Celebrating the Weekday

Because Life is Too Damn Short!

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about weekdays, and how the majority of us are just trying our hardest to get through them. Everyone just wants to reach those two very special, clearly favorited days at the end of a week, when work is a distant Monday problem and life has a million exciting possibilities. I love those two days as much as anyone, but still, I’ve been thinking a lot about the five days in between.

When you’re me, your weekdays usually go something like this: Monday is spent working from home, most likely grocery shopping and trying to squeeze a workout in. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are spent in the office downtown. I come home pretty tired (and typically sweaty) after, and the rest of my day pretty much consists of dinner, a shower, and a book or TV show. Thursdays and Fridays are, nicely enough, work from home days as well, spent in a lot of Webex meetings with a load of laundry squeezed in somewhere. Any excitement at all would typically result from preparations for the upcoming weekend. Nothing too earth shattering happening, as you can plainly see.

On those Tuesday/Wednesday commute days I mentioned, I tend to walk underground through the Oculus when I get off the subway. I’ve got Taylor Swift singing in my ears, Longchamp bag on my shoulder, work-appropriate outfit on, and I suddenly realize that I look exactly like everyone else. When I look up at my surroundings, it’s a bit of a quarter-life-crisis moment, if you will. Huge crowds of people are all marching in the same direction, assumedly toward a cup of coffee and an empty desk waiting patiently for their arrival. It’s like we’re all aliens in some sort of trance marching towards our leader. Everyone is walking at a brisk pace with their airpods in, work bags on their shoulders, and half of them are probably wearing those same men’s shoes with the white bottoms. I find myself wondering if anyone else ever gives this scene a second thought like I do.

These sorts of institutionalized standards can really bum me out. And I know we have to work for a living, and I know that I am one of the rare lucky ones that actually enjoys my job, so it’s unfair of me to complain. But I don’t enjoy feeling as though my life is an endless robotic cycle of going to work, coming home, and going to sleep on repeat. I want to have a life that is overflowing with good days and loads of memories. But that’s the thing — you don’t just have a life, you make one. It’s easy to fall into patterns and become bored with my everyday routine, so it’s up to me to switch things up.

That all being said, here’s what I’ve been thinking. Life is too damn short to make only two days out of seven count. I recognize that we all need to do laundry and buy groceries and pay bills and keep our bodies healthy and the list goes on and on and on. Some days, there just are not any spare minutes for anything else. But I am willing to bet that for a lot of us, those five weekdays are not jam packed with long to-do lists down to the minute (unless you are Katie Hill). There has to be some time to bring something worth looking forward to into your weekdays. If you’re thinking “well, there just isn’t any!” then maybe you need to reevaluate things and make some time. There, I said it.

So recently, I’ve been making dinner plans with friends I don’t see as often. I’ve been going to see a movie and eating popcorn for dinner. I’ve been taking dance classes and doing more happy hours. I’ve been going for more walks. I’ve been cooking dinners/ watching shows/ drinking wine with others. Even playing some games. Maybe I’ll go out to a comedy show on Thursday, or fail epically at trivia on a Tuesday. No matter how big or small the plan, filling my days with things to look forward to truly changes the game.

When you are living solely for the weekend, pressure tends to pile up on those two days. Living in New York City now, or even living up in Ithaca for college, I found myself constantly stressing about weekend plans, as if the world would crumble to an end without a stacked weekend lineup. Solution: celebrate the weekday more often. I’m not saying I don’t ever stress about weekend plans anymore, because I certainly do. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a little bit of that pressure off?

I’ve always been a head-in-the-clouds, dreamer sort of person. As cheesy as it may sound, I love to talk/think about life, both the meaning of it and how I can make it as awesome as possible with the time I have. My favorite show that I’ve quoted in my writing before, How I Met Your Mother, has a whole episode devoted to making every single night “legendary.” So, I am going to take a page out of Barney Stinson’s playbook with a bit of a caveat; every single night does not have to be legendary, but at least one or two nights each week can be. I may not be out here licking the liberty bell (iykyk), but at least I am making some sort of a memory. And that’s good enough for me.

So here’s to the weekday! Next time you do something crazy on a Wednesday, keep me in your thoughts.