I Have Been Waiting for Godot

Blogging is more time-consuming than I realized, and so is having a constant social life. These forces came together in the past two weeks or so, and now here I am, facing the end of 2010 and not completely clear on what I last wrote. I will, however, attempt to catch up, especially as this incoming blizzard demands me to do little else than try to stay warm in my apartment.

Anyway, in sophomore or junior year of high school--I had the same English teacher both years so it's difficult to differentiate--I had to read Waiting for Godot. Like most, if not all, of my classmates, I was irritated by this play, the only redeeming quality of which was its length, or lack thereof. There was really no point to the plot, and if meeting with this Godot was so important, then why didn't the characters actually go after him? Why did they stay in the same place and expect him to appear, even after it became reasonably clear that he probably wouldn't? Do something, I mentally screamed. At the very least, don't make me read and analyze your nothingness.

The irony of my frustration now hits with the force of a 2 ｘ 4.

I was sitting on a crowded, snow-delayed train, on my way back to my apartment after a brief Christmas weekend back home. For whatever reason my past several days have been filled with these extremely detailed scenarios of what I would do, what I would say, what he would say, what I would be wearing, how I would act, how he would act, where we would be, of everything, if he were ever to come back and try to make things right. This monotonous train ride was particularly conducive to these pointless scenarios, and as I wandered in and out of sleep I started running through the details again. I have it all in my head and therefore am prepared if anything similar were to ever occur.

I realize and generally accept the idea that nothing probably will.

And all of a sudden, Waiting for Godot made sense to me. I have been waiting for my Godot for five years, if not more. I am the very characters that I despised, and I have been wasting my time leading that pointless, frustrating life. I would hate myself for this more than I already do, but my background self-loathing is already at its maximum level. Instead, I've developed a sort of sympathy for Vladimir and Estragon, and realize that, perhaps and hopefully, they are not as stupid as we then-teenaged readers assumed. Sometimes, even after you lose track of why, things are just too important to abandon, even after they've abandoned you or were never around in the first place.

There are a lot of things I don't want to be anymore, and most of all I don't want to wait for my Godot.