One Monday
You
won’t see Monday bright and early. This
is because Monday has hit the snooze bar more than three times and currently
has his head buried beneath the pillow to block out any morning light. You may, however, hear muffled groans emerge
through the feathers of his pillow.
Monday refuses to sleep on anything but down pillows – expensive doesn’t
even begin to cover the cost of the swanky pillows he purchases every year from
Macy’s. Would you spend $249.99 on a pillow?
Neither would most normal people.
But Monday has high standards for his nightly round of sleep.
Anyhow,
Monday eventually flops from beneath his equally fluffy down comforter (remember, he pays a high price
for his comfort, but to Monday it’s all worth it) and straggles downstairs for
several mugs of coffee and a Pop Tart straight out of the box. Then he pulls his briefcase from behind the
couch and struggles out the door, mumbling and grumbling all the way.
Once at
work, Monday checks his email (a clear stalling tactic for the real work that
awaits him), arranges his pencils in the jar on his desk, grabs another mug of
coffee in his favorite Tasmanian Devil mug that has (oh the irony) “I Hate
Mondays” scrawled around the rim.
Finally, Monday pulls out the agenda for the day and starts at the top
item, grumbling a little to his neighbor in the next cubicle, and starts
slogging through the day. At lunchtime,
Monday has brought a can of soup, but it’s not the pop-top can and the one can
opener in the staff lounge is broken, so he drops the can into his filing
cabinet and eats leftover Wheat Thins from the most recent staff birthday
lunch, which was last Friday. They’re a
bit stale, but at least they cure the rumbling in Monday’s tummy.
After
lunch he resumes plowing through the items on his agenda, which is now a third
of the way completed, except that already Monday has been forced to add four
new agenda items to the bottom of the list, which feels a little bit like the
Springsteen song about going “one step up and two steps back,” which is funny
because that’s what song is playing quietly in the background on Monday’s
Pandora station on his computer (He originally started out by creating the “Taylor
Swift” station, but due to the songs Monday had shown approval of by clicking
the “thumb’s up” icon or disapproved of by clicking the “thumb’s down” icon,
the station now mostly plays maudlin Coldplay songs intermingled with Anne
Murray tunes from the 70’s). Anyhow, with music playing in the background, Monday takes
a break from his calculations and spreadsheets to check out the headlines on
MSN.com and quickly realizes that is a stupid thing to do. One headline shouts that the health care deal
is being stalled again in House, the next indicates that the first U.S. woman
has found herself on death row, and another reported that Egypt is on the verge
of total collapse. He quickly searches
“Sea World San Diego Penguin Cam,” where he spends five minutes watching
adorable, happy, stress-free penguins being fed fish by their yellow
pants-wearing penguin “keepers.” Monday
daydreams about the day he’ll leave this 9-to-5 Hades and become a penguin
keeper for Sea World San Diego, sporting jaunty yellow pants and a bucket of
fish, but is jolted back to reality when the phone on his desk rings. It’s his wife, Sunday, and she has asked him
to stop by the grocery store on his way home from work to pick up a gallon of
milk and three boxes of cat litter.
(Monday has four pet cats and, let me tell you, they go through a lot of
cat litter). So, Monday continues in
this fashion until the time clock clicks to 5:00, and then he punches his
timecard, puts on his gray flannel fedora, stuffs all loose papers into his
briefcase, and heads out the office building’s automatic sliding doors.
Once he
makes it home following his visit to the grocery store where he purchased a
gallon of milk, three boxes of Arm & Hammer cat litter (fresh scent), and
an inexpensive but large bottle of merlot, he chucks his briefcase behind the
couch, grabs the remote, and tunes the
DVR to pre-recorded segments of Judge Judy.
The best part of the day is when his loving wife, who has cooked his
favorite tuna casserole for dinner, curls up on the couch with him, and they
laugh together as Judge Judy doles out judgments to people who have done stupid
things. These people include a couple
who, after dating for approximately eight days, decided to buy a car together
and broke up three days later; a roommate who flooded the dishwasher and ruined
the floors but won’t pay for the repairs; and a boy who threw rocks at the
neighbor’s car and is now denying it.
But the beauty of this evening ritual is that Monday and Sunday get to
watch Judge Judy see through all the lies and distortions, get to the heart of
the matter, and give the guilty parties a tongue-lashing coupled with a command
to pay their debts to society. Such a
satisfying end to a rather unsatisfying day.
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