Live-blogging from the Waiting Room

What is it with people that they think everyone around them is interested in the soap opera of their lives?

Here we are, waiting interminably in the dim recesses of the Mayo Clinic, where we hope to find out why our back hurts endlessly and whether we fractured our knee the last time we fell on the floor.

And what we have here is a woman yakking on the phone, on her feet and pacing back and forth so as to share the benefit of her piercing voice with as many listeners as possible: what we must tell “him,” how we must say “it” to “him,” how we can manipulate “him” to fit our purposes, and on and on and on…

Please, lady: take it outside. Or just shut up!

Back in the Day, oh yes, the Day… We did not yap loudly in public unless we came from the Midwest, where apparently farm machinery had deafened most of the natives. Otherwise, people spoke quietly, and in waiting rooms especially, they kept their voices way down. As in a whisper. I remember my mother insisting that I barely murmur to her in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms.

Nor, of course, did we pound away on our typewriters in public.

Brought the laptop so I could continue to work on the interminable index of medieval and Renaissance history. The schedule the Mayo laid on me entails a 90-minute lacuna between the X-rays and the chat with the doctor. So I’ve spent the last 45 minutes searching out terms related to Ottonian and Carolingian fiscs, squinting to read the results on a PDF rendered microscopic on the MacBook’s cute little monitor.

By the time I got up to walk down to the internists’ check-in area, leaving a relatively quiet area near a plashing fountain, I hurt so much I could hardly limp down here.

Ah hah! This leads to a Diagnostic Theory:

The reason my back hurts is that I spend almost all my time at BORING WORK!

boring boring BORING!!!!!

Dayum. My work is literally a pain in the tuchus.

I have got to find something better to do with my life. What little remains of it.

But what?

It looks to me like my choices are

a) sell the house, buy an RV, toss some food and the dog into it, and drive away, never to be seen again; or

b) check myself into a life-care community, where somebody else will have to do the boring stuff of taking care of me and I can rot away playing mah-jongg on the Internet.

One is brought back to real estate. Would answering the phone in a real estate office be as boring as editing and indexing scholarly copy?

Or journalism redux. It was fun to have an excuse to ask people nosy questions.

Possibly, though, I’ve lost my taste for snoopiness, given the boredom factor of the conversation about steering “him” around to wherever the recent speaker wanted “him” to do. And we have just heard about all the furniture in another lady’s house waiting to be yard-saled or moved. Once, I suppose, I found the daily doings of people’s daily lives interesting.

One of my former students now occupies my former job at Phoenix Magazine. I expect if I gave her a call, she’d help to weasel me back in the door there. A nice architectural spread on some overdecorated stately home could be fun. But not, heaven help us, another round-up of night-clubs, cell phones, or movie theaters.

We’re now running 15 minutes behind, so the 90-minute stint of heel-cooling has morphed to two hours. And counting. But of course what do little old bats have to do with their time but sit and stare into the distance?

Finally got around to starting some of the yardwork yesterday afternoon. Spent the whole afternoon hacking back an overgrown plumbago and trimming a man-eating rose. And finally, now that its leaves have dropped, getting around to pruning the misshapen vitex bush into a sort of tree-like shape.

That vitex was such a beautiful little plant when it was put in. Its branch structure was downright sculptural. Then the hated devil-pod tree expanded to fill all available sky, and in its struggle to find sunlight, the vitex became as distorted as the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

It kind of filled in once the devil-pod tree came down, but it’s remained lopsided, and some of its limbs have twisted around each other or crossed.

So I cut out a couple of pretty big limbs — that was hard! — and trimmed out a lot of spindly, tangled twigs and snapped off a lot of deadwood. It still needs some more shaping, which I’d planned to do this afternoon.

But now it looks like once again I won’t be able to get to that. Client sent a draft iteration of the index to the client, whose executive editor sent back a long list of frantic WHAT IS THAT??? queries.

Thank you so much, boss! I really needed to impress this guy like that…

At any rate, though most of the stuff that had the guy exercised had already been fixed, he did spot a number of anomalies. And in the course of going over and over the page proofs, I’ve found sets of entries that could be profitably reorganized and new topics that require endless digital searches through a 360-page PDF. So that job has now officially claimed the entire afternoon. And probably the evening.

Welp. I’m going to wait until 11:30 and then tell them he’ll have to call me with the results of those X-rays. I think an hour is long enough to wait, don’t you?

***

LOL! I’d barely hit the question-mark key when they called me back to the doc’s examination room. That was 15 or 20 minutes ago. When they get your clothes off you, they know they have you trapped.

So now I have to decide whether to get dressed and flee or whether to lay down on this six-foot-long sofa and take a nap.

Probably the latter.