I am not especially fond of Mondays and I never have been, at least since learning of the existence of this artifice. I use the word not to mean fake — because Mondays are quite real — but to define them as made by human hands. In the rest of the universe with its whirling stars and unknown planets, Mondays do not exist.
I don’t like Mondays because when I was a kid they meant I had to set down my lunchbox full of rocks. Ditches and vacant, weedy lots were replaced with plastic chairs on metal legs and having to listen to the tick tock rhythms of civilization, what wars were fought, what is seven divided by eleven.
I’m not a great learner, got good enough grades, but I wanted to be outside, or anywhere but learning to count hours, standing in line with people I didn’t care about while desperately trying to find the ones I did. Which is why I don’t like Mondays. You have go back to it.
The seven-day pattern we’ve invented has, of course, effected our psychology. A study published in the Public Library of Science found that the fastest a participant could remember the day of the week was Monday, and not because it’s a pleasant thought. The study of 1,115 people (mostly 21-40 years old, about the same women as men, mostly UK, most of the rest US), looked at “the semantic and affective character of weekdays,” their emphasis. Days of the week each have their own personalities. Monday is ranked lowest in ‘pleasure,’ lowest in ‘arousal,’ and highest in ‘dominance.’
For me, it was the clock on the wall and the classroom door closing with a loud clicking, windows shut tight, if there were windows at all. In the mid 70s, I was bused to the inner-city and what I remember is big, old trees growing outside the school, and in the spring a girl and I sat on nests we made at their bases, and we flew together like birds. Anything outside the box was good. You could move your arms around, and imagination opened wide and soared.
On weekends I’d get up early and when we lived in Denver explored construction sites and culvert marshes loud with redwing blackbirds, and in Phoenix I walked neighborhoods and grassy parks back when the city flood irrigated. With sneakers in my hand, pants rolled up, my feet dove through forests of lawn as if snorkeling in eelgrass. Weekends had possibility. I’d get up at sunrise or earlier, when no one was around, streets and sidewalks mostly quiet as I hopped barefoot from one irrigated lot to another.
The study in PLOS found a “a midweek dip in psychological salience,” phrasing that makes me feel like I’m falling into a hole. The downturn starts on Monday. Most of the participants in the study reported they thought one day was different from the last, and the presence of a unique name seems to be the cause. Good or bad, I’m not going to say, but if it involves “psychological salience” fading in the middle of the week, I believe Monday kicks off something unhealthy. At least we think of it that way, the word ‘Monday’ prompting associations such as ‘boring’, ‘hectic’ and ‘tired.’ Words that go with Friday are ‘party,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘release.’
I write for a living, which means days of the week are mostly out the window. It’s just numbers, and I remember the name of the month if I have to. If there’s any day to know about, I’ve made it Sunday, the Lord’s day, being sure to get out for a walk, and bloody marys or at least eggs and toast for breakfast.
For ten days a month, I get the weekdays back. I drive two and a half hours and spend a week and two weekends with my one kid who is still in High School. The seven-day pattern returns. I have it posted on the banister where we live, a whiteboard with every day listed out. I am fortunate to live in both worlds, one of nameless stars spinning in the heavens, and another with seven boxes on the whiteboard. In the box marked Saturday, which was just the other day, I drove with a carload of kids, loud and laughing friends, on an excursion to the nearest big town in western Colorado. Coming home, I pulled over on the four lane highway and we sprinted across and stood in open desert watching the last light on Grand Mesa, the largest flat-topped mesa in the world. That’s what a Saturday might get you. Sunday was just as sweet. When he was done with homework, the kid and I walked several miles through junipers and clay hills, in and out of washes, finding our way from the A frame where we sometimes live to the nearest town and from there walked back home.
I don’t know if I’ve ever had such a fine combination of days as last weekend, definitely a peak in psychological salience, whatever that is. In my own isolated study, I find the artifice of weekdays useful, best when paired with as much time away from the artifice as possible. Names of days, I believe, serve as a focus, a reason to celebrate, a reason to dread, which has again led to today, Monday. I’ve sent the kid off to school with his lunch, and closed up the wood-heated abode we occupy for ten days a month, and as you’re reading this, if it’s Monday afternoon, I am driving a highway through the mountains along a river that roars in a canyon, leaving a trail of alphabet soup behind me, the names of days scattered.
Photo by Craig Childs, last weekend
Empathy on your struggles to maintain a dichotomous existence from all of us at Weaselskin.
As an ad-hoc educator, who chose to maintain a distance from administrations and brick walls, I feel your mental anguish to keep track of Mondays, early releases and PPO days, as more than once either I or a student has stood on the farm drive, alone, wondering if the other was arriving soon.
Indigenous cultures have created titles of honor for those, like you, who can walk that narrow line of distinction between the natural and manmade worlds. That line for me is more of a jump rope that I often trip over because either my natural diurnal rhythm has been thrown off by snow storms or the white board was erased by an OCD inflicted intern. These failures are mocked daily by our resident low-perched Raven.
I also relate to the incongruity of using diminutive human defined boundaries of time while trying to explain the timelessness of existence of the past. For example, I think it is a great idea that while I am standing in our “grand” kiva site speaking to a group of students, that if I first present 15 pieces of paper stacked on top of each other, a measurement that probably represents the average age of these learners, then present a stack of 2.5 reams of printer paper, that the pupils minds can grasp the magnitude of time of their current lives to the time it has been since the Ancient Puebloans vacated these premises. More often than not, the understanding of the passage of that much time as well as the understanding that these ancient lives were not bound by Mondays, or Tic Toc seconds but seasons and ceremonies, float over their heads like the wind caught 15 pages of paper I cannot ever properly return to the ream.
Likewise,I do find sympathy with the ridiculous inappropriate events that our farm inhabitants have to endure by following natural patterns of time. This morning our outside kept horses were desperately seeking the morning sun’s warmth as their photosensitive hair follicles had felt it was time to start to shed,(albeit there was some push for an early start aided by extremely warm January days) and last night’s traditional February snowstorm caught them without guard hairs.
I am sure that you, and all your readers would love to continue to discuss the pros, cons, and impossibilities of following either/or/both natural or human-defined time patterns until the cows come home, but I unfortunately must move on with my days schedule and attend a “Zoom” meeting at a precise hour with an intensely human law regulated bound attorney to discuss our placement of a conservation easement on our naturally unbound wild lands and the legal, economic, and human ramifications of the words perpetual duration and perpetuity.