and Words
Oo-ooh-ooh, hoo yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Seven a.m., waking up in the morning
Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs
Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal
Seein′ everything, the time is goin’
Tickin′ on and on, everybody’s rushin’
Gotta get down to the bus stop
Gotta catch my bus, I see my friends (My friends)
Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.
On Fridays, I normally work from home; on this day, my routine is subtly different. I indulge in a little more sleep since I don’t need to commute. First, I select a Hawaiian shirt from my closet. We established a fun tradition; we post selfies wearing Hawaiian shirts online each Friday. I subsequently take a selfie with sunglasses, edit the photo to add a tropical background, and post it online.
Second, I try to publish blog posts on Fridays. I aspire to have the blog post finished and ready to publish on Thursday evenings. On some Fridays, I put the finishing touches that day and publish. In rare instances, I don’t publish until Saturday. I maintain the weekly pace of publishing blog posts. That said, I alternate between two blogs; this is one of them.
That describes my morning routine. My first regular meeting is at 10 am; I normally accomplish those two tasks by 10 am. While these two activities are strictly those that feed my soul, I still approach them with my engineering sensibilities and set parameters to accomplish them.
On a sunny Friday afternoon in the mid-1980s, I finished my classes for the day. I return to my dorm room to collect my duffel with clothes for the weekend. I pack my 1966 Mustang and head north on Interstate 95. However, the air conditioner in this classic car, which is two years older than I am, does not work. The car’s interior will melt plastic as it bakes in the hot Florida sun. I immediately roll down the windows to dissipate some of the heat; the window levers are barely cool enough to handle. As the car moves, the circulation cools it down from ‘life-threatening’ to merely ‘uncomfortable’.
I drive against the teeth of the afternoon traffic. The rows of cars line the dense freeway; it spans three lanes at its narrowest and five lanes at its widest. It’s like navigating a slow-moving river of machinery that runs parallel to the Gold Coast. I drive directly to the restaurant in North Lauderdale, where I’ll work the dinner shift. I wear my buttoned shirt for the drive and put on a black vest and bow tie as I start my shift.
On this particular Friday, I also zip home after work to clean up. Next, I shower and get dressed for a Chinky party. Finally, I quietly transition from my Bruce Wayne to my Batman alter ego as I slip into the night. It’s a ritual that repeats itself with alarming regularity as I finish my studies at the University of Miami. This cycle ends melancholically as I graduate, move away, and become a contributing member of society.
Fast forward a few years, and I drive from my office in Redmond to Seattle on a Friday evening. In this particular case, I drive to my girlfriend’s place in Lower Queen Anne Hill. While the drive is considerably shorter than the one up the Gold Coast in Florida from years before, it takes longer. The sheer magnitude of the traffic density is epic and frankly incomprehensible.
While I spend the entire week looking forward to those Friday evenings, the traffic wears even my patience thin. Eventually, I resolve to meet a bit later and save considerable time on the road. However, I’m a night owl, and she’s a morning person. Those late Friday evenings run really long days for her, but that was the compromise. Spending 45 fewer minutes on the road translated to only about 15 minutes of delay in arrival time.
Eventually, she moves to my side of town. Fortunately, the public transportation system makes this transition easier than expected. She hops on the bus and meets me at the local California Pizza Kitchen. Meanwhile, we start our weekends with personalized pizzas and drinks. We eventually pack our leftovers in the familiar white and yellow pizza boxes as we head to her apartment, a short drive away.
Today, I share a home with that girlfriend from years before. On Fridays, we both work from home. Our weekend starts subtly. As dinner approaches, we wander to one of our favorite local restaurants, which is only a few minutes away. We likely spend more time looking for parking in the busy lot than driving from our home to the restaurant.
Upon arriving, we routinely grab seats at the bar island. Flat-screen televisions hang from the ceiling and play sporting events while we soak up cocktails and enjoy our dinners. Lately, Lemon Drops have been our drinks of choice. If we arrive early enough, we’ll order off the Happy Hour menu. We’ve become regulars on Friday nights. We call the attentive staff by their names, and similarly, they call us by ours.
The consistency brings us comfort. Our Fridays run hectic as everyone scrambles to shoehorn just one last task before the weekend strikes. This time the witching hour is a more conventional 5pm instead of the dead of night. We extricate ourselves from the chaos at work, and slide into the weekend with sliders and martinis. It’s a welcome weekly refuge.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
The pervasive question to readers is, while I might’ve picked practically any song to represent Fridays, why would I have selected this particular song? The answer to that is simple. A couple of months ago, I wrote a post that referenced Rush’s ‘Red Sector A’. A friend complained that this Rush song lingered in his head for days. I understand that; I often have songs linger in my head for a while.
However, a sinister idea crossed my mind. Is there another song that would be stickier and possibly even more annoying than this one? ‘Friday’ by Rebecca Black is an incessant earworm. The tune itself sounds like neon-colored cotton candy, and it has similar nutritional value. Not only does it sound that way, but the words have about as much substance.
You may speculate that the video may be somewhat more redeemable. However, it’s not; if anything, it is impossibly more saccharine than the song by itself. May it linger in your mind until the next post.