What did you do as a child (or adult) to survive boredom during meetings?

by Wasanelder Once 33 Replies latest watchtower scandals

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  Apostate Kate

  I almost forgot, splitting my split ends of my hair.

  I did that too! OMG this thread brings back memories. As a small child of 8 I would listen intently and take every word spoken to heart. (the beggining of Armygeddon fear), soon I started doodling the o's etc, flowers on the borders and drawing, mostly horses and dreaming of having one to call my own. I still have my green bible with the doodles. I colored the clothes on the little guys in the inside covers in red. Met a bad girl and we snickered and passed silly notes. As an adult I spent the short time I tried to "go back to the meetings" outside ruining my Walmart shoes chasing my ADHD son through the rocks. Thank God my son was too hyperactive to sit.

  My last meeting I went without my son, I made the mistake of reading an entire chapter instead of just the one scripture the speaker cited. Then I talked to my study conductor the elders wife and that was the end of it all. She told me I had to believe what the Org said it said even though it obviously said something totally different. I said lets just skip and agree to disagree. She said no it didn't work that way and if I did not renounce what I found out there was no need to go on. I stayed true to myself.
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  james_woods

  Oak Glen congregation, late 60's maybe 1968...

  We used to have a Vcool brother about 7 or 8 years older than me (Larry Phillips) who I really liked a lot (he and Buddy Thompson were actually building a 1927 T bucket hotrod). Anyways, he was the MS school overseer and I was his assistant (keep time, etc). So we are sitting up on first row and just stay there into the servce meeting. The CO at the time was Richard Kline and he is doing a little riddle game in his talk...I am thinking of a THEOCRATIC word that starts with the letter "P"...asks everyone to guess, then gives another hint, etc. This goes on and on for at least 15 minutes. Larry has a paperback Websters dictionary because of the school thing, so he thumbs through it, puts his finger on a word, and shows it to me - egging me on to guess it. His word was "PANTIES"!!!...We are now both doing ripple crack-ups so bad that we finally have to go to the back for cups of water and hang there until the end of meeting.

  Also, as someone else said, sound man was a pretty good gig because we were back in the literature nook and could goof around. They would usually let 2 of us at a time. Once, somehow, during an adjustment between service meeting parts some miscreant allowed a local AM station to bleed into our speakers at FULL VOLUME! It was Tanya Tucker singing "Delta Dawwn, whats that flower you have on?" All the teenagers for months would go back at one another with the other verses, etc -- "Could it be a FADED ROSE from DAYS GONE BY???". Seems that at the time Tanya was considered something of a bad influence on younger guys...

  It was in no way those two guys on the sound systems fault, just a "technical error".
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  forsharry

  I did a lot of daydreaming.

  I also wrote stories in my head...since I couldn't actually write was i was thinking (I've always enjoyed a good supernatural story), I was the mental novelist.

  The backs of the seats in the KH I used to attend were a light wood, ala maple or something like that...they had very interesting knot patterns and graining. I would sit there and find shapes and animals and such (ala watching clouds.)

  I would 'take notes' and in reality write essays for school, poetry (very dark surprisingly enough!), and once older and braver, I would actually commit my imaginations onto the pages. My mother would NEVER think of checking my meeting notebook to find contraband stories and ideas. It was a perfect deception!

  Ole!
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  caligirl

  As a child, I drew pictures. My parents made sure we each had small notebooks to take notes, but we mostly drew in them. I have a vivid memory of one particular drawing incident. I was sitting with a family that we knew well and I had recently seen a show about elephants on TV that must have included a section on the reproductive structure of the male elephant, and decided hat this was what I would draw (no, I'm, not kidding) so I dilligently drew my anatomically correct male elephant, or at least what my 5-6 year old brain considered anatomically correct. I can still remember the shocked double take that Grace did when she saw that drawing - but she just laughed about it.

  As a teenager, I would sometimes bring books that I wanted to read and put them in my bible so that I could get some good reading in during the watchtower or book study.

  Beyond that, I was really good at being somewhere else in my mind entirely to avoid paying attention to the droning. Of course I paid enough attention to get in my required one answer and then check out. Or I'd get up and go to the bathroom a lot. I was fortunate that my parents were not the type that made us all sit in a row with them in the front of the hall. My Dad fell asleep a lot - still does my mom says.