Fridays are celebrated with unfailing consistency. Enter any workplace on a Friday and you will hear workers exuberantly voicing some version of Thank God It’s Friday. Ask a worker how she is doing on a Friday morning and she’ll say “It’s Friday,” knowing that this says it all. Most recently I’ve encountered “Happy Friday!”, as recognition of each Friday as a holiday unto itself deepens among the 9 to 5 set. Friday is the force that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together, to borrow a phrase; the love of Friday crosses all boundaries of race, class, gender, etc. Friday is universal.
But on Monday ask the co-worker who on Friday danced a jig at the water cooler how his weekend went and you will get a resigned “It was too short.” Even if you are regaled with tales of midnight love or Sunday morning spiritual breakthroughs, you will get an “it went by too fast” somewhere in the narrative flow. The would-be perfect weekend is never long enough, and is at best bittersweet. So we find ourselves in an absurdly repeating loop of always feeling unsatisfied by what we are always looking forward to. Every Friday we are Charlie Brown trusting that this time Lucy will really hold the football long enough for us to kick it, and every Monday morning we are Charlie Brown lying flat on our backs wondering how we fell for it again. Of course, by Friday we’ll be lining up for that kick again.
The unfailing beauty of Friday morning is in the way the whole weekend stretches out before us with pregnant fullness. It is this fullness that infuses us with joy throughout the Friday workday. The weekend is close enough to taste as we float through our Friday labors, and we taste it in its unadulterated fullness, for not a precious second of weekend leisure has yet been burned. Just as the 1960’s really occurred in the 70’s, the weekend really occurs after hump day on Thursday and Friday, in the sense that any joy truly contained in the weekend occurs on Thursday and Friday. The weekend’s only pleasure is that of anticipation. Fun may indeed be had on Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday, but this fun is divorced from the disappointment inherent to every weekend, the disappointment expressed by the eternal “It was too short.” The weekend’s true identity is freedom from work. This is why the weekend is celebrated on Thursday and especially Friday, when the weekend is fully intact as a 64 hour interlude between shifts. The moment the actual weekend begins on Friday evening the weekend as respite instantly begins to wane. Actual weekends are essentially an experience of loss, in that the freedom represented by the weekend shrinks palpably moment by moment; as soon it comes into our possession we begin to lose it. This sense of loss peaks on Sunday afternoons, renowned for their glaring melancholy, a sadness perhaps best captured as sung by Morrissey: “Every day is like Sunday, every day is cloudy and gray.”
The enormous and bulletproof popularity of professional football has more than a little to do with the fact that its games are largely played on Sunday afternoons in the fall and winter. Shrinking daylight matches shrinking weekends, casting a pall so grim that in comparison the escapist fantasy world of the National Football League glows with life giving warmth, each bone crushing collision reminding us that life will go on even as the weekend dies at our feet.
The only thing that goes by faster than a weekend is summer break. For students, June, July, and August last about a day and a half. For teachers it is less than an hour and a half. But that last week of school in early June, with an entire summer stretching out before her, is the happiest week in a teacher’s life. Heaven, in fact, is Friday during the last week of school. Hell gets a little closer every second thereafter.
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