For many moons now, probably since Covid, I find it necessary to make a very deliberate and conscious effort to be certain I know what day of the week it is. Days matter. Days get names, even. Months and years and epochs get names but not the weeks. Weeks are nameless interstitials, maybe because it’s not universally agreed which day starts or ends a week. I don’t see why it should default to the traditional Monday-Friday work week, which applies to me not in the slightest. Still, I stick to the Mondayness of things by saying, regarding my workweek, Friday is my Monday and Monday is my Friday. I work Friday to Monday now, 4 days a week, longer hours each day. I continue to lose money every single day I show up at this job but it will work itself out somehow. I’m a capable person, talented as hell but that doesn’t matter. Talent is overrated. Creative thinking is vastly overrated, and in most cases it is an intrusive pain in the ass.
I am writing this from my comfortable Mission Recliner Chair, which I choose to capitalize for no fluent reason. I woke up remembering Thrillsville. I think there’s a video game by that name but I was remembering a grade school experiment where the class formed a city or a town and elected a mayor and developed a unit of currency. I think it was a project called “Mini Society” and other schools did it, too. In our iteration the unit of currency was “thrills” and someone designed a flag and beyond that all I remember is that things got really nasty, really ugly, with certain of the kids screaming at each other so hard their veins in their necks bulged like they were lifting heavy weights.
The teacher or moderator of this Thrillsville experiment was Mrs. Lennon. I don’t remember her first name at this time and this chair is too comfy for me to get up and find the appropriate school yearbook that is not more than 10 feet away from this spot. Mrs. Lennon is the only teacher in all my years of academia who simply did not like me. She had a particular disdain for me brining to school a little toy that I believe was called a troll before its name changed to Smurf. My mother bought a few of these in Belgium before I was born and before they became hugely popular. Mrs. Lennon stopped short of taking the thing away from me but she made no secret of her dislike of that utterly innocuous inanimate object. At seemingly random times she would single me out for shame, lecturing me on my character flaws and shortcomings while the rest of the class looked on.
But Thrillsville, well, I kind of wish I remembered more about that experiment but some things just do not magically appear on the internet just because they once existed. I just remember our little society going all the way to Shitsville.