Making some good use of waiting spells
Waiting forces you to do a lot of things.
To exercise your patience muscle, which can be painful, especially if it’s atrophied or out of shape.
To be constructive and productive with your time.
To re-evaluate your life.
To expand your horizons.
I was thinking about all this when I was in a medical office setting the other day.
The TV was on — and loud at that — and Dr. Oz was talking about five foods from around the globe that people can eat to live longer lives.
Salt and vinegar potato chips, regrettably, did not make the list.
But “chapulines” did. It’s the Mexican word for grasshoppers — a great source of protein, Dr. Oz assured. And yipee, you can buy them pre-roasted and make yourself a taco.
Of course, if you find yourself compelled to rub your legs together and start chirping, maybe you’ve had one crispy crunchy cricket too many and need to cut back a little.
Have a salt and vinegar chip and get that bug taste out of your mouth.
I’m sure these pre-roasted insects probably taste like chicken, I was thinking to myself. That’s what everybody says new and never-before tried and out-of-the-ordinary food tastes like. Chicken.
Buck, buck. Chirp, chirp.
Sometimes TV is a good thing, and sometimes it’s a bad thing. It can educate us or alarm us.
Honestly, there must be something wrong with us as a nation if we look forward to the season premiere of “Dr. Pimple Popper.”
Watching that is like driving by a train wreck, as they say, with one eye open, of course. Popeye-the-sailor-man style.
I can make better use of my time, I scold myself in this waiting room setting.
I start reading a book I’ve brought along, but I get sleepy. Chirping in public is one thing — snoring not so great.
So I start cleaning out my purse that has everything in it that I think I can’t live without.
Some day, I tell myself, I will be liberated from this baggage bondage and be more like my daughter, who carries only this little teeny tiny thing that holds her No. 1 necessity, the one must-have thing she’d choose to take to an island as a contestant on “Survivor.” Chapstick.
Oh, mother of lip balm, if Chapstick were all I had to haul around.
People in waiting rooms are doing a lot of looking down, I noticed.
Not sleeping. Not looking at magazines. But looking at their phones or electronic gizmos.
I do that a lot, too.
I find myself fascinated with all the recipe videos I come across on Facebook.
I have amassed a vast library of these saved on my phone — far more organized than all the recipes I have stuffed in notebooks and dog-eared in cookbooks, waiting for translation from paper to to dinner plate some day.
I’ll bet there’s probably a good pre-roasted cricket recipe out there to be discovered.
Now that kind of waiting I can probably handle.
(Kiaski, a resident of Richmond, is a staff columnist and community editor for the Herald-Star and The Weirton Daily Times. She can be contacted at jkiaski@heraldstaronline.com.)
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