When you trip on the stairs after meeting with a professor, when you realize too late that something huge is caught in your mass of hair, and when your stomach accidentally makes a weird noise during something important, you start to pay attention to the small things.
When you're stuck with three hours between classes and nothing scheduled but daydreams, when you're convinced that you're crappy at whatever it is you love to do and when you're sure that true love is meant for everyone but you, you have no other option but to think about the small things.
Sometimes, it seems, everything big has gone wrong, and the future -- perhaps the biggest thing of all -- is sure to follow in that routine of mistakes. I, for one, have spent several lunchtimes in the Top of the Hop this week, agonizing over my lack of future, pondering fears of getting lost, and feeling a general sense of aimlessness.
And I found a few other wanderers sitting next to me, staring at the people below who walk in and out of the Hop so quickly, all with places to be and goals to meet. As I watched from such a pathetic existentialist perch, I realized painfully that maybe the only things left to wait for and look forward to in life are meetings.
For many, having to meet with a bunch of people to discuss something undoubtedly boring resides high on their lists of least-favorite things to do. Recently, however, being told to come to a one-hour meeting often gives me something to do for an entire day, if not longer.
For me, it's a group of rather uneventful publications meetings; but with the help of some friends, I have begun to perfect a wonderfully complicated meeting schedule and have begun to help them create schedules of their own, giving us all something to do with ourselves, something small and manageable upon which to focus.
First, I create and endure the pre-meeting anxiety, a project that consists primarily of sitting around and thinking about all of the horrible things that could go wrong, all of the people that could make me feel awkward and all of the preparation I've neglected in order to make time for worrying. This takes at least a day, and more if you're lucky (by which I mean completely irrational and crazy).
Next, I enter phase two, the excitement-building phase. This usually occurs immediately before the meeting, when I get pumped up for all of the great things that could possibly happen at the meeting. It's important to use the word "meeting" a lot during this phase, both to get everyone around you psyched up and to keep the focus on what's important (the meeting).
The actual meeting itself, of course, is usually pretty uneventful, ranging in description from "boring" to "OK" to "kind of fun." The natural lull and letdown following this anti-climactic event, I believe, is natural and necessary. It must only be lingered in for a little bit, soon to be replaced by updating the "meetings per week" average, a system in which meetings receive various values depending on those in attendance and time taken.
And that's that. Then all there is left to do is begin preparing (well in advance) for the next meeting. I've noticed that -- in the publications world, at least -- Mondays and Tuesdays tend to be extremely meeting-heavy days, leaving the rest of the week open for spur-of-the-moment events and ample pre-meeting anxiety time.
In all, I think, the beauty of meetings lies not in their interest, their weight or their necessity. Rather, their never-ending, repetitive nature allows for a system of ups and downs, thrills and lulls, problems and resolutions, that focuses all worry and anxiety on one simple thing.
Without meetings, the worries -- whether small or large -- are constant and so much less satisfying. I spent the entire fall, for example, in a panic about my bed, which had to be inclined slightly at the head, as it didn't quite fit in the spot where I chose to put it. Certainly the bed created as much anxiety -- if not more -- as the meetings do, but once it was solved (by two wonderful housemates who made me a new bed of sorts), it was solved. It was over, and I was left aimless.
This term, I thought about getting really upset by the IM basketball rules for the coed league, rules that double the points of all girls' baskets (perhaps the most insulting thing imaginable). But then I realized that, like the bed, this worry would either go on forever -- never resolved -- or fix itself and leave me bored once again.
Only meetings, it seems, provide adequate resolution and never-permanent letdowns. With meetings, we can find a comforting routine horrible enough for a stressful existentialist work of art. And if you're as lucky as I was at a meeting last week, the people running it may even reward this crazy meeting neurosis with something special, like two lollipops, brought just to keep you busy, and to keep you from saying "meeting" every two minutes.
