I grew up living in a series of middle class apartments mostly around Quezon City. We didn't have appliances by modern standards-- other than a stove and a clothes iron. I was nine or ten before we even had television-- a B&W Electone TV with a rotary channel selector; there were no remotes then and you have to wait for fifteen minutes before you could see ghostly apparitions of a television show on the screen. The rabbit antennae only pulled in two channels, and we grew accustomed to the picture rolling the entire evening; we later learned that if we kept a hand on the antennae the rolling would be less frequent. I don't remember listening to a radio as a boy, though if I turned the television on early in the morning, it played a rhythmic sound which I later learned to be music. I was already in my teens when we had our first radio-- an Akai integrated hi-fi system with a turn table, a Teac reel-to-reel tape deck and an amplified FM/AM analog radio enclosed in a huge coffin-like cabinet that occupied half of the living room.
We didn't have toys either. But I discovered early on that you could whittle a semblance of a toy out of a block of wood. I developed scavenger skills and would pick up, as I walk home from school, bits and pieces of metal parts and vestigial remnants of what used to be a toy, tinker with them and turn them into something else. When I wasn't making something inappropriate out of nothing, I would stare at the wall until something comes up. It was at this time that I acquired my lock picking skills and the awakenings of a criminal bent.
The worse times were school breaks-- it was three months of nothingness. It was akin to being Laika in Sputnik as it orbited the Earth in deep space. Ten days into the "Summer " vacation (-- we actually only have the wet and dry seasons here, but we delude ourselves by calling the dry months as summer), I was eagerly looking forward to school opening not because I enjoyed school but because it was an escape from soul-crushing boredom. Worst was Holy Week. Back then it runs for the full seven days-- today people observe it, grudgingly if at all, between 12 noon and 3'oclock on Good Friday. I remember spending my time during Holy week just sitting around the house and twiddling my thumbs. Playing outdoors or looking happy is discouraged-- if you so much as smile, you'd be called a "Hudyo". Going out on the street is like being on an episode of Twilight Zone. Everybody talk in whispers. Radio and television broadcasts would stop-- telecasts would come back from the dead on Black Saturday with the annual rerun of "Demetrius and the Gladiators" with Victor Mature-- who moves and talks with a distinctive look of constipation on his face, to bore to death those who were still alive at that point.
Those times seemed to have passed. We've won the war against boredom.
People standing in line at a movie house box office, at a bank or at the LTO could pull out a smartphone or a tablet to play "Plants vs Zombies", check their e-mails, read an eBook, listen to music while they read the closed captions on the flat screen LED 3D HD Monitor on the wall. We now have 24/7 internet or cable TV-- yeah, even if it's Holy Week, and we could bypass commercials by surfing through the channels or having a quick arcade game on our Nintendo DS. Having an iPhone in our pocket, a Sony PSP in the living room, a Kindle in the bathroom, an iPad in the bedroom, means we never need to suffer boredom ever again.
I dread to think what would happen if a global electromagnetic pulse is unwittingly or wittingly set off that would disable all electrical and electronic equipment and devices. People will find themselves, maybe for the first time for some, without their gadgets. It could be Cathartic.
People around the world could experience their first Holy Week.
