Robert Manners

Sybaritic Satsun

I remember, long ago but not too long ago, when I was working in food service... I almost always worked on Saturdays and Sundays, and my "weekend" was usually Monday and Tuesday, or Tuesday and Wednesday, or else I didn't get two days in a row at all. I therefore had to come up with a word with which to reference Saturday and Sunday collectively, those two days that the rest of the world, the office-workers and school-folk, call a "weekend." And so, phonetic wordsmith that I am, I came up with the phrase "Satsun," which sounds like a certain brand of stereo components.



And so here I am blogging just after midnight, halfway between a Saturday and Sunday that have little resemblance to those days of sybaritic rest and recreation that the word "weekend" promises. And that made me think of the old hard-working "weekends" when I was in the service industry, making sandwiches and lattes for people who worked 9-5/M-F... like I now do (oh, OK... I actually work 11-5, or 12-6, depending on when I get into the office).



Now that I am part of the Monday-through-Friday World (or "Mitwitef," as I sometimes call it... sounding out abbreviations to coin a new word is a terrible habit, and hard to break), I feel that I have earned the right to sleep in on Saturdays and Sundays, to do as I wish and to Hell with what other people want. This is of course a fantasy. In real life, tasks get saved up for the weekend, things that you didn't get to do while you were at work or which you couldn't do because you were at work, etc.



So this morning saw me awake, Saturdayness notwithstanding, sipping coffee and pulling my wits together at FIVE AM! My Aunt T got some great tickets to Tuscon, where her son Michael now lives — and since the fares were so cheap, she went ahead and bought two tickets, one for herself and one for the Grandmother (who, I'm sure you've figured out, is also Aunt T's mother). The departure flight left San Jose airport at 7:30 am, so rather than have T spend all the money on parking and time on dropping Grandmother off and going to a parking space and coming back to the terminal on a shuttle, I volunteered to bring Grandmother down to San Jose, spend the night, and drive them both to the airport. Aside from a brief half-nap earlier today, I've been awake since 5 am. And yet I don't feel remotely sleepy.



Tomorrow (or rather, later today) I have to get up early yet again, though not quite so disgustingly early. Caroline's birthday is coming up, and like most loveable egomaniacs, she makes a big deal of her birthdays. So she and I and her other friend Vince are driving down to Monterey to eat lunch, visit the Aquarium (where none of us have been before) and then have a nice dinner. In order to get to Monterey by lunchtime and have enough time to see the Aquarium before it closes for the day, I have to be ready to leave by 10 o'clock... meaning that I have to get up at around 8 so I can shower and shave and put myself together. And then I won't get home until after 12, I imagine, so Sunday is pretty much spent. And I really need to do some laundry... I can't afford to keep buying new clothes so I can have something clean to wear.



Have I ever mentioned how much I abhor repetitive tasks? I have this project that I have to get through, one that resembles other projects that I have to do about three or four times a year in my job... that pernicious and creeping horror of a repetitive task, Stuffing Envelopes. I have been putting this particular envelope-stuffing (about 500 twelve-page documents with 500 cover-letters stuffed into 500 9x12 brown envelopes) off for the last three days. I brought it home with me, even, so that I could do it while watching television and/or playing with my Sims... I even turned down two interesting invitations and flaked on a literary salon so that I would have the time to do this task today. Yet, while I have been watching television and playing with my Sims, the documents and their stamped manila sheathes remain in the trunk of my car, unwed and unstuffed and unsealed.



Nevertheless, television has been a very rewarding false-idol today. Every time I flipped past MTV, there was a hot nearly-nekkid boy on. Actually, there were lots and lots of really toothsome physiques on many different channels. There was some old movie on SciFi with Michael T. Weiss in his early twenties, sporting a feathered mullet and a tight trapezoid of tremulous torso (I think it was The Howling IV, there was some dim talk about lyncanthropes in the background... but who listens, when one's eyes are so busy with all that chest-hair?); then there was the boat/obstacle-race on Survivor 5 in which this built blond hottie was in and out of the water a great deal, with his wet white shorts hanging halfway down his hips (I didn't watch the whole episode, in fact I avoid Survivor on principle, and didn't quite understand the obstacles, but there are quite a lot of hunks on this season!); and then there was a lot of shirtlessness on the Season-12 premier of Real World (set this time in Las Vegas, of all bizarre places), where all three of the guys are built like brick shithouses... though Frank has by far the hottest bod in my opinion, and he spent less than 50% of the show with a shirt on; and then there was a certain baby-hunk in the Road Rules cast, on the same channel, who spent a fascinating few minutes onscreen in and out of the pool wearing nothing but water-sheered white boxer-briefs, all his juicy goodness bouncing about in plain view... and both shows aired twice today, so I got to see the hot bodies and wet panties twice, much to the edification and satisfaction of my filthy little voyeuristic mind.



So here I sit, all alone with my naked boys on TV and my beautifully housed Sims, no sleep last night and no sleep in the forecast, up to my eyeballs in dirty clothes and unstuffed envelopes, and I have really rather enjoyed myself today. And though I will be up all tomorrow night stuffing those damned envelopes after I get home from Monterey, and will be wearing dry-clean-onlies and second-string fashions (the closet bench-warmers, things that don't quite fit or which aren't quite in season yet) tomorrow and in the near future, I guess it's all been entirely worthwhile.



It's nice to enjoy being alone.