July 2, 2004
Friday Easy
Everything is a little easier on Friday ... have you ever noticed that? Especially the Friday preceding a three-day weekend.
Rolling out of bed at 5:12 a.m. is easier. [Well ... no it isn't. But for the purposes of this journal blurb, let's just pretend that it is.] Finding something decent to wear is easier. Getting your hair to cooperate is easier. Sticking to the diet is easier. Typing row after row of teeny-tiny numbers into an Excel spreadsheet for eight and a half hours is easier.
Even making nicey-nice with your co-workers is easier on a Friday.
"Got any exciting plans for the weekend?" asks The Main Nerdy Geotech Guy. [It is 10:17 a.m., and he is already standing at the front desk signing himself out for the rest of the day.] It is a question I have been asked 43,896,371 times already today ... a question I will likely be asked another 43,896,371 times before the day is over. It's the kind of question I hate the most -- it rates right up there with How was your weekend? and Are you busy? -- mainly because it just seems so disingenuous, especially when it's coming from a co-worker.
Do you actually care about my weekend plans?, I'm tempted to ask him. Do you want to hear that I plan to be in my Happy Pants by 5:15 p.m. this afternoon ... and that I plan to live in them, basically, until 5:15 a.m. Tuesday morning? [I'll change out of them briefly while we go out to dinner with Graham and his new girlfriend on Saturday night, and then again when we go watch Alameda's adorably podunk Fourth of July parade on Sunday. But otherwise, the Happy Pants are on to stay.] Are you interested in hearing about my new laptop, and about how I'm going to spend a big chunk of the weekend transferring all of my programs and settings and desktop frippery from the old computer to the new one? Do you care that David and I are going to grocery shop on Monday this weekend instead of Sunday, and that we'll probably go to the groovy health food store on Park Street instead of our usual Albertson's or Safeway, because even though everything there costs an arm and a leg and another arm -- and even though everybody who works at the "health" food store looks like one of The Walking Undead -- they carry the only 100% whole wheat hamburger buns we've ever been able to find in the Bay Area? Do you have a deep abiding need to know that I'm 43 pages into a decent gothic horror novel ["The Ghost Writers"], 15 pages into a self-help manual on writers block ["Unstuck"] and halfway through a book of Carolyn Knapp essays ["The Merry Recluse"] ... but that I still feel like I don't have enough to read?
Does any of this stuff matter to you? I mean really? Or are you asking just so I'll ask you about YOUR 'exciting plans' for the weekend, which -- and here you'll have to forgive me for being rude, but it's been a hecka stressful week and all of my *charm molecules* have been worn down into little pointy stubs -- I actually don't give four-sevenths of a crap about?
But on Fridays, even the most curmudgeonly Office Curmudgeon [read this: me] finds it a little easier to be nearly human.
"I don't know yet," I say to The Main Nerdy Geotech Guy with a smile. "I'm thinking about just hanging out at home with my husband all weekend. What about you?"
Have a great weekend, everybody.
p.s. got any exciting plans?
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