Despite the arguments made by old Heinz Ketchup advertisements and by young fundamentalists trying to convince their partners of the merits of abstinence, waiting is terrible. It doesn’t matter if you’re waiting for water to boil or for George Lucas to admit he made some mistakes, it hurts and will continue to hurt until the wait is over, or until you forget you are waiting. Let’s be honest: how quickly can you forget the voice of the first lover who said, “Not tonight”?
Some people, like Lucas Southworth, claim that waiting is “interesting,” since, regardless of how long you suffer in anticipation, you forget it all as soon as the wait is over. Sadly, some people, like Lucas Southworth, are wrong. Waiting isn’t interesting; it’s suffering, even if you try to downplay the degree, and all suffering becomes a part of you long after it has been soothed. Try waiting on line for the bathroom in your local dive after taking a few Ex-Lax pills and see if you ever forget, or anyone else either, the consequences of that queue.
Still, the main concern with waiting isn’t memory, it’s the fact that you have to live through it. Waiting for this site to get off the ground has been miserable, not unlike the mild agony of sitting through a Third Eye Blind concert to please my younger brother and pleading for the speedy arrival of the glorious moment when the music would stop. Now, I may grant that the euphoria of having our needs and desires fulfilled after waiting remains among the true pleasures left to us. Likewise, teasing is an art to be admired. But then again, too many people think they are cunning teases, when they’re really just making us wait for something not worth the trouble.
If I might wager an ill-thought-out Freudian analysis, made without the benefit of morning Grape Nuts, I mean Nutty Nuggets, it sounds as if you are dominated by the pleasure principle more than the reality principle. Or perhaps you resent the reality principle. I don’t know what I’m talking about, and I’m tired of reading Freud.
In my opinion, waiting is only bad if you never get where you wanted to go, in which case I wouldn’t call it waiting anymore.
By the way, in high school, I sat through many 3EB concerts, entirely by choice. Waiting for the band to come on was an exquisite agony!
I’m very sure I didn’t call waiting “interesting.”
I do agree, though, that the actual, physical act of waiting is not at all interesting. In fact, it might be considered traumatic, or at the very least, if we need to bring Freud into this conversation, it is an act of submission. But waiting is also an illusion, and as soon as the time you spent waiting is over, that illusion immediately dissolves. This is what I find interesting.
Per the Ex-Lax example: I would argue that the more urgent the waiting, the greater the sense of relief when the waiting is over. If you take Ex-Lax and head to your favorite neighborhood dive, you will have to wait in a queue to use the bathroom. But when the waiting ends, you become presented with an entirely new set of obstacles. These obstacles occupy, thus shrinking time and, in a sense, it erases the original agony of the waiting. If you race into the toilet area, you’ll frantically begin scanning for toilet paper. If you find it, then you’ll move on to the new obstacle of wiping urine off the seat. As you do these things, you’re technically still waiting for the release, but you are also busy. The sense of waiting has left you. The time spent waiting has dissolved.
What is also interesting about this example is that waiting almost entirely implies that you are at the mercy of factors (or people) you cannot control. The moment you regain control (even if frantic), you have stopped waiting. And since your mind is never interested in returning to the moment of waiting (that traumatic or submissive moment), the waiting therefore disappears.