Tom Petty Was Right About One Thing

The waiting is the hardest part. The topics that Petty were wrong about will be saved for another post.

Waiting sucks. And on so many levels. There aren't too many activities that cause both boredom and stress. At the same damn time!

When we wait, we are temporarily transformed into an alternate state of human existence. One which is treated with a universally accepted form of apathy and prejudice. When we wait, we are considered so abnormal from the rest of our species, that special rooms have been constructed to separate us from the rest of civilization.


ME: "Hello."
THEM: "Name?"
ME: "Patrick Egan."
THEM: "You're here to wait, aren't you?"
ME: "Please don't make me go in the room!"
THEM: "Sorry, but that's the rules. Down the hall. Go now."

Waiting causes us such exasperation and outrage that special music is played just to calm us down. (A quick note to the folks at Muzak: it doesn't help. Cough up the extra few bucks for the rights to the original recordings, okay? Hearing orchestral versions of our favorite songs makes us feel old, which only pisses us off even more. Thank you.)

(If you'll excuse one more aside, my wife just informed me of the time. It seems I have to stop writing in order to pick up my daughter and take her to the dentist, so I have to wait a while to finish. Ironic, isn't it?)

Three hours later...That took a little longer than expected, but at least the music during the car ride was good.

Let's see...where was I? Oh yes...

We don't like to wait, because waiting is a signal to us that we are not as in control of our world as we'd like to be. We wait because the activity we want to happen, and happen now, is no longer in our hands. And we all know how stupidly ineffective other people's hands can be.

Yes, yes, yes, I realize that our overreactions to waiting also suggests that we are impatient, and demand instant gratification at every turn. Blah, blah, blah...what an astute observation. Now shut up and let me finish.

I bring up the subject of waiting because that is what I currently find myself sweating through. Again. The waiting room in my particular level of hell is reserved for waiting to hear back from agents. I know that's not nearly as traumatic as say, the wait to see whether a Plus or a Minus appears on a urine-soaked stick, but it is nonetheless filled with anxiety and frustration.

The common strategy for writers is to only contact a handful of agents at one time, and not carpet-bombing dozens of them at once. So, believe it or not, the stress doesn't even concern whether or not the agents ultimately say yes or no. The tension is actually generated by not hearing anything at all. Thus, the waiting. I've been through this so many times by now, that I don't really care how they feel about my work. I just want to get a timely response so I can move on and bug another agent.

I'm swamped by guilt even mentioning my feelings on this subject because the matter always seems far too trivial to others.

"Don't you know how many people in this world really have problems? There are one-legged children in Kenya with nothing to eat but the legs of other children. Who they can't catch because they only have one leg to get around on!"

Trust me, I genuinely feel bad for those one-legged cannibal children ~ it's a gruesome life experience that I wouldn't wish on the majority of people I know ~ but you can't compare one to the other. I have the right to feel a sense of dissatisfaction at my problems in life, too. And I'm willing to bet if one of those kids spent over three years writing a story about something important to them, they would get annoyed at having to wait for an email response from an agent, as well.

So, keep your fingers crossed. Not just that my wait time is decreased, but also that you don't have to deal with me while I wait to be contacted. I can get a little testy.