【英语生活】涂鸦打发上班时间

I draw boxes. I draw them carefully in 3D and then put a little circle at each corner. My husband draws arrows. A line, then a triangular head at one end followed by a similar one at the other. When he is on the phone his hand moves unthinkingly and thickets of double-headed arrows fill up the margins, along the top, in all the available space.

His doodles have always struck me as more troubling than my cubes, which are strange only in that they seem to come from nowhere. Otherwise they seem perfectly reasonable. By contrast, his arrows are unreasonable: the purpose of the arrow is to show the way and so to point two ways at once makes no sense at all.

My sudden interest in our doodles has been prompted by a little booklet called Le Cahier de Gribouillage pour Les Adultes qui S'ennuient au Bureau , which is selling in hundreds of thousands to bored French workers. An English version, called The Doodle Notebook: How to Waste Time at Work , is about to be published in the UK.

I very much doubt if it will catch on. Far from telling us anything about doodling, it tells us the French have a babyish approach to work and a taste for arty whimsy. Inside are pretty pictures and suggestions of what you do with them. Under a pair of eyes it says: "Who has the biggest mouth in the office? Draw them and tape the mouth shut."

This is unfunny and is also misconceived. For a start, doodling isn't really a rebellious act at all, at least not any more. If you want to be rebellious what you do is write a steamy blog at work, get sacked, get a book deal, win a case for unfair dismissal and become a national celebrity - as the English secretary "Petite Anglaise" has recently done.

It is also wrong to see doodling as something to do when bored. Instead, it is what we do when we are trapped and forced to listen to someone else talking. Because work involves a lot of this, there is much scope for doodling.

Technology offers some competing things to do - fiddling with Blackberries can occupy the idle fingers of people in meetings and Google can provide solace to those on lengthy conference calls - but doodling is still best, and I doubt if it will ever die.

Last week I Googled doodle (which was wasting time squared). I found a doodling expert called Diane Simpson, who told me that a doodle isn't a drawing at all. It is a cross between a fidget and a daydream and can tell us something about ourselves.

She explained how Rockefeller's doodles were a series of boxes all on top of each other - implying constructive logical thought. Bill Gates' doodles, on the other hand, were a series of loosely connected boxes - implying a more unexpected, disorderly thought process.

In an attempt to sort out the Rockefellers from the Gates among my colleagues, last week I went round looking for doodles. This was a doddle. In a morning I had collected more examples of arrows, boxes, flowers and hearts than I knew what to do with.

The first finding was quite remarkable. The male/female divide in doodling is deep and almost without exception. Almost everyone now accepts that men and women are made differently. But when we try to name these differences we are embarrassed by the exceptions. So, women are sugar and spice and all things nice; but then along comes Margaret Thatcher or Carly Fiorina.

But in doodling, at least in my sample, the difference is stark and almost without exception. Men do lines and boxes. The only curls they do are regimented lines of joined up figures of 8.

Women do flowers, faces, eyelashes. One particularly tough and analytical colleague has notebooks dotted with pictures of swimwear. They do curls and circles. Not all the women were twee though. One did dark messy scribbles so deep her pen almost went through the page. I didn't need an expert to tell me that this was worrying.

Also worrying was the fact that my own doodles suggest that I may be a closet man, though the decorative ball motif gives my doodles a feminine touch.

The males in my sample shunned figurative doodles altogether. Only two did anything recognisable - one turned boxes into cars by putting wheels underneath. The other has developed a motif that looked like syringes. If I had been him I would have kept my notebook to myself.

Only one man did proper curves - he produced badly drawn treble clefs. However, I discount this as he did it to order, and as he was a manager was probably trying to trick me into thinking he had a nice, empathetic side. Otherwise, his notebooks are filled with boxes like all the others.

Boxes, said my dream expert, mean control. A series of boxes means logical thought. The neater and the more ordered the boxes the greater the logical process.

So what about my 3D boxes? She said I was a private person struggling to be more transparent but trying not to be, which was a bit confusing.

What of my husband's arrows? These suggested he was lacking in conviction and undecided. Which was just as I'd feared.

And the people who don't doodle at all? Apparently these are people who never mark time. People who simply don't let others bang on tediously.

Yet from my researches I'd say there was another sort of non-doodler who troubles me even more: those so obsessively neat that they do not doodle for fear of messing up the notebook.

