Waiting makes you old
by LogPoes
For some reason, I do some of my best thinking in the shower. Complete, coherent, structured stories and blogposts just materialise while I’m rinsing some fancy conditioner out of my hair. Unfortunately, I still haven’t found a way to record my thoughts while I’m actually IN the shower, so (not unlike those brilliant, world changing epiphanies that strike me 3 seconds before falling asleep that I’m never able to remember when I wake up) those wonderful, fully developed blogposts are more often than not three quarters forgotten by the time I’m wrapping a towel around my hair. What follows are the remains of one of those magical blogposts, because the subject matter is relevant to my life right now and I want to post it to either elaborate on or refer to at some later point. So, here we go:
I was in the shower, thinking about how destructive waiting is and how much waiting I’ve been doing recently. Being someone who is always trying to get to something or get to somewhere, you could say that I am always waiting for things to be finished (zines, essays, exams) and dates to arrive (graduations, shows from favorite bands, the new RuPaul episode), but that to me is different: they’re either happy things that I’m anticipating or there is clearly an active element of working towards things where I do have (some) influence on the process (write faster!).
The kind of waiting I’ve been, I’m tempted to say suffering from in the last few Idon’tevenknowhowlongs has been the draining kind of waiting. [While I'm thinking all this, a song by my favorite Belgian musician Daan pops up in my head in which he sings "I'm not waiting, waiting makes you old". I haven't thought of this song in at least 6 years. Welcome to my brain.]
Amongst other things, in the last 6 months I’ve been waiting for grades, for people to email me back, for paperwork, for permissions, for letters promised that never arrived, for information, for medical results, for me to stop feeling so miserable, for my studies to finally stop s*cking, for my new neighbour finally to buy some damn headphones (for the record: he did! It took him a year, but he did! Everybody rejoice!), for me to know where I’m at, for me to be able to make some decisions and for my life to finally start going forward again. Because all this waiting just makes my general existence feel very stagnant, like I’m on stand by. It’s getting pretty old. And so am I.
How can you take everything I do and think and conceptualise it in a post? I feel you, I really do. I’m doing an intense masters, so much waiting on my part. But hey, we’ll get through it!
Hi! Yeah, I’ve talked to a couple of fellow students and professors this week and it seems like everyone in academia has been feeling like this. Maybe it’s the time of the year? Maybe it’s inherent to being in academia? *ponders*
I think part of what makes waiting so miserable is the fact that you don’t have control over things: when the waiting will be over and what you’ll get in the end and doesn’t that suck. Like whoa.
Yup! Trufax!
[...] In my last post I wrote about the waiting and the stuck and the s*ck. One of the things I was waiting for, was for this gentleman named Clark (Clark Cat! Best. Name. Ever. Y/Y?) [...]