The Power of the Five-Day Workweek

I’m totally astounded at the power the five-day workweek still has over my psyche. I turned down plans to leave town this weekend particularly because, when I’m out of town two or more weekends in a row, my life starts to feel REALLY unbalanced, and I live grocery-less in a squalid apartment just feeling sort of squashed by life (of course, the feeling I had from actually being away those weekends definitely makes up for it — when I’m not in my apartment, I don’t have to worry about how clean — or not clean — it is, nor whether there’s food in the fridge).

So, I stayed in to work. I had to catch up on the money I was earning, and I needed to change my bedding, and I needed to vacuum the cat hair off my carpets before they started looking like those shag carpets that were so popular in the 70s (and yes, I had that kind of carpet in my bedroom growing up, and the creepy thing about them is that the shag hides EVERYTHING and they can go YEARS without being vacuumed).

OK, so today is Saturday, but theoretically it shouldn’t be very different from any other day to a freelancer. But somehow, I managed to earn more money today than any other day this week AND eat better AND do some laundry, dishes, and housecleaning and write poetry. And somehow, none of it felt as . . . demoralizing? as all that work feels on any weekday. Somehow, I still felt as though I had the “freedom” of a Saturday at my disposal.

Part of it may be that other people aren’t working today, so the rest of the world does slow down a little. Part of it may be that I get WAY better assignments from one of my clients on Saturdays because no one else is working. But whatever it is, I’m going to try to wake up imagining every morning is Saturday.