People soon get tired of things that aren’t boring, but not of what is boring. Go figure. For me, I might have the leisure to be bored, but not to grow tired of something. Most people can’t distinguish between the two.
I’m watching a tennis match as I’m writing this. I like tennis, love the sport, and I don’t grow tired of it —but you can bet it’s boring, every game the same routine, from start to finish, one set, then another, then even another. Or reading a good book, especially non-fiction (you could say fiction too): utterly boring. Listen to opera (or to a conceptual album, as the ones that aren’t recorded any more): the same. Traveling, programming, having sex: you can add your favorite activities here, and you’ll see they all are boring.
What all them have in common is that you go on enjoying them all the same, regardless of them being boring. Murakami seems to imply that it’s because they are boring that you go on enjoying them, and I think he may be right. What would distinguish boring from tedious would be, then, that the tedious things are boring and unexciting, making you feel numb, teaching you nothing, wasting your time, carrying you nowhere. On the other hand, there would be the frivolous distractions, the glossy novelties, the adrenaline-charged activities that either you leave behind as you grow tired of them (as Murakami says) or become so intimately boring after a while that you end up loving them in their sheer boredom.
(quotation from Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami)
LEVIATHAN, BEHEMOTH, and ZIZ 