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Patience. What the hell is patience? I know that patience is a really good song by Guns and Roses (and I can whistle along with pitch perfect harmony), and I’ve been told, repeatedly, that patience is a “virtue” that I must learn. But lately, I’ve been beginning to feel like an old dog, and patience is some new trick that I’ll never learn.

I want to write a whole tirade about how many things in this world are “virtues,” and how patience is just another one of these “many things,” and it’s therefore not that important. But this would be a bald faced lie, because I may be impatient, but I am not stupid, and I am more than aware of how my impatience is the root source for most of my anxiety and unhappiness in life.

The worst part about this whole “I have no patience” thing is that I know I’m capable of practicing patience, but I find the task of practicing patience to require a lot of patience; it’s a real catch-22 for me. I’m so impatient that I can’t even wait long enough for hot food to cool before eating, and this results in me burning the roof of my mouth nearly every single day of my existence.

I can theorize aplenty about patience. I know that one who acts with patience has a deep understanding of pacing and timing that results in a behavior that is neither rash nor fickle. But as a card carrying member, and perhaps even president of the ‘Rash and Fickle Club,’ this basic premise of patience tends to irk me.

Intellectually, I understand patience. I understand the concept that you don’t need to rush or speed in order to catch a green light, because once the light goes red, if you wait for a bit, it eventually turns green again, and you still get to go through that intersection, and to where you were headed in the first place. But I don’t really care, because I want to keep moving, and stopping is boring.

I also know that patience is leaving for work a half hour earlier than you need to, so that you can walk, bike, or drive at a nice steady pace, show up a bit early, grab a little coffee, and not get worked up about rushing and being on time. Well, I get the first part of this idea, just fine, for I usually show up to work early. The only problem is that I show up early because my sense of impatience tends to ruin any time I have before work, so I end up showing up early and working for free a lot. This is precisely why I hated bartending and working night shifts, and prefer to work early shifts.

I even understand that patience means letting other people make decisions at whatever pace they need to, even if you think that you already know what decision they should make. This applies to superficial things like waiting for a friend to choose what they’re going to eat off of a menu as you sit there with your menu closed, but it also applies to very serious matters, and folks, I suck at both!

I want to raise children someday, but I see my impatient attitude as a major roadblock, since kids should be given a lot of time to patiently make decisions and learn lessons “the hard way.” Hopefully I’ll marry a very patient woman who will patiently tell me to shut up when I’m crossing this line!

Ask any of my close friends, and they’ll all tell you just how much I suck at patience. I rush into almost everything that I do, with an insanely energetic amount of zeal and fanaticism, but I rarely take the time to consider how my decisions will actually affect me, down the road.

My only saving grace is that I DO actually consider, and to a stifling degree, how my actions will affect other people, and so my impatience rarely causes anyone besides myself any harm. It just keeps me constantly eyeing calendars and clocks, wishing and waiting for a future moment to enjoy. And this keeps me from enjoying the actual moment at hand, which is, so I hear, kind of the point of existing.

The last few weeks have been full of face blushing moments wherein the results of my own impatience get flaunted in my face. Most of these moments have occurred because I decided it would be a good idea to apply to nine graduate school programs last fall. I applied to each of these programs in mid-December, and then shortly thereafter received confirmations that I would be hearing back from each of these programs “by April first.”

“By…April…First!?” I screamed. “How can they do this to me? The deadline is December 15th, and they need three and a half FREAKING months to decide if I’m a good writer or not? What a crock of Sh—”

I give a lot of advice, and I’d have to say that a lot of the advice I give is hilariously hypocritical. For example, I usually cite the adage “Time heals all wounds,” which is a polite way of saying: “be patient, and in time, this too shall pass.” But I cannot follow my own advice when it comes to any event that I am anticipating, both good and bad. And this is a serious problem as I try to pretend that I am an adult (I’m convinced that no one ever grows up, we all just fake it.).

“Practice what you preach,” they say. Well, damn it, I try, I really do. But more often than not, I preach what I wish I could practice, and it’s gotten me to the point where I’m finally going insane with impatience, waiting on these stupid schools to fulfill my request for some semblance of knowledge in regards to my future.

I impatiently applied to these programs in an effort to provide me with a secure knowledge about my own future, and the irony is that the waiting process for these schools’ decisions have caused me more anxiety than my lack of a secure knowledge in my own future. I think people get committed for far less insane reasons than this.

I really just want to give up on patience, for I cannot seem to practice the art of patience, for the life of me. I’m like a kid who stares at a math book for hours, alone in his room, wishing he could study, but for some reason, refusing to open the damn book, waiting for his parents to finally let him do something else.

But if I cannot master patience, then I will be forever destined to practice impatience, which ruins most of the gloriously unpredictable and delightful moments of existence. I truly believe that the whole fun of living is to “be here now,” and my impatience makes this virtually impossible for me.

The humorous/tragic reality about my own impatience is that I don’t care as much about which graduate programs accept or deny me as I care about knowing their decision. And this is really insane, the more I think about it.

And there is another insane paradox created by my impatience: I’d rather know about horrible, traumatic future events than good ones, so that I can change the way I live my life based on the occurrence of this future event, when in reality, with hindsight, only a fool would not want to live every day that they could shrouded by a cloud of optimistic ignorance of a future trauma. Once trauma occurs, we have the rest of our life to deal with it, why would I want to deal with trauma before it occurs? I am fairly certain that this isn’t normal.

Why am I so obsessed with my future, when the future is a mere trajectory created from everything that I do in the present? I am not obsessed with my past, at all, as I rarely revisit it, and I cannot name a single regret that I have, so how on Earth did I become so obsessed with that other unpredictable and absurdly irrelevant tense of time; the future?

“Actions speak louder than words.” I love this saying because I think it’s a courteous way of telling someone who talks a big game, but never does anything about it, that they’re full of shit. Only it has a nice, mature, and ominous ring to it, so you can say it to anyone without fear of hurting their feelings. Plus, it’s just so damn true, that it’s hard to ignore.

This column is coming to you on (actually around) the three year anniversary of the birth of It Sucks To Be You. Yes, that’s right; I started this column back in March of 2006, and it’s now 2009. If anyone back then (all twenty of you) had told me that three years later, I’d still be plugging away, still not making any money off of it, and still loving to do it, I’d have told you that you were crazy, because I’m far too impatient to do something for that long with no pay off.

But I have continued to produce these columns, and I have continued to do so because I really enjoy the process that is writing, editing, and then sharing my thoughts. And this means that this is one of those extremely rare moments in my fake-adult life in which I get to sit back and reflect on the fact that I do have a bit of patience.

This column is documental evidence that in one area of my life, my actions ARE speaking as loudly as my words (it’s kind of tie, the action isn’t necessarily louder, but this is only due to the fact that the action I am performing is the action of writing my thoughts, as words, and then sending them out. Therefore, my actions are AS loud as my words. I love twisted MikeyOpp logic!)

So I may still be obnoxiously impatient when it comes to waiting for anything I desire to come my way, and I may be similarly outraged when I have to follow a slow car on the highway, or wait for some idiot to order ahead of me in a line, but I am also capable of escaping from my forward thinking through the art of writing, and this makes me feel like everything in my life is okay, and will continue to be okay. And I’m more than okay with that. I’m even okay with living the rest of my fake-adult life with a burnt mouth; it sure as hell beats waiting for hot, delicious food to cool down!