I just realized...

...I don’t like weekends much. I mean people crave for weekends. Even I do. Sitting in office till late at night slumming it out over reports that can bring dead people back and kill them all over again out of sheer boredom, all I crave for is glorious weekend when I can get an extra hour of well-deserved shuteye before the bai comes at an ungodly hour and wakes us all up with Didi Rin sabun khatam ho gaya in such an injured voice that you almost feel sorry. For her. Self pity comes later on Sunday night.

But I digress.

Yes so I realized I dislike weekends. You see on a normal office-going weekday I have to wake up at 7, take a shower, make breakfast, eat it, make my bed, iron clothes, deal with bai-garbagewallah issues and I am out by 8.30 sharp. Even though it sounds boring and mundane and I complain about it, I like it. (I complain because you know, complaining is so much fun, sometimes.) This routine, this is almost like a comfortable space. It is predictable, safe, comfortable. The nice kind of predictable, if you know what I mean. 

You know it can’t go wrong. You shower on time, you eat all your meals, you get enough sleep (actually *I* don’t but that’s not the point I’m trying to make here), you are never late for work etc.

But weekends? Bah. Your Saturday morning goes in catching up on those lost sleep time. You wake up at 7 (because of aforementioned bai), get up at 11.30 feeling like a dump because you haven’t showered or eaten any breakfast. Then you are too lazy to shower and fix something you call lunch and your mother shudders at (read: cold, soggy Maggi/cereals) and eat. Your face looks all puffy and you have bags under your eyes. Your hair looks like vegetable. By 2.30 your head starts hurting again and you feel woozy because either you have had too much sleep or not. If you have a non-existent social life you stay at home and try to read/smoke/watch something on your laptop but you can’t because that head-throb has turned pretty bad by now and you feel tired and listless. But you cannot go back to sleep because hey it’s Saturday and it’s a weekend and you are supposed to do things you don’t get to do on normal weekdays-like staying up really late reading/watching something/talking to people and by the time you do manage to crawl to bed (or in my case, slump onto the sofa with the laptop on my tummy almost burning my flesh) your eyes burn like hell.

Sundays are even worse. I mean, it is like Saturday only but somehow it gets worse because probably you have been doing the whole getting-up-late-not-eating-not-showering-nursing-headache thing all over again but it’s been two days in a row and by Sunday evening you get that ‘what am I doing with my life?’ feeling.

And if, you are this social animal/person who really enjoys a healthy number of nightouts every month/person who hates or sucks at socializing but will because someone told him to get a life, you will go out on a Friday night which means you will spend your Saturday morning at a friend’s place feeling that horrible feeling you get when you really just want to get some sleep at your own place but you can’t. Then you drag yourself home and do the whole not-showering-not eating thing again because you feel sick and sleep-deprived. Then god forbid, if you again go out on a Saturday night you wake up with an alcohol induced temporary blindness/blackout/something to that effect on a Sunday morning. And because pretty much everyone around you is in the same or much worse state of inebriation, you don’t get the motivation to get up, shower, eat and sleep like a human being who wants to live to see his/her grandchildren.

See the problem? You get no rest, something you have been pining for the whole week. You don’t get to eat because, well, I just explained why so please scroll up and read. Your whole weekend is a haze where even your existing bank balance on a Sunday evening does not make you jerk into consciousness. And basically pretty much all you think all this while is…well…yes the same old ’what am I doing with my life?’.

I don’t know. Don’t get all judgmental. I have tried reading on weekends but the headache gets so worse and I feel so distracted all the time that all I manage to do is keep reading one line almost thrice before I realize I am doing that thing where I read one line thrice because I am plain distracted. I have tried getting some sleep but even that doesn’t help much. I have lied to people who want me to attend their parties that I have other plans just to stay home but even that doesn’t help. (I am sorry and I love you all even though I really don’t understand why some of you are still friends with me because you clearly see I am lying and I don’t wanna come to your party) Because even at home I feel listless. I make it a point to not check my mail or go online even once during the weekend.  I never ever make any plan unless it involves me and only me going to a bookshop and reading quietly, not taking calls, not replying to text messages or anything. But I don’t even have the energy for that kind of thing these days.

And now with all the religious frenzy the good people of Dadar have worked themselves into for Ganpati (accompanied by loud beating of the dhol and the loud singing of bhajans as if their life depended on it), sleep is a distant never-to-be-fulfilled dream.

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for festive euphoria and shor sharaba during festivals. I mean, hell, I come from a place where during pujo we shut down offices, banks, schools, colleges, maybe even hospitals and police stations going by the spiraling crime rate at that time...so I am no one to judge. But you do get my predicament now, right? RIGHT?

I should stop whining and go beat up whoever gave me that stupid crap about my life being too predictable and the importance of going out there and doing something and feeling upbeat all the time. I want my weekdays. I want my meals on time, regularly taken showers and everything.  I want my routine. I crave for my routine.

Now go. Go start judging right away. I won’t hold that against you.