The Culmination Of All My Hard Work (Or Thinking About Hard Work) May Have Finally Paid Off.

So, here’s the deal my friends, I used to lobby for a change to our calendars. In effect, I wanted to turn Monday into Funday, thus doing away with the worst day of the week, Monday. I wrote about it here back in August or September of 2006. Instituting Funday would basically make it a second Sunday, even though that would technically make Tuesday the new Monday and then we’d crappy up what has normally been an inoffensive day for most people, but much like toxic atmospheric destroying gasses in the developing world, we’d just overlook it.

I’ve been reading a lot online and even in Time Magazine (are you impressed, because that’s why I read Time Magazine to be able to say that I read Time Magazine. Time Magazine) about school districts moving to a 4-day school week to save money, like electricity and bussing costs and yes, the lunch lady down in Lunch Lady Land (note to self: prepare sloppy joes for dinner tonight). Some of these school districts are taking Friday off and others are taking Monday off. At first I though to myself: why does radio no longer play Marty Robbins? Wait I think I shared the wrong thought. The thought I meant to share was the one where I thought: why in Barry Manilow’s name would you take Monday off and not Friday when the weekend is still ahead of you and not behind you? Then it hit me, several hours later mind you, but at least it hit me, those Mondayless school districts are in effect observing my Funday!

I was so excited; I got ready to Google all the school districts observing this Funday, but then I started wondering if they had encroached on my idea and how much it might be worth in court. Then I remembered I am as anti-litigation as I am anti-celery and I should just spend all my happy energy about Funday catching on by bragging to you, the reader. I also decided to petition Microsoft to add Funday to MS Word’s spellchecker because it infuriates me every time I type Funday and it gets that red line underneath it like I did something wrong. Augh, it just happened again!

There is one thing I am slightly regretting, lamenting and bumming about in general though. Why couldn’t there have been 4-day school weeks when I was in school? It kinda burns the same way moving around hot, white ashen pieces of charcoal with my bare hands when barbequing does. Or, if you have never gotten to feel that skin scarring pleasure, it kind of stings like strolling through the toy aisle at Target and seeing all the Star Wars and GI Joe action figures that are now made much cooler and with more gadgets. Seriously, I have lost sleep by thinking of all the cool things I could have done with them when I was a wee lad. And don’t even get me started about how much more poseable they are. Realizing that analogy might not resonate too much better, I say it burns like chugging half a can of Diet Dr. Pepper after running. At that point, you might as well que the Tramps from the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack. I should probably explain that – you’d be saying ‘burn baby, burn.’

It would have been nice to only have 4 days of school though, especially in high school when I drove the same ’68 VW Bug that I was brought home from the hospital in. We used to go to the Beach what seemed like almost every other Sunday in my senior year. Yep, we were OC when OC wasn’t cool, or a crappy teenopera. And I haven’t mentioned (even though I’m about to, which really makes me look dumb) that it would have been one less day of school, because I felt it was so obvious that it didn’t need mentioning (even though I just mentioned it).

This may come as a surprise to you (although if you read this blog and this is a surprise, there is a very good chance that your eyes may have stopped sending signals to your brain) that I really wasn’t ‘in’ to school. The closest I got was walking INTO school. Ha! Get it? I was more into the social aspect and the recesses and all the bathroom breaks I took so I could wander around aimlessly until another student was sent to retrieve or ‘fetch’ me. They may call it Attention Deficit Order today, but I just call it my alone time, like a coffee break for a kid. In high school the trend continued, except for the fact that I had to substitute wandering campus (the high school cops carried pepper spray, which was every intimidating) with trying to make highly intellectual jokes about the subject matter like ‘wow, the Civil War wasn’t that civil was it? Unless of course you consider civility to be shooting your next door neighbor and letting him moan to death in a field somewhere,’ or may favorite, ‘what do mermaids wear to hide their chest barnacles? Yep, an algae bra!’

I just wish I had known more about Johnny Cash back then because my American History teacher wore black every single day. Imagine the jokes there. All that fun was balanced out though on the one day where I goofed off a little too much when we had a substitute teacher (ironically in the woman in black’s classroom). It was only for an instant where I made the connection that his last name was the same as my mom’s aunt and therefore all of my cousins. In my defense though, it is a fairly common last name. Sadly, mine is not…and the sub, my cousin who I hadn’t seen in a number of years, noticed my not so fairly common last name. He called his mother, who (and let me reiterate this here) is my mom’s aunt. My mom’s aunt called my mom. What was the aftermath you ask? Well, the first hint is that I referred to it as an ‘aftermath.’ Talk about a Ring of Fire…(see, NOW I can make the Johnny Cash jokes!)

A 4-day school week? Lucy and Ethel would LOVE that. In fact, the idea sits pretty well with me too. Well, not the school part, but the whole having to show up somewhere at the same time every day only 4 days a week. In fact, I put a copy I made of one of the articles about the 4-day school week up where my boss could see it, you know, just in case my boss gets the hint and feels inspired. Did I mention that the article I photocopied was from TIME MAGAZINE? Yep, TIME MAGAZINE.