This past week, I had the unfortunate situation of being stranded at airports and on planes for two days straight (okay; a bit of an exaggeration, I spent the nights at a hotel because I’m not a masochist). I could not believe my luck. I missed a total of three flights over the course of my travels. The first flight that I missed (Chicago, Illinois to Madison, Wisconsin) was delayed for an hour, or at least it said so on the departures and arrivals display screen. Somehow though, it didn’t actually depart an hour later than it was originally supposed to, a fact that I discovered a few moments after the plane left without me. The second flight that I missed (Madison, Wisconsin to Detroit, Michigan) was due to my own fault at not finishing up a post-interview candidate assessment sooner. The assessment was not make-or-break (or so they told us), so leaving some of it blank probably wasn’t worth missing my flight. Worse, this was the last flight from Madison to Detroit for 24 hours. After those 24 hours, I got on the plane assuming that my ordeal was over. It wasn’t… The plane could not leave without undergoing de-icing first, and that took three hours, just long enough for me to miss my flight back to State College. Again, that flight was the last one from Detroit to State College for the next 24 hours. When I got on the plane headed to State College, another hour or so of my life disappeared down the drain as we waited an hour for de-icing to finish.
I’m not sure which was worse: having 48 hours of your life delayed due to bad weather and bad decisions, or sitting on a plane for 16 hours straight as you cross the Pacific Ocean. I have experienced the latter way too many times to have even considered a worse period of your time largely spent waiting for something to happen. I was too optimistic in this mode of thought. In light of my recent reappraisal of how our lives go to waste in seemingly stupid ways, I’ve decided to reflect on what my life will largely consist of by the time I die:
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1. Sleeping
There’s no getting past this one. No matter how much sleep one may skip over the course of their lives, whether due to schoolwork or other preoccupations, your hours of sleep will likely all total up to the same amount regardless of how they’re distributed. You can’t help it. If you don’t sleep, your body will punish you, and the longer you keep up the intentional insomnia, the worse it gets.
2. Eating
I might eat at the pace of a koala, but even so, eating will consume (ha ha, get it?) more time than you’ll realize throughout your life. Sure, you can always starve yourself to speed up the process (it sure works wonders!), but like sleep, this is an activity you cannot avoid and that will hog up an uncomfortable percentage of your life’s time when you look back upon it on your death bed (or in your last fleeting minutes of utter agony and pain after a car crash).
3. Using the Restroom
This is not something most of us think about, but even though each individual trip to the restroom is relatively brief, it all aggregates to staggering dismal amounts of life spent answering the call of the wild (or rinsing off those darn dust mites you share your bed with). I’ve heard the average for most people is a total of two whole weeks spent in the restroom in one’s life, but don’t quote me on that.
4. Blowing your Nose
This one will likely escape your recollection most of the time. However, when you are sick and the trash can is full of mucus-filled tissues, you won’t have to wonder where the time went for long at the end of the day. Time flies faster when you’re sick, and unless you want to live in your own mucus, you’re going to tally up a lot of hours spent blowing your nose by the time your nose stops operating.
5. Traveling
If college seems to move at a faster pace than real life, consider the amount of time spent walking to class and other destinations. Add up all the hours in a single week, a month, a semester, four years, and it might seem like college is merely a trick to get Americans to exercise more. If so, it isn’t working. Whether you are on a bus, a plane, or even a space shuttle, there’s no getting around the massive amounts of time you’ll spend simply getting to a destination to continue on with your life.
6. Waiting
Whether it’s waiting for a plane to de-ice, a doctor’s appointment to start, or traffic to budge an inch, you are going to spend massive chunks of your life doing absolutely nothing. I once made a wrong turn after watching a movie (“Interstellar” if you’re curious). In order to get back to where I was I originally made the turn, it took me well over an hour due to traffic. If you need to drive quite a while through seemingly interminable traffic just to get to work, you’ll look back on your life wondering where the time all went. Hint: You spent it waiting for the driver three spots ahead of you to finally make a left turn before the green light ends.
What a lovely way to spend your life, isn’t it?
