What is it about Fridays?

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.)

Baby on BORED

Happy Halloween.

Our Sales Admin department decided last week that we’d have a costume contest this morning at 8am. In true me fashion, I immediately got nervous. What am I gonna wear? What’s considered “acceptable” here? What if I’m the only one who dresses up? What if I’m the only one who DOESN’T dress up? People really need to consider the feelings of Neurotic Insecures (new term, abbreviated NI, prounounced “KNEE!”, coined here today by yours truly, defines yours truly quite well) before they announce costume contests – I’ve had agita about this ever since. No wonder I’m not getting much done at work. … Okay, that’s a stretch even for me. I’m not getting things done because there’s NOT a lot to do, and what there is to do isn’t exactly lighting my fire, but I’m also feeling run-down lately, so I’m being lazy. Sue me.

Anyway, I ended up wearing a baby costume, complete with bonnet & bottle (sold separately) that I bought 4 years ago and haven’t worn since. Totally rocked it. Walked in & people just bust up laughing and telling me I’ve got guts, gumption, gall, etc. (never noticed that almost all words that are polite ways to say ‘balls’ start with a hard g – coincidence?) So they voted, and I won most creative costume because I have “nerves of steel” according to our VP Sales. (She was actually dressed as Measles (the disease), courtesy of her 7-year-old daughter who pasted little red construction paper polka-dots all over her.) Given all the praise, and me being a small-time ham but a ham nonetheless, I’m going to wear it all day. (Never mind that it’s bordering just on the safe side of showin’ off me twig & berries. But as long as it stays on the safe side, or I hide behind a strategically placed notepad, I’ll be fine.)

What’d I win? A $200 gift certificate to Boulevard here in SF. Boy do I feel guilty – I BOUGHT this costume, and I bought it FOUR YEARS AGO and have never worn it, and now all of a sudden I have a sizable gift to an extremely gourmet experience on the Embarcadero. The only way I could feel more guilty is if I played it like I didn’t win, and then used the GC to take R out for her b-day in November. It’s a thought that crossed my mind, but A) was too excited about winning that I couldn’t not tell her; and B) she reads the hell out of my blog, and I had to tell Wyltie about this.

I guess I can just think of it as compensation for my agita over this. But there were a few other costumes that were more original (or at least more homemade) than mine. Two of our Finance managers showed up as handstands – they put gloves on their feet, strapped shirts to their legs, flipped jeans upside down and stuck their hands in a pair of boots, and looked very real. One lady did a full-on black spiderweb ghosty ensemble that I think went undervalued. One of our directors on my team showed up as Nappy D, which isn’t a big deal for most folks but I didn’t expect it at all coming from this guy – he’s built like Homer Simpson, has the brain of Homer the Greek, and the personality of a cold spoon. For him to go full-on with the wig and the Vote for Pedro t-shirt, outdated jeans and huge glasses… well, I’m glad to see he has some humor. He wins for Most Surprising Effort. And one chick showed up as a Fried Egg. She made the costume herself out of a white bedsheet and some yellow fabric. Now Fried Egg is not a very exciting costume, but the execution and authenticity of it was striking.

Look at me getting all emotional and analytical about Halloween costumes. You know what that is? That’s me exploiting any opportunity to be creative/funny & making it more impactful. Why? Cuz I’ve got the bug. I wanna act or perform.

… crap, but now I have to go have a one-on-one with the boss. I thought he was out sick because he wasn’t in this morning for the contest thing. *sigh* Left Brain vs. Right Brain. It’s DEFLATING even when I’m just writing the blog and I have to get up and actually work. (Slacker mentality aside, I actually NEED to do this, and the only time I seem to have is when I’m at work. Sue me.)

WAIT! Bonus! My admin says he’s busy with the new boss (MyLINH, pronounced Mee-LING, I’ve been told). No meeting. More writing.

So I wanna act/perform/create in some way. I can do what I’m doing to enable that… but eventually I don’t want it to be something I’m enabling. I want it to be the only thing. Financially and professionally it really makes so little sense that it puts a sinking feeling in my stomach when I think about those aspects. But dammit, what if I rock at it? Or what if I rock at it just enough to become a cult favorite like Robert Goulet (may he rest in peace)?

There’s a lot to be said for the ‘good’ things that come of being a professional in the business world. And it should prepare me fairly well for my ultimate goal of being a teacher or a professor, providing lots of real world experience from which to draw anecdotal stories to relate to the students yadda yadda. But what about the healing power of laughter? What about the ability to directly affect lots of people from one stage? And what about the practice of being on an ACTUAL stage before getting on stage in front of tons of students? *sigh* Conflicted much? A much too much.

Happy frikkin’ Halloween. Stay the hell out of the Castro and stay off the Bay Bridge so I can get home tonight (had to drive to work today due to the costume).