Waiting.

I do not like waiting. It's just one of those things in life that you kind of just accept and can sometimes do nothing about, but that doesn't make the act of waiting any less unenjoyable. We've all done our fair share of waiting throughout our lives, of course, as have I, and I like to consider myself a person who's quite good at it. Unlike other things I'm good at, however, waiting is something that I would much prefer to avoid doing whenever possible.

Linguistically speaking, waiting is a verb, or a word that indicates an action. I find that to be a bit paradoxical really, because, in my case anyway, waiting usually involves me doing precisely nothing. I have that ability to simply zone out and literally not think about or do anything, and this particular ability is my regular go-to whenever I find that I am forced to wait for something. It's quite handy when I don't feel like wasting my phone battery through aimless scrolling on social media or playing the one mobile game that I have.

I've been trained from an early age to remain vigilant in the face of an extended period of waiting. Looking back now, the time I used to spend waiting for my mother or either of my grandfathers to come pick me up from school might not have been all that lengthy, but back then it seemed like forever. My sister and I used to find comfort in Billy Joel's "The Longest Time", although years later I discovered that the context of the song was quite different from what we used it for.

I incidentally just read about Arsenal, the football club I support, employing an Austrian 'gridlock consultancy firm' to design a new queuing system to reduce waiting times on match days. The fact that such a service even exists is actually sort of amazing to me, but I guess it makes complete sense. People specialize in everything these days, and due to supply and demand, the fact that a lot of people, like me, don't like waiting, there was always going to be someone finding some way to make money from addressing that.

Having said that, though, waiting is just part of life; there's only so much you can do to speed things up, but most of the time it's impossible to eliminate the wait altogether. The world today, among other things, is characterized by its need for instantaneousness; everything has to be done now, now, now. It's a viewpoint I personally agree with, as I don't really see why something that can be done quickly, well, isn't being done quickly. However, I do accept that there is always a certain amount of waiting that needs to be done - I just always prefer that it's as small an amount as possible.

Sometimes, though, there's really nothing you can do to reduce your waiting time. I'm currently waiting for the proposal for my Master's project to be approved before I can properly start with my research, and I've been told that the approval process typically takes a month, though mine might just be able to be completed slightly sooner. This was last week, so I have potentially three more weeks in which I have no choice but to wait.

I could, of course, get started on my reading, which is what my supervisors have advised me to do. It would at least be better than simply doing nothing. With me being me, however, exactly no relevant reading has been done. I've pretty much been doing what I usually do when I'm waiting for something, which is basically nothing.

I guess I've been hardwired since young to do nothing while waiting for something, but it's a habit I'm trying to break. I intend on being at least a little productive this week, if only so I can tell my supervisors that I've actually been doing something besides watching YouTube videos all day. Rambling about the act of waiting is one way to get the juices flowing, in any case.