028 The Matter With Weekends

There is this problem with weekends, there isn't even enough time for someone to call it a holiday. 48 hours. What's the matter with this people? Anyway, other then the common lamentations of seriously overworked people, we are also faced with the dilemma with too long weekends, i.e. school holidays or also known as the time when schools are more than happy to be closed. And the governments complain there are too many holidays. Yikes. But, since this argument is in fact going nowhere at all, let's just change the topic.

Thank God is Friday,..... or Saturday,..... or Sunday. Three days. Let's see where the time goes. Assume work/school finishes at 5 pm. Typical... we all agree. Roughly 48 hours plus what's left of Friday.that would be about 55 hours. 3 nights and ideally 8 times 3 minus 5 or 6 for Mondays. Say 25 hours, leaving 30 hours, including extra catch-up-on-lost-sleep time, not a luxury, I must say, but a need. 30 hours.... let's see. 7 meals to eat, we eat slowly on weekends so about .... 4 hours maybe, this is not counting suppers, which are longer then average meals, include it, maybe 5 hours. 25 hours left. Then there is of course the essentials like self-grooming. Minus, I say, 2 hours. Completing work brought back home - another 5 hours maybe. What about grocery shopping. Barely fun and 3 hours and a lot of $$$ later, we are left with 15 hours. Cleaning the room/house up after a long and dirty week, 3 hours. Doing laundry, effectively 2 hours. Checking e-mails, reading newspapers, paying bills and other "official" weekend stuff... 3 hours. Wathching weekend regular television shows, which easily takes up 4 to 5 hours.

Now for the less important stuff. But wait! How many hours left? Let's see. Oh dear! We are left with only 2-3 hours which is meant for....

-going out with friends
-giving your wife/[girl/boy]friend/partner due attention
-simply lazing around doing nothing
-exercise to keep fit so that you can live through more weekends like this
-looking for/trying to continue a hobby
-finding ways to reduce stress on your own life
-shopping for things other than groceries
-meditating, yoga, or any type of relaxation activities
-have babies (for married couples)
-socialising with other human beings who are also looking for more time
-finding out exactly how much time you have to do all of the above
-noticing that it is nearly impossible to do all of the above

Also, that would actually imply that the neccesities, which I have given due consideration by not listing them in the list above but in the original calculations, have to be rushed through. Sounds intelligent but not neccesarily so. You see, doing those would man that there is more stress and less quality, which in turn makes the correction time longer, and reducing the remaining 2 -3 hours. Viscious cycle, eh? Life is painful.

Also, for a select few, there is also time for blogging and thinking of what to blog, which usually eat into times of sleeping and eating. Some call it multitasking, I just call it being too efficient. Who needs to do all that at the same time anyway? And it's distracting if anyone didn't notice. Besides this overly satirical remark, I believe people do purposely reduce sleeping hours and other essentials just to have more time being happy, which is good but if overdone detrimental. People here are learning to sleep at the wee hours in the morning here and skip breakfast which is rather intellient on hindsight. No breakfast, add an hour or two to the schedule. But, mainly it's because it's the school holidays. So no one really cares about the timing because it's a long weekend, which leads back to the start of the entry. The problem of too long holidays. People might get resourceful and turn the biological clock upside down. Strange but true and effective, albeit a little disturbing.

While we leave the debate of too many holidays alone, the idea of holidays is however good for the mental health of the people in general. We need a little variety in life sometimes, a little late night activities won't kill anyone, in fact, it's good to destress and unwind after painfully routine weekdays and even, unfortunately, weekends. I'll close for now, because it's getting rather late and this particular entry is rather long already. So bye, and have a good and hopefully interesting weekend.