Word: ennui
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This may sound like touch-tone utopia, but in reality Murphy's Law prevails. Computer breakdowns and mistakes in programming commonly cause problems. The software bugs that may linger for many months can invoke a state of perplexed ennui in even the most sanguine of computer phone users. Danray, a Texas-based communications firm that was acquired last year by Canada's Northern Telecom, installed a PBX system two months ago at AMF headquarters in White Plains, N. Y. Reports one AMF employee: "The new system has its problems. We have trouble with connections, and quite often calls...
Still, the more conventional avenues of gift buying will probably leave you choking on Cuteness and clutching painfully at your wallet. To relieve ennui, try shopping in untraditional places; like Sanborn's Fish market near the Quincy Market. A sign outside advertises "Whale Steaks" but the man inside insists, "that's a lot of horseshit. We donot support the slaughter of whales!" Nothing like giving with your social conscience clear. Oh well, failing that, maybe someone you know would like to get a crate of lobsters for Christmas. And maybe the Post Office will get them there before July...
...State, trussed up in a chair and holds the weap on to the dignitary's head, while the pair reach a tongue-blistering stalemate on the accommodations of power vs. the demands of conscience. Two ideas have entered Doctorow's play on a double ladder of descent. Ennui, anomie - the catatonic state of buried lives - was summed up by Kierkegaard when he called despair "the sickness unto death...
Natalya (Tammy Grimes) is a brittle, self-centered wife. Consumed by ennui, she finds her estate-owning hus band Arkadi (Robert Symonds) a total bore. She whiles away the lazy hours with a sophisticated neighbor, Rakitin (Paul Hecht), whose one-man-talk show masks the desire he feels for her. A coltishly appealing young man named Aleksei (Mark Lamos) is brought in to tutor Natalya's son. One look at him and Natalya half falls, half dives into the vortex of love...
Still, every craze sooner or later begins to bloat with selfimportance; then it incites, along with ennui, a certain peevishness and skepticism among outsiders. Running is no exception. Superannuated as a fad, running is beginning to express itself more and more in the tongues of a subculture. Thus antirunning feeling, apart from that expressed by spouses and families of devout marathoners, has been turning up more and more in the public prints...