Phoenix Musings

There should be more weekend days

12 March 2007 at 11:20 am (Peeves and Rants)

I mean… am I right, or am I right?

Anyone who’s ever woken up on a Monday knows this sentiment. There should really be one extra day to the bloody frakkin’ weekend.

You’d think 48 hours should be enough for anybody. Maybe during the Industrial Revolution, yes, or even at the tailend of the “innocent” ’80s. But this is the 21st century, where the boundaries of work, home and leisure time gets blurred with the Internet and digital communications. 8-5s are essentially meaningless in a world where your boss can call you anytime and anywhere. And since most yuppies have access to a computer – what with the proliferation of 24-hour computer shops – you don’t have the excuse of “sorry sir, but the office is closed (remember? kasi nga 8-5 lang office hours?)” when your taskmaster asks you to do a writeup or something.

And then, there’s the stress of the hypertime-speeds of the 21st century  workspace. It gives new meaning to the term, Thank God It’s Friday, and the need for the Workman of the Bloody Future for unwinding time on the fifth day of the week has allowed the leisure business to flourish, for places like Greenbelt in Makati, Eastwood in Pasig and Metrowalk in Ortigas to be feasible and earn their owners big bucks.

So then: the modern shaikujin works very hard so he/she parties harder. Most yuppies probably wake at around past lunch every Saturday and Sunday, and since this is the Philippines – and unless you live alone and much away from the ‘rents – Sunday will be strongly recommended by your family to be reserved for them.

This inevitably leads to a life lived in a sort of daze. Everything happens in hypertime; there is so much to do – both the “what needs to be done” and”what you want to be done” – so you go through what you can in the time available. And since the human body, even young human bodies, require rest somehow, you can only move so far, so fast, so much before the inevitable crash happens and you flop down on your bed to wake up more than 8 hours later.

There should be one extra weekend day. Party till you drop on the night before the weekend, and on first day’s night. Go to Mass on the second (since that’s a Sunday), go out with the family. But you still have that extra 24 hours to do stuff that might really matter to you. Like go sit in some quiet cafe somewhere and read a book. Or go to an art gallery or museum. Or take a walk in the park with your special someone, be it the one on two legs or the variant with four.

An extra day. To do anything that isn’t compensation for the harried work week or the demands of blood relations and religion. To do something for one’s self and remember, even for a single day, your place and direction in the whole scheme of things. To remember yourself, actually.

When the world industrialized sometime during the 19th century, the reaction of the workmen of that time was three eights: 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours play. I can’t remember when the weekend thingy started, but the conditions of the time were sufficient for those demands. The same innovations that make the 21st century what it is has also created a situation where its workers are fast losing themselves. 8-8-8 doesn’t mean a thing to a world of cellular phones and telecommuting.

So join the Monday as a Weekend Movement, and stop the hate.