True Confessions: My Boring, Boring, Boring Life Exposed!

You know your life might be getting just a little too boring when . . .

• You look forward to the automated calls from your library telling you that the item you ordered has just come in, and you even engage in conversation with the computer-generated voice. What's really weird is when it turns out to be one of best conversations you've had lately.
• One day you suddenly realize you haven't spoken face-to-face with a real human being, except for your daughter and sales clerks, for weeks.
• The highlight of your social life is going to the downtown library every other week, especially if you get the good circulation clerk, not the frowny, unfriendly one.
• You actually look forward with eager anticipation walking around downtown, while alternatively dodging and getting tangled up with the annoyingly clueless throng of Pokemon Go! players.
• You know the schedule of your local NPR affiliate so well that you can tell what time of day it is by what's playing on your radio, and sometimes you even know what day of the week it is by what program is on.
• You are so bored you waste hours engaging in what passes for political “debate” these days with a couple of knuckle-dragging, Trump-loving, crude-to-the-max, name-calling conservatives on an on-line comment section, even though you know from the beginning that it will change nobody's mind.
• You get excited making the grocery list for your weekly trip to Target, a store you've been to literally hundreds of times before. And for added excitement you decide to go in the morning rather than making your usual afternoon trip. Then for a really wild time, you throw caution to the wind and go an alternative route. Life in the fast lane, watch out!
• Even though you're not normally that great at crossword puzzles, you become obsessed one Sunday with the New York Times Sunday crossword and finish it completely. And you still have time to clean the house and make your usual Sunday phone calls to your siblings and dad.
• You realize with utter mortification that you could describe in explicit detail, leaving out nothing, all the dates you've been on since you became a widower in front of your daughter, any child of any age, mixed company, even the Pope, without censoring anything. And if that's not depressing enough . . .
• It then dawns on you with deep and utter embarrassment that your social life isn't rated triple-X, a single-X, R, not even PG-13, but G for general audiences, or, more appropriately, E for Extremely Boring.