As isolation boredom takes hold, we’re all guilty of making some silly choices, writes Patrick Carlyon

An Astrophysicist getting magnets stuck up his nose might sound like something straight out of Betoota Advocate but we’re all guilty of making some unusual and hilarious decisions because of boredom, writes Patrick Carlyon.

I get it. Astrophysicist Dr Daniel Reardon was sitting at home and started playing with magnets. What followed next sounds like a spoof story from the Betoota Advocate.

One magnet went up Reardon’s nose, then another. They stuck to one another — through his septum. He took advice from an 11-year-old boy on Google. The kid suggested more magnets to remove the magnets.

But Reardon’s hand slipped. Instead of two magnets he now had three magnets up his nose.

Reardon turned to pliers, but they got magnetised. So he told his partner, who laughed — much like the doctors at the hospital who removed the magnets.

“A bit of boredom in isolation,” explained Reardon, who ought to be applauded for sharing his tale with the world.

But was he so silly?

His choices almost make sense in a world that no longer does. Aren’t we all sitting around and twiddling our magnets?

In the vortex of enforced home life, random impulses seem like good ideas at the time.

It’s where staying in your dressing gown until noon is fine, and you figure it must be 5pm somewhere as you crack a beer at the same time you put on pants.

Where you think about treating yourself to ice-cream, but the journey to the freezer seems too hard.

Where you go for a run and remember at the front gate that you don’t do running. As someone has said, runners run because they love running. Joggers jog because they love cake.

So you turn around, and steam dim sims, then eat an orange, then embark on the 4m-trek for ice-cream.

It’s time to clean the barbecue.

You do things you never do. Clean the barbecue. Spread metres of topping on the garden, which unwittingly sets up a suburb-wide warning system. Now, if you can’t smell the cow dung from that house down the road, you probably have the virus.

You buy a leaf blower, which revs like a motorbike, and clear areas of the driveway that are clear of leaves because you cleared them (in your dressing gown) that morning.

You watch a few episodes of Parks and Recreation and liken each of the characters to family members, in a serious blow to the brittle harmony. One day, you discover you are watching the seventh and final season — by yourself.

Showing Team America: World Police to one of the kids kills time. By the time he gets to the vomit scene he has learned all about private parts as they are applied to people.

He asks to watch Die Hard and you say yes.

“Yippee-ki-yay, mother------,” he tells the poodle, cocking his fingers like a gun.

You think about organising your Spotify playlists, then decide to save it for week 12 or 13. Along with clearing emails and vacuuming under the couch.

You blast bogan rock in a briefly empty house, and the neighbours now desperately seek to distance themselves from an unholy trinity of the stench, the leaf-blower and Jimmy Barnes.

Australian rock icon Jimmy Barnes belting out classics. Picture: Supplied

You start checking your super balance, just for the lurid horror, but change your mind just in time.

Facebook, or Snapchat, or whatever these social media thingies are called, no longer seem so lame. Instead, you play computer golf against mates, for money, and your gambling debt soars along with your blood pressure.

You accept that “zoom” is no longer just a camera function and wonder why you didn’t buy shares in that company earlier this year — instead of Westpac.

You remind yourself to buy chargers. Three chargers for 13 devices in one house leads to outbreaks of swearing lifted from Team America. But you forget, except when your phone dies three or four times a day, and you curse like Bruce Willis.

Maybe you could paint the door. Clear the gutters. Read a book. But there is no conviction in the possibilities, no allure in their prospect. Like your friend, who started online guitar classes and dropped them the same day.

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You stare at a plastic ball in the backyard and wonder at its spiked resemblance to coronavirus.

You start working and realise you are on leave.

So you go to the park and kick the footy, forgetting that you are too old to kick the footy until the ball thuds into your face.

You buy a dozen bottles of pinot noir you can’t afford. Medicine for the nightly news, you tell yourself.

There are matches in the house, and a war chest of pinot noir, and probably six or seven things in a garden shed that you’ve never thought to open until now. All weapons now in the struggle against boredom.

Happily, there are no magnets.

Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist