编者按：这篇文章是 2017 年天津卷高考的最后一篇阅读，被改得不成样子了……在此把原文发出来，让大家欣赏一下。文章作者是 Tom Bodett，选自 John Langan 的 College Writiing Skills 第 8 版（就是英专写作课里的那本《美国大学英语写作》）。
Wait Divisions
by Tom Bodett
1 I read somewhere that we spend a full third of our lives waiting. I’ve also read that we spend a third of our lives sleeping, a third working, and a third at our leisure. Now either somebody’s lying, or we’re spending all our leisure time waiting to go to work or sleep. That can’t be true or league softball and Winnebagos never would have caught on.
2 So where are we doing all of this waiting, and what does it mean to an impatient society like ours? Could this unseen waiting be the source of all our problems? A shrinking economy? The staggering deficit? Declining mental health and moral apathy? Probably not, but let’s take a look at some of the more classic “waits” anyway.
3 The very purest form of waiting is what we’ll call the Watched-Pot Wait. This type of wait is without a doubt the most annoying of all. Take filling up the kitchen sink. There is absolutely nothing you can do while this is going on but keep both eyes glued to the sink until it’s full. If you try to cram in some extracurricular activity, you’re asking for it. So you stand there, your hands on the faucets, and wait. A temporary suspension of duties. During these waits it’s common for your eyes to lapse out of focus. The brain disengages from the body and wanders around the imagination in search of distraction. It finds none and springs back into action only when the water runs over the edge of the counter and onto your socks.
4 The phrase “a watched pot never boils” comes of this experience. Pots don’t care whether they are watched or not; the problem is that nobody has ever seen a pot actually come to a boil. While people are waiting, their brains turn off.
5 Other forms of the Watched-Pot Wait would include waiting for your dryer to quit at the Laundromat, waiting for your toast to pop out of the toaster, or waiting for a decent idea to come to mind at a typewriter. What they all have in common is that they render the waiter helpless and mindless.
6 A cousin to the Watched-Pot Wait is the Forced Wait. Not for the weak of will, this one requires a bit of discipline. The classic Forced Wait is starting your car in the winter and letting it slowly idle up to temperature before engaging the clutch. This is every bit as uninteresting as watching a pot, but with one big difference. You have a choice. There is nothing keeping you from racing to work behind a stone-cold engine save the thought of the early demise of several thousand dollars’ worth of equipment you haven’t paid for yet. Thoughts like that will help you get through a Forced Wait.
7 Properly preparing packaged soup mixes also requires a Forced Wait. Directions are very specific on these mixes. “Bring three cups of water to boil, add mix, simmer three minutes, remove from heat, let stand five minutes.” I have my doubts that anyone has actually done this. I’m fairly spineless when it comes to instant soups and usually just boil the bejeezus out of them until the noodles sink. Some things just aren’t worth a Forced Wait.
8 All in all Forced Waiting requires a lot of a thing called patience, which is a virtue. Once we get into virtues I’m out of my element and can’t expound on the virtues of virtue, or even lie about them. So let’s move on to some of the more farreaching varieties of waiting.
9 The Payday Wait is certainly a leader in the long-term anticipation field. The problem with waits that last more than a few minutes is that you have to actually do other things in the meantime. Like go to work. By far the most aggravating feature of the Payday Wait is that even though you must keep functioning in the interludes, there is less and less you are able to do as the big day draws near. For some of us the last few days are best spent alone in a dark room for fear we’ll accidentally do something that costs money. With the Payday Wait comes a certain amount of hope that we’ll make it, and faith that everything will be all right once we do.
10 With the introduction of faith and hope, I’ve ushered in the most potent wait class of all, the Lucky-Break Wait, or the Wait for One’s Ship to Come In. This type of wait is unusual in that it is for the most part voluntary. Unlike the Forced Wait, which is also voluntary, waiting for your lucky break does not necessarily mean that it will happen.
11 Turning one’s life into a waiting game of these proportions requires gobs of the aforementioned faith and hope, and is strictly for the optimists among us. For these people life is the thing that happens to them while they’re waiting for something to happen to them. On the surface it seems as ridiculous as following the directions on soup mixes, but the Lucky-Break Wait performs an outstanding service to those who take it upon themselves to do it. As long as one doesn’t come to rely on it, wishing for a few good things to happen never hurt anybody.
12 In the end it is obvious that we certainly do spend a good deal of our time waiting. The person who said we do it a third of the time may have been going easy on us. It makes a guy wonder how anything at all gets done around here. But things do get done, people grow old, and time boils on whether you watch it or not.
13 The next time you’re standing at the sink waiting for it to fill while cooking soup mix that you’ll have to eat until payday or until a large bag of cash falls out of the sky, don’t despair. You’re probably just as busy as the next guy.
