Killing Time

It's gotten to the point where I've done pretty much everything I have to do, seen pretty much everyone I need to see, and have a rough idea of what I need to pack. And yet there are two whole days until I leave. I've also said goodbye to almost everyone I need to say goodbye to, so calling them up and doing the goodbye thing again, just because I'm bored, feels like beating a proverbially dead horse. This is the worst part of traveling, I think - the waiting around with nothing to do and no one to talk to before you go. So then I just sit around and think about the other people I still need to talk to one more time, and plan out when I'm going to fit them into my incredibly busy schedule, and miss them a lot in the meantime, which also is neither productive nor fun.

Things I have been doing to kill time until I go:
- look briefly at lists of Chinese characters and decide I should just review them on the plane, because what else am I going to do for 30 hours.
- look up hostel listings in Hong Kong and decide it's useless to do this now, when I won't even be in Hong Kong until mid-December.
- kick my parents' butt at Scrabble. Not as gratifying as it sounds, given that it's travel Scrabble and kind of ugly to look at.
- watch videos online, inluding (but not limited to) this amazing sneezing baby panda.
- read. I finished Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami in 3 days. It was really good, I give it top marks for readability, intriguing plot structure, and smartness.
- exercise. But time-killing exercise is so much less fun than, say, aikido. Aikido is tiring because you fly around the room. Running on the elliptical machine is tiring because there's nothing else to do, and there's only so much time you can watch the calorie counter slowly go up while distracting yourself with bad TV shows. And believe me, TV shows really prove how terrible they are when you're relying on them as a distraction from what is perhaps the most boring form of exercise ever. (There's a lot you can say about "Lost," but one thing is that it's really good for exercising to - lots of cuts, lots of cheap thrills and intrigue. "Pirates of the Caribbean," on the other hand, is not. The action sequences are too protracted.)

So I guess what I'm saying is, it is time to go. I can't even say I'm more than just fleetingly excited for this trip, because I'm so brain-dead from all this waiting around, but I am very twitchy to get going. Oh, and if you wanted to talk to me before I left, now's your chance to call (it will make me very happy).

And the moral of the story is:
You can try to kill time all you want, but in the end it
Just.
Won't.
Die.