Waiting

Sorry, you have been waiting for this blog. I did promise I’d write weekly and I’ve kept you all well, waiting. To be honest if you are a regular blog reader you’ll be aware that my life hasn’t been scintillating recently, the last Buffy themed entry being a testament to that. Plus, I’ve been a bit melancholy with the whole jobless thing neither of which is contusive to cheerful blog writing.

So today, the theme is waiting. I’m writing this as I wait for Andi’s bed to be delivered. For those of you unaware, Andi had just bought a flat in Edinburgh, but lives in Fort William. Fortunately for him he has an unemployed friend who has the time to sit about his house waiting for things to be delivered. Last Friday I also did this and was actually a little disappointed that by 1030 all the people had come, delivered their wears and were off again. It meant I had to go do something productive with my day and not just hole up in a corner of Andi’s unfurnished flat watching the extra features of my heroes season 3 DVD boxset like I had planned (don’t get me started on Heroes, while a silly programme with massive plot holes, it has become my new obsession, a mere pale comparison to Buffy of course, but nothing could ever fill that gaping hole in my heart).

Anyway, so waiting has become a major part of life recently and it dawned on me that waiting had been a major feature of most of my life in its entirety. I hated school, and spent my entire day waiting for the school day to be over. I then hated work and spent the day wishing my life away for the few precious moments I had at home before going in for another shift. And finally since moving to Edinburgh, I have been waiting to get a job. Now of course during my wait, I have been doing stuff. Seeing friends, decorating houses, moving a lot of other people’s furniture, but essentially in the back ground, waiting.

This concerns me. Should waiting define my life? But then looking around me and I notice a lot of my friends and family are doing the same thing. A lot of my medic friends are going through the hideous interview process again and waiting to hear if they have got the jobs they so want (and deserve). My mother is still waiting for her house to be finished! And it occurs to me that perhaps waiting isn’t a bad thing, perhaps in fact it us what it is all about.

Hmm how to explain what I’m getting at. I’ll use the medium of film as it’s the one I am most familiar with. When you are watching a good film or a TV series, you are desperately waiting to find out what happens next and how things will end. But when you do, it’s done, finished and even if you’ve enjoyed it, there is part of you that wishes you could go back and watch it all again with no memory of seeing it in the first place; to get that feeling back, the excitement of waiting to see what happens next. Will the goodies prevail? How will things turn out? Seeing things you weren’t expecting, surprises, delights, expectation. It’s all part of the process of enjoying the production.

And this is how I have decided to try and view my life. Everyone knows that the best part of a film is watching the protagonist going through a hard time and then in the end emerge triumphant. So I am nominating myself as the hero of my own life film. This is my difficult time, my cross roads, my period of transition. I will eventually get a job, things will change and for good or ill, I will and find out the outcome of this chapter of my story.

But until then, I just have to wait.