If you’re at all like me, Fridays are nearly sacred. Everybody loves a good Friday (not the religious kind). We count on them pretty much every week, unless they’re right around a two-day holiday before the weekend, in which case we don’t really care which day is which, or unless they’re the last day of a vacation, in which case we don’t look forward to the Friday but we say ‘Well at least we have the weekend to get back into the groove’. But cool people that don’t work weekends know that Fridays promise lots of great things, among which are some of my favorites:
a) happy hours;
b) pizza, beer and/or porn, especially in college;
c) movie theater visit(s);
d) dinner with friends;
e) potentially meeting new people while doing any of the above;
f) laying around in the living room just vegging out in front of crappy movies & worse food.

And remember when you were a kid? Fridays meant little or no homework, and even the homework you DID have, you didn’t have to do on Friday (!). I almost always rented movies and/or video games on Fridays so that you’d get the whole weekend to enjoy them. Fridays were usually the days when the parents could justify taking you to McDonald’s or ordering pizza or grabbing food that tasted like ass in the food court at the mall. Plus you got to stay up LATE. Not that you did anything with that whole ‘no bedtime on Fridays’ rule, because you were too fat to have a lot of friends or energy… but at least you didn’t have to go to bed right after Golden Girls. Staying up for Empty Nest – now that was a big deal.

And once you were old enough / no longer the fat kid and had friends, you had sleepovers on Friday nights. Board games, video games, tons of Mountain Dew, ping pong, laser tag (nerd!), capture the flag (hick), LAN parties (computer nerd), midnight trips to Wal-Mart / Krumpey’s donuts / Denny’s / Taco Bell / Waffle House (fat kids AND hicks), over-priced movie tickets, porn pirated from stepdads (perverts), porn found on the internet (nerd perverts), chess (… J.C. I was an uber-nerd), Magic cards (why am I still revealing this sh!t?), stalking girls we were too afraid to talk to (thank Jesus for the 5th amendment), deep conversations involving metaphysics and The Truth… Fridays always held something to look forward to. (Notice that I didn’t mention anything to do with dating or going on dates – aside from stalking. Now remember that I’m married to a beautiful woman who SEEMS really cool… and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about whether or not she’s a nerd in a sexy body.)

Even the Fridays you have ZERO plans for, you get all excited – “Well, no big plans for the weekend, but maybe we’ll (fill in blank with something you’d never be able to do during the week because ‘during the week’ is not Friday)!”

But some Fridays… shit goes wrong. You NEVER expect bad news or bad things or heavy workloads or lots of chores on a Friday. When they come up anyway, they’re ESPECIALLY bad – or you end up shielding yourself with the Friday, saying “Well, at least it’s Friday,” and you feel just a little bit better.

For instance, this morning the wyf & I kept our pinky-promise to each other to go to the gym. I left a bit earlier than she did (she was in her “other office”), and because I had left my keys at work last night, walked out the door, ran to the gym, and checked in there by giving my name. (Normal procedure is that I take my keys & they scan my little keyring badger thing.) R will meet me there.

So I get on the bike & pick up a copy of BusinessWeek to sweat all over. About 3 minutes in, R bounds up the stairs and says “Major problem: do you have a set of keys?”

This is like the BIGGEST event for us, when one or both of us doesn’t have keys & is relying on the other one to be more responsible (I admit, I’m usually the one doing the relying). We HATE ourselves & a little bit resent the less responsible one for being so Hurry Hurry that they can’t even remember their damn keys. It’s a big deal because there’s NO good place for us to keep a spare set in case this happens; mailbox = mailman theft, outside our door = we can’t even get into the building so that doesn’t help, neighbors = we don’t know/like ANY of them well enough to rely on them for keys, work = best we can do but still damn inconvenient especially at 6:15 in the AM.

So I’m like “Of COURSE I don’t have keys! I had to rush YOU out of the office last night because I forgot them! You know this! Don’t ask me if I have keys! You know I don’t!” (I only said “NO I don’t have keys!”, but all the other stuff was blended in with the emotive yell in which I said it, so you need that background.) She says “Don’t Yell At Me!” and she’s right. Didn’t mean to yell, and yelling does no good… so I yelled “I’m NOT Yelling!”

Her solution was to go all the way downtown to her office building (20 minutes with the help of public transpo, 30-40 if you’re hoofin’ it) and pick up the spare set in her desk drawer. Again, if you’re like me, you marvel that she’s lucky enough to have walked out the door with her Muni pass (for the buses & cable cars) AND her badge for work but not the keys to the apartment.

And of course I’m all “I’ll go with you” and I toss away the now sweat-ridden BusinessWeek. (I get sweaty quickly on the bike. Keep up!) “You don’t have any money & you don’t have your bus pass!” Well, no, of course I don’t – I’M AT THE GYM, WHERE NEITHER OF THOSE THINGS PERFORM ANY SERVICE OR PROVIDE ANY BENEFIT.

*sigh* So at this point we’re both stressed out – even as I write about it, my heart rate is up around 70. (I’ve gotten my resting rate in the low 40s these days! Healthy!) She takes off & says she might make it back by 7, which was the time we’d decided made sense for gym departure. I continue my workout with even higher heart rates, more sweat, and less concentration on form – because I’m worrying about whether or not she’s going straight to the apartment or for some reason coming all the way back to the gym and where would I meet her and I don’t want to just miss her and have her mad and holy shit this 55 lbs is heavy.

In the end? Of COURSE everything worked out fine. Of course of course of course. She got down there (ran along the bus route but because there were no buses got to run the whole way), snagged the keys, took a cab back and paid for it while it sat out there waiting for her to come down with money, left a note on the door so I’d know she was there, delayed her shower until I got back, and I got back 10 minutes later.

We left together & caught the cable car, all the while talking about ‘at least it happened on a Friday’ and ‘ready for the weekend’ and ‘couldn’t have handled that on a stressful Tuesday’ etc.

It was a big deal because we’re totally OCD NIs (Neurotic Insecures), and I’m very OCD about schedules & expectations, and when it’s a Friday, our expectation for our schedule is minimal hiccups and as much fun as possible. But instead of this WRECKING a Fun Friday, we wrapped the Fun Friday around us and insulated ourselves from the nerve damage that such an incident would cause on a Terrible Tuesday or a Woeful Wednesday. We maintained the positivity that Fridays promise.

As my workday on a Friday draws to a close, I just ask you to recognize the force that is your Friday, and to go forth and revel in it. It is a day for reverie, a day for relaxing, and, if you must, a day for beer, pizza, or porn. I am off to enjoy my Friday. I wish that you do the same. Just remember your keys.

… and I might talk to the wyf about naming our first-born Friday. That’s how sacred the day is to me. (Better than naming our son Rosh and our daughter Hashannah.)

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 6:42 pm and is filed under FRIDAY, NIs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.