Patience Is A Disease

Oh, sure, a certain amount of patience is required to get through life. But at some point, it becomes a problem. Sort of like you can graduate from getting enjoyably tipsy on Friday nights to having a serious drinking problem, you can get more and more patient until it tilts all the way over into dangerous passivity.

I’m saying this because I think I have a patience problem.

I realized it right after I got laid off from my software marketing job, back in November 2005, and I decided to spend some of my severance check on a new tattoo. For the first minute or two, I seriously regretted paying this man with strange facial hair to poke me with a sharp object, but then I stared at the ceiling and breathed slowly and lost myself somewhere on the other side of the pain, which really isn’t more than a minor discomfort. That was when the real pain began: I realized that I was using the same skills I’d developed over the past six months at work. I realized that for months, I’d been just lying still and waiting for it to be over.

Oh, sure, a certain amount of patience is required to get through life. But at some point, it becomes a problem. Sort of like you can graduate from getting enjoyably tipsy on Friday nights to having a serious drinking problem, you can get more and more patient until it tilts all the way over into dangerous passivity.

I’m saying this because I think I have a patience problem.

I think it got serious around November 2005, after I’d gotten laid off from a software marketing job and decided to spend some of my severance check on a new tattoo. For the first minute or two, I seriously regretted paying a man with strange facial hair to poke me with a sharp object, but then I stared at the ceiling and breathed slowly and lost myself somewhere on the other side of the pain, which really isn’t more than a minor discomfort, to be honest. That was when the real pain began: I realized that I was using the same skills I’d developed over the past six months at work. I realized that for months, I’d been just lying still and waiting for it to be over.

There had been rumors of layoffs for at least a year, intensified whispers and instant messages, sudden surges of people making sure they were connected on LinkedIn, fearing their at-work email addresses would disappear. For the last few weeks, when I was really sure I was going to get the axe, I didn’t do much more than read news online and try to sleep at my desk.

Sounds like a dream job, right? I hated it, because I was waiting. Yes, also because I wanted to be doing something useful, but mostly because it was just day after day of passivity. It’s depressing to know you’re sponging off the hard-working officemates. And I definitely had co-workers who cared, who did real work.

Eventually, my patience was rewarded: Along with ten percent of the other employees, I got sent home with a severance check and a phone number to dial for unemployment benefits. You don’t get those if you quit. You get those for suffering patiently. Good things come to those who wait, you know.

“Patience is a virtue” is pernicious. It starts out when you’re a kid. Dinner’s not ready, be patient. Christmas isn’t going to come for six more months, be patient. We’re not there yet, be patient. Later, you learn that patience is the only cure for a cold, a hangover, a heartbreak. It’s the only way to sit through a tattoo or a boring meeting. Eventually you begin to develop patience waiting for things like job satisfaction, or love, or justice, and then you look up and you realize you’re really just waiting for death.

Good things come to those who wait, you know.

It’s an echo, in some ways, of the medieval Catholic doctrine that heavenly afterlife is a justification for misery on earth, and the virtue of patience is the way you get it. Beginning in the mid-1950s, liberation theology tried to shake that up, demanding social justice and progress during mortal life, but it didn’t get very far before getting tarred as socialist and disavowed by the theologians in Rome as well as the economic theorists of Chicago and Washington.

You still see that tendency today in the newspaper columnists railing against the “culture of instant gratification.” Yes, free-market society provides a bewildering array of instant something, but most of it is a distraction from the fruitless wait for true satisfaction, for love, for justice. All those op-eds claim that what people need is more patience in pursuing longer-term goals, and they may be right, but on the other hand, maybe people need to start trying to achieve their longer-term goals sooner. Maybe patience is just an excuse for letting pain linger more than it needs to. Patience, in that case, is a trap, a disease.

What scares me, though, is that it’s worse. What if patience is just like that instant frivolity that op-ed curmudgeons love to hate? What if it’s just just another way we distract ourselves from the everpresent nature of pain and unhappiness? What if, patient or not, all we get is a series of meaningless distractions, short-term solutions that do nothing more than hold us over until, in the long run, we are all dead?

I’m Sure I’m Just Confirming My Pre-Existing Biases

I thought the stimulus check plan was dumb, so the Globe confirms it: The people who most need them are least likely to get them.

Not enough people recycle their direct-mail pieces. Funny, I keep a recycling bin right next to the mailbox so they can be recycled right away. I guess the goal is to drive me to recycle them after reading? Whatever.

Web radio is getting choked. Well, that’s a damn shame.

There’s got to be a thesis in the similarities of SATs as a way of measuring the ability to learn and FICO as a measure of creditworthiness. It’s all about tying something very abstract and diffuse to a number, then idolizing the number and ignoring the actual thing it’s supposed to refer to.

Whose Job Is It To Guard The Freezer Full Of Pee?

This year, the Olympics authorities will take what is delicate referred to as 4,500 samples, and store them for eight years so that if they develop new tests for previously-undetected drugs, they can go back and check old champions with new technology.

It sounds great, but just imagine the logistical challenges of keeping a room-sized freezer full of urine at ultra-low temperatures for eight years. Just imagine being the person whose job it is to guard that freezer to prevent tampering. Just imagine, some time in 2013: “Hey, Bill, we got a new test developed for synthetic HGH, can you go down to the 2008 Olympic Pee Freezer and pull samples 3021 through 3044?”

Yet another reason that we should not only allow, but promote, doping. My primary desire for it, of course, is that it’ll lead to great leaps in transhuman technologies. Genetically engineered swimmers with fins for feet!

Higher, stronger, and swifter right into the goddamn ground.

Seeing our jackass embarrassment of a president schmooze with Olympians just makes me want to break the TV.

I guess he’s no more of an embarrassment than the Chinese gymnastics team, which is obviously faking the birthdates of its athletes to get them to competition age. Seriously, look at the difference between the American and Chinese gymnasts– the Chinese have fielded a team of children who have no idea how badly they’re going to injure themselves.

I love watching the Olympics. But you have to keep in mind a phrase that I think is attributed to Brecht: “Competitive sport begins where healthy sport ends.” You don’t need state-sponsored doping programs to know that. You can see the president using nominally non-political events for political purposes and know it.

Food Of The Olympians

In my eyes, the Olympics, like the Super Bowl and the Oscars, are mostly an excuse to have a party with snacks and a theme. For the Super Bowl, of course, you have hearty midwinter fare. For the Oscars, there are more options: Elegant finger food, things served in movies, foods based on movie puns (There Will Be Blood Pudding, anyone?) or of course foods that actual Hollywood stars eat (superpremium vodka, diet soda, cocaine).

But what do you serve at an Olympics party? Ambrosia, because it’s Olympian? Chinese food, since the games are in China this year? Power Bars and Gatorade because it’s an athletic event? Or maybe I should serve factory-farmed meat since it’s an athletic event rife with doping and a total lack of concern for the long-term health of the participants?

Maybe we’ll go with Chinese health food at the table and an HGH or EPO injection station in the back room.