Edifying Activities You Wish Were Over Already When You’re Still in the Middle of Them and then You Feel Lame
1. Orchestra Concerts. You love classical music. You love performances. You love getting dressing up. So why, two minutes into a symphony from Beethoven, do you inevitably begin wishing they would just hurry up and be done with it? Why train your eyes on the conductor’s sheets of music, trying to gauge by the thickness of the remaining pages how much there is left to go? Why not close your eyes and float on the ethereal strains of violin, like the much more cultured woman to your left? Why pay more attention to the nasal hair of the guy four seats to your right than to the tragic, darkening notes of the adagio? What’s your problem, anyways?
2. Kayaking. Nature is great. Boats are great. But somehow their powers combined, in a kayak, equal hell. In a kayak, you never reach an exciting clip, as you do in a sailboat or a motorboat. The upper body exercise is punishing. If you’re in the front, you can’t tell when the person in the back stops paddling and you keep going, like a sucker. Your shaky grasp of left and right does not help either, and results in inter-kayak tensions. If it’s summer, kayaking is brutally hot. You’re surrounded by water and you can’t swim. If it’s cool, you’re chilly AND you’re getting splashed. Instead of enjoying the water lilies sliding by, and gasping at the heron soaring twenty feet away, like everyone else, you’re imagining the multiple-varieties-of-cheese sandwich you’re going to make for lunch and thinking: is this kayaking business over already?
3. Getting ready for bed. You’re 32, not 3. So why is getting ready for bed the worst? What’s so hard about putting on pajamas, washing your face, and brushing your teeth? And speaking of brushing your teeth, have you ever noticed that every single person you’ve observed brushing their teeth takes longer than you? Like, usually two to three times longer? What are they doing that you’re not? You’ve always been extraordinarily proud of the fact that you never get any toothpaste foam around your mouth while you brush like other people, but is this potentially due to the fact that you’re not really brushing that hard, but just trying to brush in such a way that no toothpaste foam escapes your mouth? Is this really an accomplishment? Doesn’t it go against the greater goal of getting your teeth really clean? Maybe there is a Youtube video that can help?
4. Celebrated movies Like Drive. It’s so intelligent. It’s shot so beautifully. The soundtrack is amazing. When the conversation turns to whether you’ve seen the movie, you have to admit that you couldn’t even watch it on the plane, with that miniscule screen. You tried. When it got violent, you turned down the volume and twisted your screen away. But sometimes the violent parts would come out of nowhere, so you couldn’t turn the volume off and get the screen away fast enough. Plus there was that attractive passenger next to you who was beginning to look embarrassed for you. The only movies you agree to go and see are comedies (but not if they’re slapstick) and dramas (but not if they’re too dramatic. You’re still recovering from Breaking the Waves, which you saw in 2002.) These aesthetic preferences are a recurring blow for your husband, who is a film producer. You point out that you are fine with watching Nashville, and clarify that you mean the TV series, not the Roger Altman film, which you’ve heard is kind of gritty. 1980s BBC Sherlock Holmes episodes are also permitted, but you usually close your eyes during the first five minutes, when the crime occurs.
5. Any sort of guided tour. Five minutes in, it doesn’t matter if the guide is droning on about Susan Sontag or the orange-bellied trogon, you inevitably lose interest and wander away. This holds true for museum tours, nature walks, neighborhood architecture tours, castle ruin tours, college orientation tours, first-day-on-the-job-let-me-show-you-around-the-office-here’s-the-photocopier tours, library tours, haunted house tours, sewer tours, real-estate website webcam tours, babysitting/housesitting/dogsitting this-is-the-drawer-where-we-keep-the-poop-bags tours, airplane safety instructions, etc.The only exception you can imagine making to your guided tour aversion is a guided tour of a sprawling hotel suite that you are somehow staying in, which is so immense and luxurious and filled with wonders (this is where we keep the puppies. And yes, madam, you’re right, that’s your very own mango tree!) you absolutely need a tour, à la Willy Wonka leading everyone through the chocolate factory, and you hope it never ends.
