The Observer, April 11, 2008
Volume XL, Issue 24
Worst Case Scenario: Hurry up!
Life is a fast-moving series of slow-moving moments. Nobody knows this better than someone waiting for their graduate school rejections/acceptances. Thanks to rolling admission, the day you send in your application and the day you find out if you're in may be separated by several seasons. I'm in the throes of agonized waiting right now. I check the mail an average of six times a day – even after it has come – because I keep wondering if maybe the mailman forgot to leave some sort of bulky acceptance package for me and had to come back. Every day, thick packages come in the mail…but they're never for me. April must be some sort of ratings crunch for animal rights groups, because every day my pet-loving roommate gets free personalized notepads from ASPCA or puppy-festooned address labels from PETA. The cruel mailman loads these letters into the mailbox backwards, so that in my second or third over-eager mail trip, I find them, blank and pregnant with potential, only to be confronted by dubious free gifts and entreaties for donations when I turn them over. It's just not right.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that a lot of college is centered on waiting. You wait for your interminably long general education classes to end. You wait for your friends at home, then head down to the cafeteria where you wait in line for the soggy beef and potatoes to which you owe your freshman 15. You wait for your favorite shows to be on, then wait until you go to bed, then wake up and do it again. Every semester, you wait with great trepidation for your grades to be posted online, trembling fingers pounding the refresh button over and over again, so you don't have to wait a single second more than you have to. And so on.
I remember reading a poem once where a man talked about always waiting for the next step in his life to begin. Lying on his death bed, he wrote, he realized he had spent so much time waiting, he had forgotten to live. I hate this poem. When I reach my death bed, I will still regret losing the minute it took to read that poem, when I could have been doing something useful, like checking the mail again.
Unfortunately, life does require a lot of waiting. And, bummer of all bummers, there is always a lot to look forward to. Without validating the author of the poem in any way, I would still like to suggest stopping a little and enjoying the ride – or at least taking in the view when the ride isn't going too well. I can't make the law school letters come any more quickly – even if I checked the mail a hundred times a day. I'm building my talents in other ways – for example, I'm honing my writing skills here in this fine student newspaper. I'm also joyously procrastinating on my five 20-page final papers. I'm even exercising and learning Chinese! The law school letters will come when they may, but the important thing is that I'm focused and working in the present. Crap! Only 73 days until my wedding!
