Ever since I was a kid, I've lacked one of the key virtues of human life: patience. I've never been able to wait calmly for anything that I wanted, whether it was a TV show, pursuit of an idea, getting into the college I wanted to get into, I've always wanted it NOW. When MJ is getting ready to go out together, it takes awhile, and I have no patience to wait, I want to get out there NOW. When garbage is lying around to be thrown away or dirty dishes sitting in the sink, I need to clean them out NOW. It funs in the family: my dad always had problems waiting to pick me up after school, getting upset if I kept him waiting even if it wasn't my fault. To be fair, he didn't have the internet or i-Phones back then, it was just idle waiting.
Patience is also another name for solitaire, that pesky computer game that came packaged with most Windows computer software back when people still used personal computers, along with Hearts, Freecell, and my favorite non-card game: Minesweeper. Solitaire's a game of patience; so is baseball, fishing, and long term stock investing; no wonder I am not good at (or show little appreciation for) any of those. Which is also why I didn't enjoy an outing at the local pub trivia night at a bar.....it was too slow. For someone attuned to getting 61 trivia questions in rapid succession compressed in a roughly 20-minute window (without commercials) every weeknight for the last 2 years, pub trivia is just way too much of a slow drip for me; it's designed for teams to go out to the bar and sit at a table and spend money slowly, pay for more drinks, stay at the bar as long as possible, etc. it is NOT designed for getting as much knowledge in that time as possible. The first question tonight was what flavoring sits atop a Basked Alaska to preserve its flavor; a solid trivia question in the food category, answer being the very tasty meringue..... then all the teams submitted their answers, songs played, and we waited, we waited......and finally the answer was revealed. Then another pause for the next question; I could envision this being fun filler for lulls in the conversation if I was with a group of friends, but I had arrived as if I was there to play patience/solitaire: big mistake.
Patience is definitely in short supply in modern times with phones, texts, and a million possibilities for life...I can't be the only one who wants to cram everything I can do all into one day (Everything, everywhere, all at once) and dislike when time is wasted because it's keeping me from doing the 14 other things I could be doing. A little extreme when drivers behind me can't wait an extra half-second for me to respond to the light changing before laying on the horn. It's like everyone forgot what they taught you as a kid about things that you've anticipated for longer and wanted for such a long time taste sweeter/ are better experiences. "Good things come to those who wait." Patience does eventually pay off if you're a viewer, as I have been the last week or so with my freshly minted HBO max subscription, of the series "Station Eleven," which unlike the stimulating zombies of "Last of Us" and "House of the Dragon" (the Game of Thrones spinoff, so you know it has dragons, nudity, and other flashy attractions) doesn't have anything that makes a huge splash, just an end-of-the-world virus and some people in Chicago living through pandemic times like us, but viewers have to wait for it...be patient and watch the TV show until the end to get big payoffs. Once bitten, twice shy after Lost promised us all that over the course of 7 seasons, but turns out some TV shows do actually reward patience. You just gotta devote hours of viewing and not doing other stuff. Shudder.
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