Mundane
In the last week of 2004, I bought a planner. A weekly thing, taller than it was wide, like a Zagat guide. I’d always wanted to have to use one, but I just never had enough stuff to do. Or rather, I didn’t have enough stuff to have to plan very much into the future. And I liked it that way.
But I couldn’t live that way forever. People get married, we get tickets for shows, there are graduations and comprehensive exams and part-time jobs.
So I needed a planner.
First thing I noticed when I looked inside was the fact that for any given “week,” that is, the left and right side pages of the open book, the topmost leftmost day is “Monday.” Monday through Friday all the days get the same amount of space, but Monday’s the first. Start of the business week, not of the real week.
I’d seen some planners years ago – I refused to acknowledge them for that time – that had the Monday-Friday setup, but the entire weekend, Saturday and Sunday, was squeezed into the space comparable to that of a single workday. No doubt, these planners were fabricated by clever administrative types who subliminally want people to realize that their two whole free days per week are worth LESS time than they actually take up, and are really just placeholders until you start working again.
I used to use a monthly calendar at school, to keep an eye out for weekly and long-term papers and assignments. It was an ordinary Sunday-Saturday setup. Something about it felt right; there was symmetry in it. The work week was bookended. The action rose and fell, “Hump Day” was created by default, and everything made sense.
But that model seems a little too balanced for me now. I need the Monday model, to make the meaning of the week different, to frontload it, to give it some momentum. Overall, symmetry is worthwhile, in architecture for example, because it leads to balance. But balance is a different shade of stagnation. For change, progress, movement, you need imbalance. Asymmetry. Yin and yang – not always.
How you see things affects (if not determines) their nature and quality.
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