Waiting
This Is Also Work
I’m sitting on a tall stool overlooking an inner garden, just a few steps from where I lived less than ten days ago.
Next to me, a woman sits alone, quiet, lost in her thoughts.
The air is charged, but this moment feels oddly still.
I’m waiting to be let into the end of year fashion show at the University of Brighton.
My partner is one of the models, booked through a friend of a friend.
Around me, students buzz with nervous energy, ready to step into the future they’ve dreamed of for years.
This strange mix of the ordinary and the electric made me think about waiting—about work, art, and becoming.
I’m back working in hospitality.
I needed a part-time job to cover expenses.
So I went back to the restaurant where I used to work a while ago. I know most of the team, everyone’s friendly.
The muscle memory is still there.
But I didn’t see it as a step back from the projects and ideas I’m building, including this newsletter, which I’d like to publish more than once a month.
I just need a bit more time to get where I want to be.
You’re still an artist, even with a day job.
Now I think of it like chess.
You prepare your moves in advance, patiently.
You wait for the other side to move.
Only, in this case, there is no opponent.
A few years ago, I hated working at the restaurant.
Not so much the job itself: I liked the adrenaline.
I hated the time it took away from what I really loved. I felt wasted.
But everything depends on perspective.
So I decided to flip the script, to turn the job into a game.
I wrote a contract with myself.
From that moment on, I wasn’t a waiter anymore.
I was an artist performing a role. A happening disguised as service. A situationist game.
I signed it.
I built a sculpture from pizza boxes and receipts: my tombstone.
It marked the death of the waiter and the birth of the performer.
That idea shares the core principle behind this newsletter: I Die in the Process—to be reborn as someone new.
Every shift, every plate, every receipt, part of an experience that accumulates, an unmeasurable kind of knowledge.
I covered a 4-litre ketchup bottle with receipts and turned it into a vase for dried flowers.
I added a photo of a horse hoof—zoccolo duro—with a touch of irony.
“The expression zoccolo duro began to be used in journalistic language in the 1980s, and later spread to other sectors as well, to indicate the base of a party, a movement, an institution, a social group, or another apparatus, that constitutes the most loyal and most resistant part to possible changes, evolutions, or deviations.”
— Treccani.it
I also made some large drawings using only a BIC pen.
But maybe I’ll talk about those in a future issue as a continuation.
I’ve been calling this body of work, along with other semi-realised ideas: WAITING
Waiting (noun)
The fact of staying where you are or doing something until somebody/something comes or something happens
The fact of working as a waiter or waitress
— Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
This is the kind of waiting I’m learning to value.
Not passive. Not empty.
But full of friction, repetition, attention, irony.
And maybe that’s the real lesson:
Stay with something long enough until it stops being resistance and becomes clarity.
Until the ritual reveals its own depth.
“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”
— John Cage
While I wait for my partner to change after the show, I see the woman who had been sitting next to me earlier.
We’re both still waiting.
On the other side of the garden, her boyfriend—also one of the models—walks over and kisses her.
Meanwhile, G smiles at me and waves hello.