The Friday of It All
What do Chappell Roan and anticipatory anxiety have in common?
Mondays are the dentist visit of the week. Tuesdays are YouTube ads you have to sit through. The best Wednesdays will ever do is align itself with wine for an alliterative, palatable identity. Thursdays are baby Fridays. And Fridays…oh Fridays, you sweet, sweet, senseless heartbreaker.
Today is Friday. I listened to Red Wine Supernova on repeat for the entire duration of a 20+ min errand run. Men in UPS uniforms are sexy. These things are not related.
Today is Friday and I’m getting dinner with people I love at a place known for “scratch-made sausages, plus beer and cocktails,” which is just about the most on-brand Wisconsin restaurant concept imaginable. (Hat tip to you, The Vanguard.) ((Yes, they have cheese curds.))
I didn’t leave my apartment once this week, save for a Monday afternoon grocery trip. Clouds kept spotty coverage over the hermitude. The weather couldn’t decide on rain or shine so it split the difference four days straight.
Now it’s a painfully perfect 73°F. My houseplants are watered, my windows open, sociability on the horizon. I itch for it. I’ve saved up all week.
And then I get sad
Which is worse:
A) Anticipatory excitement that leads to ballooning expectations of plans you willingly made, which spirals you to fixate, projecting scenario on top of scenario about said impending plans only to find yourself zapped once they arrive?
B) Anticipatory anxiety that leads to dreading plans you willingly made, forcing you to scrounge up willpower to attend, which you do, even though your brain is oatmeal, only to of course end up having a nice time.
This is an unfair question.
Option A bears a worse result but a pleasant build up. Option B deludes your entire week for a never-guaranteed payoff. Both make you distrust yourself, in the way they take you out of your body, out of the present, out of any real semblance of clarity or calmness or meaningful control.
Yet this is life. That’s the menu. It’s all we’ve got. We can’t escape a calendar, or our linear perception of time, and how our brain sloshes about inside of it, at best doggy paddling and at worst really truly drowning.
Sunday scaries but uh oh, it’s every day
I struggle a lot on the weekends. Most of us do, we just don’t talk about why.
We struggle because we spend most of the waking week looking forward to that morsel of time that feels in our control. Saturdays are the full-bodied stretch after cramped too long in the airplane seat. Sunday a warm hug. Each holds a promise of what life itself could be, should in fact be — spent how we want, where we want, on what we want, with whom we want.
What happens when that promise is broken? With the exception of Friday nights, most of my weekend unfurls dreading the upcoming week, and/or sad at the fleetingness of the freedom seemingly present for forty eight precious hours. It’s a cousin version of the joke most people need a vacation after their vacation. We’re so seeped in linear planning we can’t appreciate openness, and so lost at the mere thought of bucking weekday routines or falling behind on mental to-do lists we can’t find meaning outside of stress. Cram that anxiety inside a strict, ceaseless, ever-seven-day calendar thanks to jobs and responsibilities and appointments and errands and business hours and bad bosses and classes and schedules and side incomes and alarms and notifications and inboxes and grocery lists and autopay alerts and inflation and IRA contributions and chores and ghosting and home projects and procrastination and sickness and loneliness and FOMO and fatigue and do I have to keep going?! Your blood pressure’s elevated. Feel it? Maybe not. Maybe you’re used to that.
Enough todaying for today, how about this weekend?
Which is better?
A) Accepting you can’t and probably won’t ever find a perfect balance between schedule and freedom —> that maybe these things aren’t actually at odds —> that you deserve little treats —> that you don’t have to wait for the weekend to assign and feel pleasure —> that calendars and time are funny and dictate a lot, maybe too much, but they’re still actually kinda-okay-fine important.
B) Red Wine Supernova on repeat.