Boredom & Intelligence

I don't know if it's an excess of excitement last weekend, or whether the warm weather has one hankering after better things to do, or just a combination of things, but this last week I've just been excruciatingly bored. And...given boredom, what else is there to do than go for a drink? Actually, what I should be doing of course, is write, since I guess one of the reasons one writes is to stave off boredom - or rather writing fiction at least is probably the most highly charged intellectual pursuit I've got. You don't have to be intelligent to be a writer, of course, but I think if you are intelligent, or shall we say, easily bored - then writing is a stimulation of that intellect. I'm not an academic or musician or scientist or craftsman, so without creativity I'm reduced to paperwork, administration, watching TV, sitting in bars. All well and good, of course, but not really doing anything for the intelligence quotient. Dilletante that I am, I do find quite a lot of things in my life at the moment, not "easy" as such, but eminently doable, and, more than that, not exactly stimulating me intellectually. Perhaps I could learn a language or develop a computer system or something equally absurd, but no, I'm not just bored, I'm a little jaded. I feel a need to stretch my wings, yet I'm feeling particularly grounded at the moment. Whereas I tend to write poetry to emotional order, fiction is primarily intellectual with me, not that I'm wanting to write something particularly complex, just that the whole job of writing fiction is like building a large house from scratch, with the writer as architect, surveyor, designer, bricklayer, roofer and labourer all in one; and, though there are plenty of Barratt books and Wimpey Stories, I'm probably more interested in a one-off, a building without a particular template; something that will give me the "wow" factor; which will stop me feeling this boredom.