Axl Rose Was Wrong

A quick note today about the evils of patience. While this is only remotely related to pop culture I got's to speak my peace. This week I've gone down two roads one with patience as an excuse and the other with patience as a goal.

Almost two weeks ago I had a phone interview for a job I desperately want in my soon to be new/old home of Minneapolis. The interview went well enough and at the end the nice lady told me to expect a call later the next week about face to face interviews. That would have put me in line for a call last Friday. Well Friday came and went and so did Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday and still no call. I decided I must not be getting an interview but to placate my fragile ego I decided they must still be deciding on who to talk with. On the surface I decided I needed to be patient and wait to hear from them. After all I've applied for 23 new jobs and not a single one has gotten past this stage. After speaking with my moms last night I was convinced I was being a gigantic pussy and needed to pick up the phone and call. Guess what? The HR woman has been out of the office all week so perhaps they really haven't gotten to the point of setting up the face to faces. Meanwhile, I've been living in turmoil all week long when a simple call could've somewhat eased my mind. The moral is I used patience as an excuse and it tore me a new one.

Now let's take another exercise in patience I went through today. Today was THE DAY for the US soccer team. Lose go home and set soccer back 8 years in your home country. Win and maybe still come home but with your heads a little higher. I woke up jazzed for this and extremely pissed because I actually had responsibilities at my dead duck job I couldn't get out of. So I broke out the DVR and decided I'd be patient and not ruin the game until I got home and watched it in it's entirety. Do any of you know how hard this is? I had to stay off e-mail, internet, radio, and TV all day long. For a mass media junkie like myself that's pure torture. I had a couple of near misses. When I went on my first break of the day a coworker bounced up in annoying fashion clearly with soccer on his mind. The guy's french and loves to talk up both futbol and football with me. Needing a quick escape I ducked into another cube and started up a conversation with whoever happened to be there about how great that tomorrow was Friday, and other mind numbing work topics. Later when I hit the road for my lunch break I engaged in a game of chicken. No, I wasn't street racing like those hot rods from Fast and the Furious Tokyo Drift (really, there's an audience for that), I was listening to the radio. When I got in the car I realized I had left the sports talk radio station on from my drive in but instead of switching it off I actually listened for about 2 minutes since they were talking about how Chicago's favorite bigot Ozzie Guillen had shot his mouth off again. Once I saw the clock turn towards 40 minutes on the hour I knew a Sports Center was coming up so out came the iPod. So after being completely patient and ignorant of the results I came home about 2 hours ago and watched the game. How was I rewarded? With another lackluster performance by the American's including a massive choke of a play by our Captain and another no show by the pretty boy Landon Donovan. Fuck! I'm starting to think there's nothing wrong with our instant gratification society because whether patience is used for evil or for good it's clearly for the birds.