Tuesdays
I love Tuesdays for the simple reason that during them I have neither work nor class. Granted that being a university lecturer makes you take home some of the work, during most Tuesdays I am neither a student nor a lecturer. The entire day is mine, and entirely at my lazy mercy. I can walk around the house with just knickers and fluffy slippers on, and go the entire day without wearing glasses or eating proper food or brushing my teeth until I fall asleep from the sheer effort of being unemployed for a day. Tuesdays are priceless.
Recently I have taken to making a pig of myself and a piggery of the bedroom in front of the technological sty that is the television, but sometimes I spend it in the other room, which for lack of a better word and better furniture I will call the "den with a work space in at the other end."
My appreciation for Tuesday starts on the Monday afternoon, after leaving work, and I proceed to appreciate the vacancy of my remaining thirty-six hours by doing nothing until dawn. I may finish a book or a comic book, read several articles online, finish several levels in a game or episodes in an anime - but any and all of those still count as doing nothing. Gloriously doing nothing, I fall asleep at dawn, still unworried about tasks and papers to mark, because I know I will be waking up on a free Tuesday.
At times I get a different sort of work done on Monday afternoons. I drew plans for a palochina table yesterday after work, hoping to replace the two tables in the "den" which have started to come apart at the dowels and finishings. I resisted the temptation to just Google "long work tables with an underside shelf for putting more stuff on, preferably painted a decent shade of black or if not then any neutral color will do" and instead drew the thing, not quite able to imagine a flesh and wood version of it.
Recently I have taken to making a pig of myself and a piggery of the bedroom in front of the technological sty that is the television, but sometimes I spend it in the other room, which for lack of a better word and better furniture I will call the "den with a work space in at the other end."
My appreciation for Tuesday starts on the Monday afternoon, after leaving work, and I proceed to appreciate the vacancy of my remaining thirty-six hours by doing nothing until dawn. I may finish a book or a comic book, read several articles online, finish several levels in a game or episodes in an anime - but any and all of those still count as doing nothing. Gloriously doing nothing, I fall asleep at dawn, still unworried about tasks and papers to mark, because I know I will be waking up on a free Tuesday.
At times I get a different sort of work done on Monday afternoons. I drew plans for a palochina table yesterday after work, hoping to replace the two tables in the "den" which have started to come apart at the dowels and finishings. I resisted the temptation to just Google "long work tables with an underside shelf for putting more stuff on, preferably painted a decent shade of black or if not then any neutral color will do" and instead drew the thing, not quite able to imagine a flesh and wood version of it.
I start Tuesdays with a satisfying smack on the "dismiss" button on the alarm in my phone, waking up just quite enough to mumble a "snfrll nice day, nana" to Pasco as he leaves for work at 6:45 a.m. By eight a.m. or so I awake to the vegetable peddler gleefully shouting "GUlaaaAAY!" as his bicycle passes through the street outside. My day begins, full of the possible nothings I could be doing later on, and I contemplate them while using up every bottle in the shower and end up smelling like a pretty parade of gays, blessing the air everywhere I sit down.
It is also on Tuesdays that I get to make nutritionally oblivious food, which in this case somehow resembles two deformed turtles, and take pictures of it and post it like an annoying person on social media.
This particular Tuesday started with a hesitant sun, and now the air is filled with drizzle that couldn't make up its mind. It's turning out to be a particularly pensive day, I think, the kind of day whose thoughts I normally bump into at three a.m., when I wonder what I should be doing with my life apart from, or in some cases, instead of, lecturing philosophy in the university. As with all relationships, there is the subtle oscillation within "I love my job; it is a job," and any other permutation of that sentence with emphasis on different words. Most of the time I think I'm not that good at it, and I know I can't write academic papers for jack. I dread the looming seriousness of a dissertation, and even before I think of the letters "PhD" my head has already started shaking itself in self-defensive insecurity.
So maybe that's why Tuesdays are priceless: filled with all the nothings I end up doing - apart from rest and lazing around, Tuesdays serve as the pause from the accelerator, the gasp at the start of a sprint or a dive, the clench of shoulder muscles and fists to a human battering ram. (The weekend doesn't count - everybody knows that weekends are for inexplicably creating and nursing hangovers.) Come Wednesday I will lecture again, mark papers again, end up exhausted again, hopefully with a smile that convinces itself that this is all well. If it doesn't, then sod it - there's always next Tuesday.
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