Why Staring at the Ceiling is Bad for Your Health

By: Justice Seymour

SCENARIO: It’s a Saturday, you have completed your homework, you cleaned your room, groomed yourself to the best of your ability, and you, I don’t know, just have done all you could do by yourself on this very day. What next? It’s a Saturday, after all, maybe you wanna go do something fun, like see a movie, (some not totally legal things because you aren’t of age), or maybe play some Xbox (or Playstation...fine, also Nintendo). But wait, you can’t do any of that! Why? The answer is so simple, it hurts. You just don’t want to. Or you feel like you can’t. Or you can’t feel like wanting to. So what do you do? What do you do with the rest of your Saturday?? I don’t know what you should do...but I know what you shouldn’t. Do NOT stare at the ceiling.

You’ve done it before, you will do it again, but, please beware, when staring at the ceiling is your “thing to do,” you are riding on the slipperyest slope of your life. You probably start to wonder,”What’s so bad about staring at the ceiling?” but you stop, you think about it, and, suddenly, you already know. The ceiling has that way of making you feel time as it is while also accelerating it rapidly. You can stare at that sucker for hours, feel the full pain and boredom of it, and still wonder where the time had went. Staring at the ceiling is like going into Narnia except, instead of a magical world, there’s just a closet. And you’re in it. And it's just dark and cold (even though there are clothes in there so, realistically, it might be nice and toasty). When you come out, it will feel like years have passed, until you go look in the mirror and find that you are actually years older.

The powers of the ceiling are complicated. Many scientists (me) have contemplated just how it works. The only trouble is, I was staring at the ceiling when I was thinking about it. When I was done, I found that it was the next morning and time to go to class. The best way to avoid staring at the ceiling is to simply not start, the only problem is, how do you actively try not to start doing nothing at all? Here is a small list of things that might help you in your battle with the son of a gun that is your roof’s butthole:

1. Do not use your bed for rest.
   • Only ever sleep in your bed. If you lay down, with no intention of sleeping, you are bound to stare at the ceiling.
2. Do not wait for a text.
   • The most common place to wait for a text is laying on your back, on your bed. Do not do this. For one, the text would seem like it took forever to get to you. For two, it probably did, you just wouldn’t have felt it if you didn’t stare at the ceiling the whole time.
3. Do not contemplate the human existence.
   • People are supposed to contemplate the human existence with a telescope, stars, and friends to show off to. NOT in your bed staring at the weird pattern on your ceiling.
4. Do not fight with your friends (even if they’re kinda shitty)
   • Don’t give yourself a reason to be alone with your bed and your ceiling, keeping friendships keep you from being bored.
5. DON’T GET BORED
   • Always move, keep doing anything and everything because the moment you fight with your friends, and have nothing to do, and get bored, and get sad, and go to rest, and wait for texts, and think about if you ever really were meant to do anything ever or if you’re just another ant in the hill, is the very moment that you will be stuck, staring at the ceiling, wait and waiting, until your Saturday is over.