Patience Is A Virtue

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Her Voice

Written by Elizabette Guecamburu - Hometown Girl
Friday, 07 November 2008

An election comes and (finally) goes

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One doesn’t have to look far to find a clichéd phrase that glorifies the virtues of patience. And each one seems to be more annoying than the last.

For example, “Good things come to those who wait” is nearly as irritating as “Anticipation makes the heart grow fonder.” Any time someone says something like that, the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I get the same feeling when I watch one of President Bush’s press conferences.

In our current digital age, there isn’t much need for patience anyway. After all, resources are only a mouse click away, while 24-hour news organizations offer information at such a speedy rate that the only way to receive it faster would be to take it intravenously — like heroin.

Sometimes I think it may be just as addicting, for if I don’t get my daily dose of Anderson Cooper, I develop a horrendous twitch in my left temporal lobe.

Even though patience has become a thing of the past — like profitable American auto manufacturers — I still try to exercise patience in daily life from time to time.

For instance, sometimes I skip the express checkout line at Save Mart even if I have fewer than 15 items in my cart. I like to wait in the regular line with everyone else so that I can covertly study the headlines on the tabloid newspapers. How else am I supposed to learn about the latest celebrity to be abducted by aliens?

Exercising patience isn’t always as easy as simply waiting in a longer line at the grocery store. Some endeavors require more persistence — more endurance. No, I’m not talking about competing in a triathlon — although it sure feels close to that — but witnessing this never-ending election season.

This latest election season has been the ultimate exercise in patience. I wasn’t aware that an election could drag on for such a long period of time. It felt the Hundred Years’ War, complete with cavalry attacks, blood and incessant infomercials. There came a point when I was convinced it might never end, especially when I began to hear robocall voiceovers in my sleep.

But end it has.

And my patience has been rewarded with an election of historic proportions. Now that all is said and done, I guess it might be true that “anticipation makes the heart grow fonder,” for, strangely enough, there are some things about the election that I am going to miss. What am I going to do without Tina Fey’s impersonation of Gov. Sarah Palin to brighten my week?

Well, at least I still have Anderson Cooper to console me.

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