If not a giant asteroid, then boredom will kill us for sure
Yes, I’m a turophile. But when a guy called me that, I took an offence too toxic to fit in an average Twitter user’s 280 characters. With a fat burger in one hand, I quickly looked it up on my phone (yes, we all do it). Turophile: a lover of cheese. I looked up, smiled, he too smiled back, white, gooey cheese stuck in both our teeth (Oooh, dirty mind on this dude).
Cheese… Who must have made it in the first place? I’m not even going to ask why; it preserves the proteins of milk and that’s enough for me. However it was created, making cheese, frankly, is a boring affair. If you don’t know – one has to wait, do meagre stuff, wait, do more of the meagre stuff and then wait again. (What else do we do as it heats inside the microwave oven!) Like cheesemaking, life is full of brief boring moments. In fact, if we sum up all those difficult, why-I-didn’t-bring-my-phone-with-me moments, we are literally being bored to death.
It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention. I believe boredom is the horny-bug that bit mother necessity before the invention was conceived.
A pandemic forced Newton under an apple tree, a silly job at a patent office motivated Einstein. Agree that boredom has led you to some astounding discoveries, some rustic places on the outskirts of your town, to some stupid facts which were never to be discovered doing what you normally do. There are no recommendations popping on the screen when one gets bored. You get up on your own, out of boredom, and find whatever there is to be found. Nothing is leading you, no algorithm. It’s just you and the sweet-tasting boredom.
After performing meagre stuff and after years of waiting is born cheese. There are over two thousand types of it (no, not counting tofu). But the wait is the same. Some types of cheeses are stored for as long as twelve years. It’s cosmos in a wooden mould kept aside to be forgotten. The milk changes, ages. It’s different every day. Like wine, or everything else that ages. A minute early or late to open and something new is born. Serendipity. Each moment matters yet none is precious. What’s precious is the taste born out of boredom. Then there’s the one type of cheese that is manufactured every ten seconds: the processed cheese. But, more on that later because it’s unimportant.
The future depends on what you do today.
Cheese is a product of milk. (God! Is the cheese stuck in his teeth or is he stuck to it)? It boasts about the milk it was born out of; goat, sheep, cow; it swears on it. It’s lazy and thick as a kid before it turns into a sour-mouthed adolescent. A little rennet and a muscular block of whey is obtained. A lot of hustle through the real world (it must be made worth its mother’s milk), and a block of marvellous cheese comes out. And someday, probably during its midlife crisis, it lands on a pineapple pizza and decides to sacrifice its life. That’s life. Not every cheese wheel grows up to model in Tom and Jerry. Some die for reinvention.
Cheese is ancient. It tastes like starlight. It’s old, so old, the earth was not even born. It was still a cloud of curdling milk and we were just hydrogen. Life kindled in it over years, spun round and round till it came together. Maybe, someone watched it evolve, even gave it a whirl till it solidified into globs. Then the aforementioned someone moved on to the next batch. Maybe. And here we are now. The whey looks nutritious. The only thing stopping it from turning into a harmonious block of cheese this instant is the time between now and eternity. So, it keeps revolving, solidifying and hardening at a pace so slow that no scale can count.
What roams around like zombies across the streets in every part of the globe is processed cheddar cheese. Cheap, easily available and undemanding, it’s the easiest to make and abundantly found. You ask why? Because it’s the easiest. Every block tastes the same. It demands no special care and it doesn’t boast about its milk. It simply is born to be consumed. It doesn’t get bored because it has a short shelf life, a smaller attention span. Nobody flexes about a block of processed cheese lying in their refrigerator. The only people who run around praising it is the company that manufactured it in under a minute and forgot about it faster than a goldfish. That block now sits. It allows itself to be shifted, rather pushed, from truck to truck, ship to ship, shelf to shelf; it is mistaking it as its journey. The little cheese cube wrapped in its plastic comfort zone seldom dreams of wooden barrels. All it wants is to garnish our mediocre, tasteless evening meals. It is the grandest product of consumerism. Don’t be that block of cheese. Act out of boredom, at least. Don’t let that milk go to waste.