As passing school weeks tend to do, this week brought with it a new dilemma. As the baseball gods granted the Astros from my native Houston a game seven letdown in the NLCS, I found myself with exorbitant amounts of time that the playoffs had previously occupied. Boredom naturally ensued.

My first act was to look inward and reassess my station in life. I can’t say I was thrilled. After all, I still write for The Hatchet. I graduate in less than two months and I still haven’t smoked pot – or done any recreational drugs in the SMPA building as I’ve planned to since freshman year. I still haven’t worked up the nerve to ask that cute blonde Californian from my CI small group out for cocoa.

Nevertheless, I decided to look for fulfillment on campus. I found myself alienated among the suspiciously massive Red Sox nation contingent that suddenly had become visible on campus. It was like there was hibernation and abruptly these “die-hard” fans appeared from thin air donning their BoSox paraphernalia.

I became further disillusioned. Much of the trendy Red Sox garb still had creases from having been stored in dressers for 10 months. Jerseys and T-shirts stretched awkwardly across fans that had gained unexpected spare tires in the off-season from caring about baseball. It was like a twilight zone, except the accents were worse.

Now don’t get me wrong, I recognize that there are actual die-hard Red Sox fans. My friend Paul could teach a college course on the legacy of the curse. And a number of the Yankee fans were just as fickle last year. But I am just curious about where all the Patriots fans are right now with their T-shirts and jerseys while the Pats have won a record 21 straight games. It was after thinking about all of this that I realized how desperately bored I had become.

My next move was to rely on the bookstore in hopes it could provide educational distractions from the mundane hours of the nascent off-season. And distractions I found. It wasn’t long after I began to peruse the magazine section of the GW bookstore that I actually came across two different porno mags, in stock and available for purchase in the bookstore.

What a school. In the last week alone I’ve found that not only I can buy tickets to a perennially lame Halloween party on points through Campus Snacks, but also I now can tag my parents with the bill for porn expenditures made from our own school bookstore. For those doubters who are still reading this column and are therefore also bored and lame, I ask you to check out this month’s issues of Ultra for Men and Perfect in the GW bookstore magazine section. I am not kidding.

After the novelty of porn wore off, I was then going to write about how the GW community lambastes men for walking around campus exposing themselves, but has no issue selling magazines in our bookstore that feature women doing the exact same thing. It seems odd that men face the fire for randomly exposing themselves, but if women do it, it ends up broadcasted on infomercials to be sold by Girls Gone Wild. Maybe it’s a weak argument. I give up.

My next idea to cure boredom was more devious. My plan was to stand in the middle of the new J Street, which I have affectionately dubbed “Airport J,” and direct larger students to low-carb terminal. However, I couldn’t find out where to buy those nifty orange direction-pointer thingies. More drastically, I even went to an SA Senate meeting on Tuesday in the hopes of being intrigued by student body interests, but the only thing that intrigued me after the first forty minutes of the meeting was euthanasia.

After the meeting, I decided to take boredom to the streets, or at least to the bar for $1 beers on Tuesday night. Not only did that keep my interest piqued, but it also made me cool. And as CADE can tell you, alcoholism is the ultimate cure for boredom and unpopularity. But in the meantime: Go BoSox. Go porn. Go away boredom. Narf.

-The writer, a senior majoring in Middle East studies, is a Hatchet humor columnist.