These Are The Days Of Our Lives

Ohhh, music videos back then were SO not what they are now.

Have fun with that being stuck in your head all day, for it is the theme song of today's post, in which I viciously mock the week. No, not like that -- not this week, per se, but the very idea of the Week itself.

Despite the myriad difference of our day-to-day lives --  whether you're a paper-mover, bean-counter, retail-drone, student, stay-at-home, whatever -- we all get the same seven days. Monday to Sunday, in the same order, forever. Depending on your personal schedule, different days may have different connotations for you; for instance, my roommate who only gets Mondays and Thursdays off has a very different idea of "on the weekend" than I do. But there seem to be what I'm gonna go ahead and call general characterisations of each day; a cast of characters that make up the average workweek.

Monday
This is the big one; what you've been dreading. You grit your teeth, squinch your eyes, and just try to make it through. Those who are impervious to its evil will hoot, "Someone's got a case of the Mondays!" These people should be hogtied to the printer-copier and sacrificed to Garfield, but all they get is a pained grimace because who has the energy to spare? Not me.

Bad things tend to happen, because society as a whole is not at its best. Parking tickets, surprise deadlines, someone else eating your lunch -- it's all about getting home, dragging yourself to your favorite horizontal soft surface, and putting comfort foods in your face. Unless you're my roommate, in which you feel chipper, well-rested and spunky, and attempt to violate the personal space of as many grumpy Garfield roommates as possible. Personal space and horizontal surfaces are of the utmost importance on Mondays.

Tuesday


This is the week's equivalent of Second Day Soreness -- that wincing and mincing you do at the gym on Day 2, when you're all sore from yesterday and are now being asked to do it all over again. Everything is harder to do on Day 2s and Tuesday is no different. My inner child always registers disbelief at my absurd behavior as I rise and return every Tuesday morning; "What, you're doing that again? What're you, stupid?"

Yes. Because everything is stupid on a Tuesday. So I must be too.

 I even coined an initialism to capture the zeitgeist of the phenomenon; DCIOT, or Dear Christ, It's Only Tuesday. Feel free to use it jovially around the office, the karmic balance to the well-known and similarly sacrilegious TGIF.

Wednesday
You're starting to get back into your stride by now, which is just as well, because it's time for the next of the week's empty slogans to get brayed at you -- "Over the Hump!" they cry, whilst anyone with any sense of dignity cringes with involuntary sympathy-embarrassment. This is a hideous phrase that should be given physical form only so that it can be burned. Okay, that's a little strong -- but still, my least favorite of the empty office nothingisms. I picture Wednesday as some homely, bulge-eyed mutt straddling the week, staring blankly as it helplessly struggles to dismount. Hump Day -- a phrase that cries out for a bucket of cold water. Ugh.

Thursday
Now we've reached a strangely anticipatory phase in our week, where the hopefulness of Friday bleeds backwards in time to the desperate Thursday workforce. This is the Friday Eve phenomenon; almost to Almost There. It is not much of a day in and of itself, so much as an awkward barrier to Friday; and it is, as Douglas Adams so famously wrote, rather hard to get the hang of them.

Friday
This is a day devoted to the sunny confidence we all seem to hold that this weekend is going to be, in fact, The Best Weekend Evarz. The merriment generated by this secret knowledge sustains us throughout, despite the overwhelming likelihood that it will turn out to involve little more than laundry, television, and maybe some takeout you will come to regret. This never seems to occur to us on that beautiful, optimistic Friday; we are all of us joyfully awaiting that moment when the walls of our individual professional rat mazes will fall away, and the boundless relative freedoms of the wider rat maze of traffic-clogged streets, social contracts, familial obligations and household chores appear with an overarching high blue sky where puffy white clouds spell out Well At Least You're Not At Work. TGIFs abound.

Saturday

My favorite Saturday-regression cartoon
regresses a bit himself. Meta.

This rarely lives up to the Friday hype. Sunshine, actual plans, and someone wonderful to do them with are all necessary precursors to this expected wonderfulness; unless you have somehow arranged for all three (especially since you can't really control the first one) you will probably have a laundry day. But, you can rebel a little by staying in pajama pants all day, subsisting off bowls of sugary cereal and watching cartoons. Regressing is the new rebelling.

Sunday
This is the day when all the chickens you didn't realize you owned come home to roost; what you shoulda done, what's about to come. The feathers positively fly (as do the fowl meatphors, apparently), each one settling with a thud on your guilty conscience. Strangely enough, this doesn't send you into the productive frenzy that's called for; the feathers usually coalesce into a down comforter that's to be lurked in while you sulkily watch your favorite TV shows and pretend you're still having fun BECAUSE IT'S STILL THE WEEKEND, DAMMIT. This has primed you perfectly for Monday grumpiness, a little Monday Eve spirit that Garfield would be proud of.