…never boils. I used that expression on a 4th grader at my son’s school the other day, while he was waiting for his disagreeably slow computer to boot up in the lab. I had to explain the expression to  him, its (accurate) assertion that the more attention you focus on something for which you are waiting, the longer it seems to take to arrive. He listened politely to my explanation, then went right back to staring intently at the screen, body tensed and quivering with the stress of his watching, hand poised to lightning-click the minute the monitor showed any signs of life.

I am, apparently, no more patient than a 4th grader.

If you read my last post, you know that I have been waiting for news of my application to grad school. No news is yet forthcoming, so I have begun spending part of each day (I decline to disclose  just how large a part) obsessively checking each of my e-mail accounts, meticulously combing through even the junk mail, in search of a reply.  

I’ve even taken to checking the program web site, in hopes that at least there might be a mass message posted there: “We’ve already sent out the acceptance letters, so if you haven’t heard back from us yet, give up now–you won’t.”

There was a mass update posted there on at least one of the times I checked, advising applicants that now (since the “late February” deadline had come and gone) they could expect word of their status sometime “in early March.”

That made me feel so much better, because now I can stop asking the question “When will I get my rejection letter?” and obsess instead about questions such as “What does early March mean? Does it mean the 8th? When do they start calling it mid-March–the 15th? That would be halfway through the month, approximately, wouldn’t it?”

Sigh. And I had promised myself that this year, I’d behave myself better about this waiting thing.

But apparently, I’m no better than a 4th grader.