The Pros And Cons Of A Weekend

I am presently enjoying the weekend. I have not done so in a long time. Not that I am one to especially not enjoy what life affords one to enjoy, but because I haven't experienced a real (Saturday and Sunday) weekend in I don't know how long. After living two years of my life working a never set, constantly fluctuating schedule that called for anything from 8 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. shifts seven days a week, I have just concluded my first week of a regular 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. shift job. I have read, written, shopped, banked, napped, gone to the movies and dinner, wached TV, slept, and even stared off in thought so far this weekend. Blissed out, basically.

But as usual, I'm being pulled in two directions at once regarding this (rather drastic) change in my lifestyle. While I bask, I also mourn; while I delight, I also fret. Life is give and take, after all. I love the idea of having two days off from "work" in a row, the same two days every week, especially the days of Saturday and Sunday (with the slings and arrows of retail scheduling, I occasionally did have two days off in a row, but rarely were they both Saturday and Sunday; as anyone knows, Saturday and Sunday are different from the other days of the week, so, where the occasional Tuesday-Wednesday off days were welcome, they weren't the same--alas, both for good reasons as well as bad--as having Saturday and Sunday off). One never shakes the feeling that he or she should be "off" on both Saturday or Sunday, so when one isn't, there is a definite feeling of having been cheated, cosmically. But then again, having Tuesday and Wednesday off, when the rest of the world is struggling through their work week, feels like a blessing one hasn't truly earned. That said, in the middle of this first real weekend in some time, I'll opt for the regular, expected weekend right now. That said, I'm sure it won't be long (check in with me Tuesday) that I'll be longing for the days of weekday days off.

Days off, being crucial. There's a psychological cushion to having regular, consecutive days off that is sorely lacking in having just one day off (though, again, the oddities of the non-regular schedule did provide several work-one-day-in-four or two-days-in-six stretches, which were, undoubtedly, nice as hell, but also, too, several seven-days-straight or eight-days-out-of-nine stretches which were, no need to mention, hell itself). Life requires, as I think the Byrds said, time to waste and time to get shit done. The two-day, regularly scheduled weekend is perfect for this paradox. As I was running around yesterday getting shit done, I felt so at ease knowing ah, tomorrow I can just not do shit; likewise, as I have taken some time to just not do shit, I have felt relieved that I have had some time and still have some time to get shit done. It might seem odd (and a sign of one's undisciplined lifestyle) but one simply can't indulge this balancing act between getting shit done and not doing shit in just one day off, but it is so--the nudge of the other (non)activity is too great to fully engage in and enjoy one or the other. A day off is just that, a day "off," whereas a weekend is truly time away, away from whatever you need to be away from. Or so I see it.

More deeply, or deeperly, I am thrilled to get Thursdays back. I am a Thursday's Child, so I have been biased towards the day since birth, but Thursday could just be the greatest day of the week, one that really doesn't exist in the all-is-flux world of random retail scheduling (for that matter, all the days of the week lose their identity in such a schedule; instead of seven distinct days of the week, there are merely two--work days and days off; I can't tell you how equilibrium-smashing it is to start a five-straight-days work stretch at 2:30 p.m. on a Friday and telling yourself, this is my Monday morning [let alone starting a seven-straight stretch then and thinking, just get me through two days and then it will finally be Monday morning]). Ah, but Thursday! The day of promise, the day of I can taste it; I'd bet all the shrubbery in the world that the day Moses mounted Mt. Pisgah was a Thursday. Let's face it, if you can endure Thursday, you've made it to the weekend. Anything is endurable on a Friday--hangovers, blizzards, staff meetings, PowerPoint presentations, anything. And so that wonderful feeling on a Thursday afternoon--I've made it, I can see the Promised Land, the weekend is nigh. I mean, Wordsworth may have patented the idea, but really, anticipation trumps actuality 99% of the time, no? Speaking secularly, doesn't December 23rd's eagerness always beat Christmas afternoon's malaise? The opening of the beeping microwave always top the actual eating of the Hot Pocket? Lord, I thank you for the return of my Thursdays.

The Devil take my Sunday nights, though. Give and take, see? If my former job's piebald scheduling took all meaning away from individual days of the week, it also spared me the nadir of existence, Sunday night. Now I suppose one might argue for Monday morning being that nadir, but again, it's the anticipation of (read here dread of), rather than the reality of, that matters. I mean, once that alarm goes off on Monday morning, you're already out in the rain without an umbrella; there's nothing to do but run like hell. It's really the thought of running through that deluge that is the killer. Hence, Sunday night. Give and take. If you're going to take the joys of the real weekend, I find myself increasingly telling myself as the last minutes of Sunday daylight tick away at the moment, then you have to give into the fact that Sunday nights are back in your life with a vengeance. I am sure that just around the corner is the medical technology that will enable us to measure the collective human race's feelings of angst, ennui, flat out life sucks at any given time, and I am really sure that such measurements will show the time of the highest density of such feelings is Sunday night. Is there a worse feeling all week than the feeling that occurs, oh so aptly, while watching and hearing the last few seconds of the Sixty Minutes stopwatch tick away? Enough said; that moment is coming on fast, let me forget about it as long as I can.

And so I face Sunday's gloaming, as my feelings toward having weekends back in my life wax and wane. But God how wonderful to think that in four days it'll be Thursday, and that next weekend, God bless you, Dr. King, is a three-dayer. Fourteen straight days until the next Sunday night. I feel strengthened, not weakened.



(A video which begs the question, did John Lennon cop his January '69 rooftop concert look from Roger McGuinn's in this 1966 video?)