Monday, March 21, 2005
Such are the Days of our Weeks
Today I am staying home on a sick day, because I feel dizzy and wretched, though not retching, which is a good thing I suppose. I’m sure I’ll feel better tomorrow, but I just did not have the energy to face a whole Monday this morning. I’m moving slow and my mind keeps wrestling with the idea that I should be at work, or working, or something, because it’s Monday. I have to keep convincing myself that it’s okay for me to be resting at home right now. I’ll get back to work on Tuesday. “Tuesday?,” I ask myself sarcastically. “Tuesdays suck. Don’t start on a Tuesday dude, you’ll just regret it.”
At this point I am face to face once again with my weird relationship with the various days of the week. It is a theme I’ve resisted here for a long time, probably because it is so hopelessly overdone. The personalities of general chronologic concepts; amorphous morphology. I’ve even done something very like it before. It’s so hackneyed. But then again, that’s never stopped me before. “Hackney” was even the name of my college president. It’s not that I seek out the hackn, but if things get hackneyed I can work with it.
And how I feel about the day actually is something I think about almost every day as I face it. These notions accompany me; one might say, they haunt me - these disembodied calendrical personalities. They are a part of my life, they are members of my household. So here they are, and maybe this will be my first step toward not concerning myself with them anymore, evicting them from my heart’s mind:
Sunday: my old religious school day. This was usually fun for me; there were some good kids in the class and I got rewarded for being a nerd, to say nothing of being the rabbi’s teacher’s son. I did well, enjoyed myself and occasionally learned something interesting. On the ride home, my mom often tuned in cool old funny english radio programs or game shows and I felt intellectually stimulated. Some Sunday afternoons we’d go and see a show or to a museum or the beach - there were various outings and they were generally enjoyable. Sunday was not a day of rest, per se, but a busy day full of self-directed projects of diversion and improvement. Sundays: are just fine.
Monday: I didn’t mind these so much. I’d had a few days to catch my breath, and I knew that if I could hit the ground running I’d at least be able to create the impression of competence. Things usually worked out just fine: I knew what was coming and I dealt with it. Other people might bumble around in a fog but I kept sharply focused and got a lot done. I enjoy covercoming obstacles and Mondays often felt like that to me - tiring but satisfying. Mondays: are okay.
Tuesday: I had trouble with Tuesdays. On Tuesday the half-assed chickens that the zombies around me accidentally hatched on Monday come home to roost. Peole are still tired from Monday. I’m still tired from Monday. I wake up Tuesday morning thinking, o god must I endure four more of those before things slow down again?, and I force myself out of bed and the whole day by its very nature is full of interruptions nad multitasking.... I used to like the television on tuesday nights, but that was a consolation prize. Now it’s an irrelevancy, but a new bonus has snuck in in its place: my yoga class gives me a valuable boost after a weekend’s worth of weekdays. When we recently got a substitute instead of my usual yogi and I didn’t get as much out of my workout, I realized how much I rely on that class to overcome the sour mood I so often have by that point in the week. Tuesdays: are a bitch.
Wednesday: This day typically surprised me. I usually expected it to be worse than it than it turned out to be. When I was little, Wednesday was just the day in the middle, distinguished more by its position than by any intrinsic qualities of its own. There’s something to be said for being in the middle, I admit it - but there was nothing about Wednesday qua Wednesday that really caught my attention till I stared going to hebrew school around the fifth grade. Classes were at the synagogue and I probably should have looked forward to them and enjoyed them, but I didn’t. Even so, I stumbled along through and I wound up doing well enough to get through without embarassing myself too much week after week, culminating in a successful flub-free bar mitzvah. And ultimately, this is the quality I associated with Wednesday: overcoming adversity, even of my own making. It was a day of petty triumph and averted disaster. Eventually my youth group met on Wednesday nights and I wound up really enjoying their company, much to my surprise. Wednesday: better than it could have been.
Thursday: By this point all noteworthy weekly disasters should already have struck; I’m starting to feel like I’m almost off the hook for another week. The elementary school cafeteria served pizza on Thursdays - a decent and satisfying lunch; nighttime television was usually excellent and some nights I even started going out to a good theater class in the evenings. It wasn’t the end of the slog-grind, but I could see it from there. People tried to keep a low profile, to avoid messing up their weekends. Thursdays: good and getting better.
Friday: always seemed overrated. I want to write it off but it’s still 20% of a work-week; on Fridays, people drop off the problems they don’t want to see on their own doors on monday. People shmooze and meander purposelessly, which would be fine if they didn’t still expect me to finish everything on on my opwn plate before the day ends. Lunch in elementary school was fishsticks, a food that looked a lot better than it wound up tasting. But Friday night was always nice, and something to look forward to - blessings, candles, a song sung by our little dog to a loaf of bread, and a sense of having overcome and persevered. Friday: a mixed bag with a prize at the bottom.
Saturday: I could start most Saturdays with four hours of cartoons and a few boxes of Team flakes with 2% milk and a sack of white sugar. In later years I’d go off to the community college for acting classes, which I enjoyed thoroughly. Saturday afternoons were for riding my bike, building models of aircraft carriers and famous monsters, reading books, watching movies… I did as I wished, as my heart directed me. I could sometimes even stay up late on special occasions (ususual late night televison events) despite having Sunday school the next morning. The day radiated the sweetness of freedom. Saturday: alll it’s cracked up to be.
I never got so deeply into personaliziing my relationships with time periods that I bothered with the months of the year - they are more objective, anyway, having characteristics of weather and season and anniversaries. Days sort of float through the standard benchmarks that pace off time for us, so they seemed more fluid to me, more susceptible to personalization. Whatever my hidden interior reasoning might have been, I didn’t go any further with this. I’m sticking with just days for now. You can take it from here if you like.
