I hate it when people refer to things as "epic fail." It's overused. Epicness must be reserved for the truly epic, and accordingly I make it a point never to say the two words next to each other in public.

That said, I thought the Bored and Brilliant Project was so hideously flawed that when all was said and done I was ready to go back on my doctrine and label it as a failure, an epic one.

Case in point.

Then I remembered that the people who came up with it have a bunch of scientific data on their website, compared that to the zero scientists backing up my opinion, and realized that probably the project wasn't the problem, probably I was.

The idea was that we would avoid our cell phones, get bored, and become brilliant. My English teacher added this part at the end where we had to write a 100-point essay about our newfound creativity or, in cases like mine, lack of it.

The problem was, I didn't even have to try on half the "challenges" because my phone is so low quality that no sane person should have any problem staying away from it. Pretty early on I deduced that writing a captivating story about restraining myself from using a phone I didn't need to restrain myself from using was way outside the range of my yellow journalism skills.

It takes some real skill to come up with this stuff.

I thought a better idea would be to revisit my relationship with Genesis, my school's online grading portal. I obsess over it enough for it to constitute an addiction equal to any kind of compulsive social media-related disorder my peers might suffer from. I'll click my Genesis bookmark, login, check my gradebook, swear at my teachers (“Mrs. Falkner, why isn’t yesterday's passage analysis graded yet?”), and close the tab.

Then I repeat the process. I’m disappointed to find that even though a quarter minute has passed, my English grade has not changed.

On our designated phone-free day, I went to sleep at 11:34 p.m. after opening and closing Genesis one last time. I didn't touch it until 5:55 a.m. the following morning. I was so proud of myself that I did the math just so I could quote a number—"6 hours and 21 minutes, Genesis-free!" (When I bragged about it later, everyone pretended to be unimpressed, but I think they were just jealous of my gift for self-control.)

A bit of a sour grapes scenario, am I right?

But eventually I came to the realization that my essay had a plot line no more substantial than falling asleep and waking up. Usually when I’m walking to school I listen to music, but that morning I decided I would consciously force my mind into boredom, and commit myself to observing the autumn foliage on Lafayette Avenue.

I thought it would be a challenge comparable to the forty-eight hour phone abstinence my classmates were practicing, and hence, story-worthy. But it wasn’t. I delighted in my newly acquired skills of observation. “Few adult persons can see nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson had said. “At least,” he’d said, “they have a very superficial seeing.” Ha, Emerson and his funny ideas. He was talking nonsense again, just like his friend Henry David always was. Of course I could see nature.

"The leaves are red. 
And green. And yellow, and orange too."

"Yes. That’s right. Those are nice colors."

"There are lines on the leaves—
Veins. 
Like in humans."

I crossed Watchung Avenue convinced that Emerson was wrong, Thoreau was wrong, and New Tech City was right: I was getting to be pretty darn brilliant. But after another ten minutes, I was half a mile down Lafayette and the trees looked basically the same.
  
"Pretty, isn’t it? Come on, Emily.
I mean, it's nature, for god's sake. Of course it's pretty."

This was getting strange; no, this couldn't be right. Everyone knows that leaves look nice in fall. I shouldn't have to convince myself of the fact; it shouldn’t take effort to see it. And here I was making a hugely ostentatious effort and still I couldn't see. 

"I know. There's something wrong with these trees on Lafayette Avenue, probably just late-manifesting effects of Hurricane Sandy."

Objects in image more boring than they appear.

I was trying, I was pretending, I was up to my neck in denial but for the life of me I could not figure out what there was to like about dying leaves. 

It didn't matter, I would discover, that Google was shut up in my laptop back at home. It didn't matter that my iPod was neatly tucked away in my backpack. My eyes had been conditioned to master the art of visual multitasking, a prerequisite essential to walking and texting. My brain had been trained to scan 2 inch by 5 inch rectangles, and focusing on any one of them for more than twenty seconds constituted an unfortunate lapse in judgment. My mind had been superimposed with the idea that the faster the better, so anyone and anything short of having Google's query return speed was a terrible inefficiency.

All his fault.

I had perfected the instinctive translation of what I saw into what it meant, and all feeling, all emotion, all judgment was lost in translation. But creativity doesn't come from hard numbers, in a gradebook or otherwise. Creativity entails the imagination—imagination lost in growing up, and further lost growing up in a technology-obsessed world.

It used to be that the sight of autumnal foliage was a foreshadowing—a promise of Pilgrims and scarecrows and the Nutcracker ballet; of love-hate relationships with icy sidewalks and holiday traffic; of early dismissals when I would take off my snow boots, wrap myself in a blanket, and read all four arcs of the Warriors series again to my Webkinz cat.

Looks like Chris McCandless and Erin Hunter were on the same page.

That simplicity of thinking, that raw excitement, was something that a couple of hours without technology could not restore. My Bored and Brilliant Project had failed, and it failed all the more epically because there was no way it could have not failed. 

But it also gave me a chance to remember the magic this world had held for a younger, blinder me; and a chance to regret that all a magician's tricks and traps were known to the older one.