Solipsism
If I hate to wait, it's not mere impatience to have what I want when I want it. It's a long experience of things going awry during the waiting period, or turning out to be all wrong when the waiting is over. The longer the wait, the greater the chance someone will change his mind, or run out of funding, or move to California. The refrigerator will fit in the kitchen, but you won't be able to get it in there without taking the door down. Or somebody may simply find out that what you're up to is adverse to his interest, or at least come to think so. Your supporters may have a change of heart. The plane might crash. All you can do is sit there and wait
I spent hours of my childhood standing on sidewalks in front of schools, libraries, drugstores and other rendezvous, waiting for my mother to pick me up. She tended toward unapologetic lateness. As I got older, I would walk home myself from wherever it was, but I wasn't the least lazy child in history, and it took me a long time to expect that my mother would be late. That's because I erase the particulars of such passively dull unpleasantness the minute it's over. I'll be frantic, for example, while I wait to hear that Kathleen's plane has landed, but as soon as I hear her voice announcing the fact, the misery evaporates without a trace. Instead of expecting my mother to be late, I expected to find out that she had abandoned me. I don't want turn up the pathos or sound like Jane Eyre, but I knew that my mother was unhappy with the person I was turning out to be. (She told me so, without realizing it. She insisted that I could be "good" - someone else, really - if I only tried.) As the quarter hours ticked by, I would grapple with the fact that my mother had Had It. I could go back where I came from. Where I came from was very dim in my mind, a vaguely forbidding institution along the lines of the orphanage in Mighty Joe Young. But I knew that I did not come from her.
Unhappily, I think, I grew up to be a thin-skinned man who tries to pretend otherwise but whose thought patterns, when kept waiting by someone, have the look of It's-All-About-Me grandiosity. It's never that someone is running late, but rather that someone is not coming at all. A tumbler has fallen in that someone's mind, and now he or she sees me as the domineering, asphyxiating, high-strung and entitled chatterbox that accords with my own private picture of Dorian Gray. Of course I'm going to be stood up! I'd stand me up!
And then, amazingly, the friendly face approaches, the kind email appears in my inbox, and I forget concocting an imaginary aversion so fierce that it put me at the dead center of someone else's life.
