June 1, 2007
Whenever there’s a holiday and I get a long weekend it always throws me off because Monday ends up feeling like Sunday, then Tuesday feels like Monday, Wednesday feels like Tuesday, and so on until I end up feeling like I’m missing a day of the next weekend. And this last week it was even weirder because on Tuesday I said to a guy, "It feels like Monday," and he said, "No, it feels more like Thursday." And that’s just all wrong because Thursday feels like that moment in a marathon when you get your second wind and you know you’re going to make it to the finish. At least I think that’s what it feels like because the closest I’ve ever come to running a marathon was once when my dentist pulled out a really big needle and I was five blocks away before I realized I was in the middle of the street wearing a bib and with a mouth full of cotton balls.
But I digress. And even though everybody hates Mondays it’s really Tuesdays that are the worst. On Monday you at least come back refreshed and it’s not so bad when you have to drive by ten phantom parking spots–those places where you think you see an open spot from a distance but when you get close you realize there’s a compact or a sub-compact or a soap-box derby car already parked there. Mondays lull you into a false sense of security, and then on Tuesday you think things are going great until you pull into a parking spot and you hear a sickening crunch because you just parked on top of a mini.
Who named the days of the week, anyway? We can blame the Scandinavians, who have given us so many other things: the Vikings, yogurt, round pastries with fruit in them, wooden shoes, tulips, Thor Heyerdahl, that Scream painting, legalized marijuana and prostitution, ABBA, and reindeer. For some reason they named most of the days of the week after their gods. Wednesday, for instance, was named after Odin, and Thursday was named after Thor, which is weird because most people get hammered on the weekend.
But I digress. What I can’t figure out is why the weeks are always off-kilter with the months and years. There are seven days in a week, but either thirty or thirty-one days in a month, except February which has twenty-eight days except every four years, and then there are three-hundred and sixty-five days in a year so things never come out even. Shouldn’t the year always start on a Sunday, or maybe even a Monday? Then again for most people New Years’ Day is a holiday, so it would still feel like Sunday.
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