Need for Speed

I can no longer wear high heels - for the mere reason that they impeded my speed. Over this last year I have progressed from speed walking to scurrying, perhaps as an adaptation to being on the floors. Miss a beat and the resident you're supposed to follow is nowhere to be found, leaving you with a handful of notes and orders to be signed, because without that MD after your name you are utterly and pathetically dependent.

But it is not only in walking. My love affair with speed, although present my entire life, has really accelerated to torrid extremes. I can no longer read, wanting to reach the end upon starting. Anticipating the end of movies. Racing up escalators. Pumping up the treadmill. I have become a fan of bullet points, newspeak, and the 5 minute man. But for good reason. The need for study. It seems like the entire goal has become to reserve time for that which I need to do above all.

So it comes to be a problem now, when in between studying, this need for speed can no longer be justified. And I realize now this obsession is really not functional, rather pathological - when pleasure is derived only from efficiency and completion, and never process. Even without necessity, I have become, at baseline, impatient, anxious, neurotic, and on caffeine.

It makes waiting the bane of my existence. Because unlike a book, I cannot turn to the last page and see the outcome (which incidentally is why I never finished Great Expectations). And so I sit here, tortured, things out of my control, waiting, with pessimism, no less. I'd really rather be studying.