(This is a modification of something I originally wrote in reply to a teenaged girl. Obvious?)

I know school has taught you that learning is totally uncool, but surely there's something you're interested in. Go memorise the details of every Yu-Gi-Oh! card or whatever.

No?

Fine, you're bored. There's nothing you can do about that. May as well learn French. You're bored whether you do or not, and if you learn French, you can go tell your parents 'Look, I taught myself French. I'm all grown up now so you should let me go to Paris. By myself.'

They'll say 'No, you're too young to go to France by yourself. Here's two tickets. Take your best friend Jill with you.'

So you take your two tickets and your best friend Jessica, and fly to Paris, where you meet enough hot French boys to keep you busy all Summer. Then, while you're there, you meet Johnny Depp, and he's really, really impressed that you're bilingual, so he marries you and you live happily ever after with the sexiest man alive. (Jill ran off with Orlando Bloom.)

What? You think it's awful that I'm telling you how to run your life? Maybe it is. But who cares? Are you going to give up a happily ever after with Johnny Depp just to spite some random jerk on the Internet? Or are you going to marry that sexy pirate captain-playing actor and become the envy of every creep on the Internet who is still stuck monolingually telling random people online how to live their lives?

Read a book, watch LazyTown, write a story, program, go for a midnight run, chat, study something unrelated to school, dance, draw, reorganize the furniture, write on the walls, learn a new language, comment on random blogs, call up your Senator at midnight and tell him to outlaw telemarketing, build a cinderblock pyramid in your driveway, write a letter to your grandparents, proofread a text on Gutenberg, memorize more digits of pi, play patience, play the drums, browse eBay, back up your hard drive, finish your homework, improve Wikipedia, dissect your computer, read Nietzsche, disassemble the cinderblock pyramid that's now blocking your driveway, hop around in circles, practice spotting so you don't get dizzy next time you hop around in circles, send me money, play with your cat, read Slashdot, look at the constellations, bugtest Firefox, play chess on the computer, write a paper so you'll have one ready next time your teacher assigns one, learn to juggle, hunt down other cool things to do, meditate, clean your room, catalogue an obscure source of data and put it online, do push-ups, write posts for your blog so you'll have some ready the next time you get writer's block, do your taxes ahead of time, practice backflips. Congratulations: it's morning.