.

Next weekend, invest in a high-quality fondue pot and unabashedly invite your best friends over for a fondue dinner. You'll be surprised how much dull fun it can be to sit around a pot of melted cheese and dip stuff into it. It breeds conversations that you'd never have under other circumstances. You remember conversations, don't you? That's when you sit next to or near other people, and they talk to you and you talk to them, and you're not required to write a synopsis memo about it afterwards.

Once you've embraced your inner dullard, you are ready to move on to more advanced dull techniques. Learn how to play cribbage. Or, if you're not quite ready to go that far, hearts. Find four newly dull friends, and establish a weekly Cribbage Night. Get miffed if people miss it, but forgive them when they apologize.

I predict that once this dullness phenomenon takes hold, it will pervade all aspects of our society. Just watch as beige comes roaring back as the new hot color, with some aqua and rose thrown in to help reassure those who are having a hard time with the transition. Memberships at health clubs will plummet as gardening, bocce, and walks around the neighborhood emerge as the hot new sports trends. New-car sales will drop as LeBarons, K-cars, and Geos fly out of used-car lots. Knitting clubs will spring up across the country. Sales of tobacco pipes and slippers will skyrocket. Pub owners will abandon the push to extend last call as their clientele goes home earlier and earlier to get a good night's sleep. The birth rate, commensurately, will soar.

Sure, we'll all miss the freneticism, the excitement, the blistering pace, the glory days that were the end of the millennium. But no one, and no nation, can keep up that kind of pace for long. It's time for a nap, 'cause I, for one, was starting to get just a little bit cranky.

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