Waiting

It’s 2 PM and I’m waiting for the cable guy.  I hate waiting.  Especially when there’s no TV to watch.

I really hate waiting.  I hate waiting in line at the gas station.  I’ll leave and come back later just so I don’t have to sit in my car waiting.  I hate waiting in lines at the grocery store (which I actually feel a little guilty about because I used to work at a grocery store and I know what it’s like to wait on a line of people waiting).  When I’m in these lines, I try to take a deep (calming) breath and wait.  Or sometimes, I don’t wait and I order out that night for dinner.  I hate waiting for answers.  If I need to know something, I go right to the source for information.  Cuts out all that annoying waiting.  At work, I’m waiting to be transformed (that’s a fancy word for “reorganized.”)  I hate waiting to be transformed because who knows what I’ll be transformed into!  (I’m hoping a snow leopard, Trix is hoping a turtle, and Deputy Pepper, well, a pepper.)   

When I finally stopped waiting to go to
grad school, this building was waiting for me!

I hate waiting but I’m also really, really good at waiting.  I was thinking about this the other night while I attended an event on the campus of my graduate school alma mater (think big state school with a turtle for a mascot).  It took me a year and a half to get my (very expensive) Master’s degree and it’s already been over four years since I graduated.  Four years…that’s the same amount of time that I waited to apply to go to grad school in the first place.  I would’ve waited even longer (the fancy term for that is “deferring admission”) but two very important women said to me…if you wait any longer, you’ll never go.  They were right and I’ll always be grateful to them for their sage advice. 

After graduating from my (very expensive) undergraduate program, I worked at that grocery store where I waited on waiting people.  When I wasn't waiting on them, I was the Very Important Assistant Pricing Clerk, in charge of putting up the new tags for each ad cycle.  You can’t quite grasp the scope of this job until all 198 brands of cereals are on sale at the same time!  That’s a lotta tags!  Every week, I worked the third shift (where I came to appreciate heavy metal in a new and profound way) and I would take down the expired tags and replace them with new tags with new expiration dates.  As I replaced all those tags, I’d say to myself, when these tags expire, I’m gonna quit and go places – get a new job, go to grad school, open a nightclub (it was usually 3 AM…I was delirious and confused by the Black Sabbath playing over the loud speaker).  And then I’d say to myself, I’m going to wait until the next ad cycle to do this or that.  What a way to live your life…according to when the Nabisco BOGO sale ends. 

So, I waited and waited some more.  And when I was finally ready, I stopped waiting.  I got a new job and then I got another new job and then I went to graduate school.  And now it’s been four years since I graduated and it feels like it was a lifetime that I was waiting to go places.  Because I stopped waiting and I went and I did it.

But where am I today?

Waiting.  For the cable guy.*

* - It is 4:25 and I'm still waiting!