HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: There’s certainly a good explanation. Maybe several, and only one or two are distressing.
(First, though, whoo hoo. Very happy with the cover of the new RT Bookreviews. Nice, huh?)
Anyway, about the “situation.” Let me admit to you, friends, that there are times I have no idea what day it is.
This has gotten so ridiculously out of hand that the other morning (whatever day it was) I woke up, and had to THINK: What day is this? And then, in my frustration, I thought: They ought to make some kind of a device you could look at first thing in the morning that would instantly tell you what day it is.
Yeah, I know. They, um, did.
But calendars aside, this whole juggling writing and full-time-job thing has given
me a better understanding of the Dowager Duchess’s famous question on Downton Abbey: “What’s a weekend?”
My confusion, sadly, does not come from the reality that I don’t have to work and as a result there’s nothing to separate weekdays and weekend.
It comes from the opposite reality, that I work all the time.
This is not in the nature of a complaint in any way—I am happy and delighted, and buzzing along, counting blessings. But I’ve got to tell you, it’s disconcerting to realize that I don’t know the day of the week. I mean, don’t doctors use that as one of the three questions to determine if a patient is grounded in reality?) (And listen, don’teven ask me the date, like what number of what month it is. I didn’t study, and that’s too hard.)
I’ll be walking down the hall at the station or at home, and it will literally cross my mind—what day is this? Sometimes, if someone is nearby, I even ASK them. Most people happily, assume I’m joking. (A few, with a little shake of the head, seem to understand,and even commiserate.)
Kind of fascinatingly, I have turned this into a musing on how we’ve assigned “meaning” to each day of the week…the difficult Monday, the placeholder Tuesday, the day things get planned; Wednesday, when some things actually get accomplished; Thursday, when it’s suddenly too late, because it’s almost Friday, when WHEW week over, and in some offices and city halls and statehouses it might as well be Saturday, where, depending on your own life, it’s either HAVE FUN or DO ERRANDS, and then Sunday, when it used to be a rest day but now its either a catch- up-on-stuff (writing) day or when you get ready for Monday.
But—and here’s my point, and I know you were wondering—if you don’t know what day it is because, like me, you are writing (or thinking about writing) all the time, no matter what else is going on in your life, you lose those day-designators we’re used to. And you can look at time a different way.
Sure, you could decide “It’s always Monday, argh.” Or you could decide: Hurray. It’s another wonderful day where anything could happen!
Just don’t ask me what everyone else calls it.
(Is it…just me?)