"... and if you start to feel guilty about being seen as lazy, think of niksen not as a sign of laziness but as an important life skill."

"Choose the initial discomfort of niksen over the familiarity of busyness.... At first, you might get sore, but 'after a while, you’ll find yourself in this moment where you’re like, "Oh, this feels fantastic."' Your surroundings can have a major impact on how much nothingness you can embrace, so consider the physical space in your home and workplace. Keep your devices out of reach so that they’ll be more difficult to access, and turn your home into a niksen-friendly area. Add a soft couch, a comfy armchair, a few cushions or just a blanket. Orient furniture around a window or fireplace rather than a TV.... Ms. Dodgen-Magee encourages people to host boredom parties, during which a host invites over a few friends to … be bored together."

From "The Case for Doing Nothing/Stop being so busy, and just do nothing. Trust us" by Olga Mecking in the NYT.

This is a topic I've written about many times — it's all under the tag "idleness." I also have a tag, "nothing," but that's a more wide-ranging subject, so the tag collects miscellany... miscellany of a very interesting sort... interesting to me anyway. Speaking of interesting, I also have a tag for "boredom," and I'm putting it on this post because of Ms. Dodgen-Magee's idea of "boredom parties." I don't find idleness boring. Busyness — now, that can be boring, but people fight boredom with busyness. It's a terrible fight, because you're distracting yourself from awareness of boredom and the boredom piles up until it bursts through your consciousness and the feeling is — well, what is it for you when that happens? — hopelessness, weariness, futility... a sense that everything's wrong and you hate it all?

I kind of had to blog this article and not just because it's on one of my big subjects and it's in the New York Times. That's a lot but it's not enough. I'm pushed over because of that niksen business. First, it's funny because I'm just assuming it's pronounced Nixon and the thought of solving your problems with more Nixon amuses me. Second, I've been following the trend of seizing upon some foreign language word to add mystery and style to things that might otherwise come across as mundane and dull. In recent years, I've blogged about hygge and döstädning. Niksen — according to the article — is the Dutch word for doing nothing.

IN THE COMMENTS: AZ Bob said:

When you ain't got niksen, you got niksen to lose.

"Cheap labor isn't so bad for me... My landscaping is beautiful. There's not a bit of slime on my pool. It's good for me, but I care about my fellow Americans," says Ann Coulter.

And then hearing some muttered snark from Bill Maher about the pool, she rises to the comic occasion, leans forward, and confides, "He doesn't come to my pool."



The part I'm quoting begins around 6:00. Bill Maher's effort at a retort is, "I'm sorry, I'll make it up to you in bed tonight." What? She got off a good punchline, so he's the one who's suffered the conversational damage? He should have let his guest have the glory of a good joke.

And by the way, can a man go sexual with a woman like that, in the era of #MeToo? The knee-jerk answer is that when it's left against right, it's still just fine, but I don't buy that. And Maher's audience gives him a much bigger laugh for his line — his sexist line.

Her joke was fantastic — "He doesn't come to my pool." She had been delivering some great substantive material about cheap labor and how it benefits the rich, but she repositions to take advantage of the "slime on my pool" imagery that Maher called attention to, and she takes a shot at Trump. She's flexible enough to do that. I don't like Maher going for a cheap sex joke to top her.

Talk about slime on the pool. That's some toxic masculinity.

ADDED: In the comments, rhhardin says, "I didn't get the joke or the rejoinder. Does pool mean vagina? Is it a wetback joke? Mexican in pool leaves scum? And why wouldn't the Mexican come to the pool. You need to skim off leaves and so forth."

I don't normally interfere with rh's musings, but I had to say:

The first meaning related to the ordinary algae that forms in a pool.

The second meaning referred to Donald Trump.

A third meaning — never intended or explored — would be to characterize immigrants as slimy. The potential for seeing that meaning made the original use of the word "slime" inadvisable. It's possible that Maher was pushing that meaning onto her to get her in trouble, but Coulter's joke was to accept the Trump-hater's idea of Trump as slimy.

Let's all reread "Being and Nothingness"...

AND: A fourth meaning, offered by AZ Bob in the comments, has Maher as the "he" in "He doesn't come to my pool." If that's the meaning — and I don't think it is — then Maher's riposte is less sexist. She called him slimy, and somehow to bring his sliminess to a sexual encounter would pay her back.