我画方块，把它们仔细地画成立体图形，然后在每个角画上一个小圆圈。我丈夫画箭头。一条直线，然后在一端画上三角形的头，另一端也画上类似图形。他接电话时，手会无意识地在纸上移动，无数的双箭头填满了所有可画空间的空白处。

他的涂鸦总是比我的方块更让我费解。我画的那些方块只有一点比较奇怪：它们似乎是凭空出现的，但从其他方面来说，它们似乎非常合理。相比之下，我丈夫的箭头则没有道理：箭头的作用是指路，因此同时指向两个方向毫无意义。

我之所以突然对我们的涂鸦产生兴趣，是缘于一本名为Le Cahier de Gribouillage pour Les Adultes qui S'ennuient au Bureau的小册子。成千上万无聊的法国工人都在购买这本书。该书的英文版——《涂鸦笔记：如何打发工作时间》(The Doodle Notebook: How to Waste Time at Work)——即将在英国发售。

我很怀疑这本书是否能流行开来。它讲的不是涂鸦，而是告诉我们法国人工作方法幼稚，假装喜欢艺术。书中有一些漂亮的图片，并提出了你该如何对待这些图片。在一双眼睛下面写着：“谁是办公室里的大嘴巴？画出来，然后用胶条把嘴封上。”

这并不可笑，而且令人误解。首先，涂鸦其实根本不是一种反叛行为，至少现在不再是。如果你想反叛，你应该在工作时间写一篇博客，然后被解雇，签订著书协议，打赢不公平解雇案，成为国内名人——就像英国秘书“小安吉拉”(Petite Anglaise)最近所做的那样。

认为涂鸦是在无聊时才做的事情，这种看法是错误的。相反，这是我们被迫听别人说话时才做的事。因为工作中有很多这种情况，所以人们有很多涂鸦的机会。

科技提供了一些其他可做的事——黑莓(Blackberry)可以占住与会人士无所事事的手；谷歌(Google)能给在冗长的电话会议期间给人们带来慰藉——但涂鸦仍是最好的方法，我怀疑它永远不会消亡。

上周，我用谷歌搜索了一下涂鸦（这是双倍浪费时间），找到一位名叫黛安•辛普森(Diane Simpson)的涂鸦专家。她告诉我，涂鸦根本不是绘画，它介于烦躁与白日梦之间，可以告诉我们一些关于自己的事情。

她解释道，洛克菲勒(Rockefeller)的涂鸦是一系列摞起来的盒子——暗示建设性的逻辑思维。而比尔•盖茨(Bill Gates)的涂鸦是一系列散落的盒子——暗示出一种更为意外无序的思维过程。

为了找出同事中的洛克菲勒和比尔•盖茨，我上周开始四处搜罗同事们的涂鸦。这轻而易举。一个上午的时间，我就收集了很多箭头、方块、花和心脏的涂鸦，我都有些不知道该怎么办了。

第一个发现相当引人注目。男女之间的涂鸦界限分明，几乎没有例外。如今，几乎所有人都承认，男人和女人天生不同。但当我们试图列出这些区别时，那些例外情况妨碍了我们。因此，女人是糖，是香料，是一切美好的东西；但同时也有玛格丽特•撒切尔(Margaret Thatcher)和卡莉•菲奥莉娜(Carly Fiorina)。

然而，至少从我收集的例子来看，男女在涂鸦方面的区别是明显的，而且几乎没有例外。男人们的涂鸦是线条和盒子。他们画的唯一曲线是一圈圈由数字8构成的线。

女人们的涂鸦则是花、脸、睫毛。一位特别厉害、擅长分析的同事，笔记本上画的都是泳装图案。她们也画曲线和圆圈。不过，不是所有的女性都可爱。一位女同事在纸上乱涂一气，她用笔很重，几乎力透纸背。我不需要专家来告诉我，这是一件令人担忧的事情。

同样令我担忧的是，我自己的涂鸦显示，我可能是一个男性化的女人，尽管装饰性的圆球图案让我的涂鸦有了一丝女人味。

我样本中的男性都没有形象化的涂鸦。只有两个画出了一些可以辨认的东西——一个在盒子下画上了轮子，把盒子变成了汽车；另外一位画出了一个类似注射器的图案。如果我是他，就不会把笔记本公开。

只有一位男性画出了名副其实的曲线，那是一些画得很糟的高音谱号。但我认为他是蓄意这么画的，而且他是一位经理，可能是在试图欺骗我，让我认为他有善良、富有同情心的一面。另外，他的笔记本上满是盒子，与其他所有人一样。

我的那位解梦专家说，盒子意味着控制。很多盒子意味着逻辑思维。盒子越干净越有序，逻辑就越严谨。

那么我画的立体盒子说明了什么呢？她说，我是一个重视隐私的人，想要变得更为透明但又努力不那样，这让人有点糊涂。

我丈夫画的箭头呢？这些箭头暗示，他缺乏信念、犹豫不决——正像我担心的那样。

那么那些根本不涂鸦的人呢？显然，这些人从不消极怠工。他们不会让其他人轻易胜过自己。

然而，从我的研究来看，我认为还有一类不涂鸦的人，他们更让我烦恼：他们有洁癖，担心涂鸦会弄脏了他们的笔记本。

译者/梁艳裳