If the CIA ever needed to extract info from college girls, its agents could skip right past the nail-pulling and sleep deprivation to the most excruciating form of torture ever—waiting for a guy to text you.
You know what we’re talking about. Your iPhone transforms from your faithful sidekick to this evil device that absolutely refuses to vibrate, no matter how hard you stare it. Or you do hear that promising bzzzz—but when you snatch your phone up, it’s a text from someone totally banal and bland, like your lab partner or the woman whose kids you baby-sit. Each minute sans text seems to drag on, until you gloomily come to the conclusion he’s never going to contact you. But even though it’s difficult, your only hope of surviving these painful times is finding a distraction. Here are 7 things to do while you wait for his message.
1. Organize Your Nail Polish Collection
While obviously you can group your polishes by color, that takes barely any time at all. (After all, most nail polishes are red/pink, metallic or neutral.) Instead, organize the shades in alphabetical order by name. So A-List would come first, and then Bashful Beige, and so on until you got to Wicked. Bam. There goes six minutes—maybe 10 if you have a lot of bottles.
2. Try to Decide What Animals Your Professors Look Like
Not only will this keep your mind busy, but it’s also a great exercise for your imagination. If you need help, Google “scary old animals.” Maybe your Bio teacher looks like a goat, or your philosophy teacher is almost identical to a llama. Whatever the case, you’re guaranteed a couple of boy-free thoughts and lots of entertainment whenever you go to class next.
3. Pluck One Eyebrow But Not the Other
We’re all convinced that everyone we come across pays scrupulous attention to our brows, which is why we religiously bust out the tweezers or head to the salon to keep ours in check. However, grooming one face caterpillar but not the other is a wonderful way of determining whether or not people do look that closely. This little social experiment will keep you busy for an hour or more as you first pluck and then go out in public to do some field research. (PS: Let us know what you discover.)
4. Actually Attempt a Pinterest DIY
There’s this weird phenomenon we’re all prey to where we pin to our heart’s content—but never actually make anything. Think of it this way: every time you pin you’re making a promise to that craft, a promise that you fail to follow through on. Not cool. So whip out your glue gun and finally, for the love of Ryan Gosling, make that chevron bulletin board or painted mason jar. Your boards will thank you.
5. Watch the Last Five Minutes of Every Rom-Com On Netflix
We suggest starting with Pretty in Pink, moving on to Silver Linings Playbook, getting a little Hugh Grant action in Love Actually, and ending with Sabrina. While arguably, these movies are worth being watched in full, zooming to the last 300 seconds means you skip all of the crying, drama, cheating, unrequited passion and emotional manipulation to arrive at the happy-gooey part where the couple skips off into the sunset. Since you’re currently single and text-less, you need this reminder that true love does exist. In the movies.
6. Do Your Homework
Haha, just kidding.
7. Stalk Your Friends On Facebook
For whatever reason, people are more interesting in social media than in real life. So if you need to turn your brain off for a bit, photo albums from the past, say, five years are the perfect solution. Dive deep into the depths of your friends’ histories, until you very creepily know everything about them from their first dog to their second-cousin-once-removed Sarah Fenley. But be careful: once you’re creepin’ on FB, it can be hard to stop. Make sure you don’t look at your guy’s profile… He will magically get a tingle in his left toe that means you’re obsessing over him and will be even less likely to text you.
Well collegiettes, those are all seven of our fantastic suggestions for staying busy while waiting for that text. We hope they work for you. And one last thing: if he doesn’t appreciate your perfectly chosen emojis and witty messaging banter, maybe he doesn’t deserve you! Just a thought.