I am a patient boy
I wait
I wait 
I wait
~Fugazi

The French donât believe in waiting in line ö itâs just a big mob at the airport, the train station. More refined, my ass. And speaking of Fugazi, theyâre wild about punk music and skateboarding in Toulouse. The graffiti there is amazing.

At the University of Richmond ampitheater, everybodyâs waiting for this hellish opening band to finish so we can hear what we came to hear ö Fugazi, grandaddys of the DC punk scene, for free, no less. Some say there should be and Ian McKaye square in DC. Unfortunately they didnât play Waiting Room, but I did get Guyâs autograph. It was the kind of moment I had been waiting for all my high school life.

The British call lines queues·they took it from the French because they werenât using it. The same word means tail in French though, and they say it cuh·instead of like Îcuteâ without the Îtâ.

I wonder if the smell of the waiting room at the doctorâs office is universal, if doctorâs offices all over the civilized world have that smell which will forever be associated with waiting for something uncomfortable. Waiting for a shot is always worse than the shot itself.

Last April I watched my dad fill out tax forms and my friends bite their nails (or smoke pot or chew their hair, whatever) waiting for acceptance letters. Every afternoon I would follow my best friend and her ropey hair down the few yards of sidewalk in bare feet to the mailbox. NYU rejected her, so now it was between Sarah Lawrence and Smith. Pitt gave me a full ride, but was it a cop out? Did I just know, deep down, that I wasnât worthy of the New Yorkâs splendid insanity?

That spring waiting became an art, and we were the grand masters. We rattled around in our little brick cage, sat in the back row in all of our classes.

The spring was torpid, we chomped at our bit, the anticipation of what was to come growing and turning college into some kind of paradise it could never really be.

The best friend couldnât decide and so her grumpy father took her on a trip to visit them both. I waited silently in English class for my Batman to return. I couldnât care about Hamlet, for what is Robin without Batman? Just some dufus in green tights, thatâs who.

Did I deserve all those Aâs, glowing recommendations, interviews from professors in corduroy pants? Was I just a suck up? The guilt mounted, she worked at a health food store and I waited for her shifts to be over. I waited to be as good as her. Iâm still waiting.

Everybodyâs movin movin movin

We sat on her couch - the big soft one whose beige cushions swallowed you. They swallowed us for whole afternoons when we would watch bbc miniseries or hideous specials on television. I was waiting for my life to begin, and this feeling lasted through the summer, Iâm still in the habit and have just realized it.

ãMove forward with your lifeä
		~Natalie Goldberg

We waited for the big old fashioned clock in our Senior Seminar class to click to 2:05 every afternoon. We didnâtâ skip as much as we could have, should have.

Donât wait for your life to start, the self help books say.

We waited for the 628 names of our graduating class to be called. I wiggled my lacquered toes in their red heels. The chicest person in that damn suburban auditorium. They had a strict policy against brining anything in ö wouldnât want any pranks.

Paula Smith taped a novel to her thigh and for five minutes was my hero as she read her two hundredth or so trashy romance novel while our principalâs voice became Charlie Brownâs teacher. Jon Hood was stoned, as he had been for the AP English exam the week before. Another boy I had briefly been in love with wrote his AP English essay on a book he totally invented. He got a five and went on to Princeton before becoming disillusioned and running off to Belize and getting arrested in anti capitalist protests. Iâm still waiting for him to reply to my letter.

The sun is setting outside my dorm room, and today, with the first breath of real Spring that we had all been waiting for, I flung open my window and lay on my bed, drinking in the air. I could do a swan dive out the window and float the 17 floors to the little ant cars in the parking lot below, if it werenât for that damn screen bolted to the window frame.

I am a patient girl.