Working For The Nonexistent Weekend

"Wait- WHAT?"

There were many days when I would return home from high school, listlessly toss my 7000 pound backpack onto the floor, and go straight for the kitchen pantry, more specifically, the peanut butter. Peanut butter is right up there with Diet Coke on the list of Truman’s Incredibly Lame Vices, and during high school a long cherished ritual for me was to spread gallons of Jif on a few measly crusts of bread and try to drown the day’s sorrows in enough peanut butter to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool. Let’s just say I got really good at giving myself the Heimlich maneuver. However, there were some days in high school, particularly my senior year, where I’d dive right into the peanut butter without even bothering with the silly formality of bread. Those were generally the bad, soul sucking, life hating days of my educational experience. Those were the days, sitting on the floor of the kitchen, covered in peanut butter and ransacking the fridge for Diet Coke, that I would say, “I’ve had it with learning! I’m going to drop out and go work 12 hours a day in a cannery, and I’m going to like it, and every student, teacher, and administrator at Charles A. Sprague High School can just go fuck a buffalo!”

Please note the sickeningly optimistic speech I gave at commencement.

In high school they were quick to remind us that the only way to avoid a life of nonstop drudgery and toil was by putting up with the drudgery and toil of high school and the subsequent drudgery and toil of a college education/a career. Only after mind boggling amounts of drudgery and toil would we find a few years of peace in our old age. Those who dropped out of high school, our steadfast teachers reminded us, would spend their entire lives working two part time service industry jobs, and then get eaten by velociraptors on their 50th birthday. However, some mornings I would walk up the hill to that ugly concrete citadel, a full day’s busywork ahead of me, and I’d start to warm up to the notion of getting eaten by velociraptors. It is a scientifically proven fact that no one who has been eaten by a velociraptor ever had to do homework afterwards. This was, and still is, what I find most lucrative about raptorcide.

Of course, I never dropped out, and instead I coasted through high school on a tidal wave of peanut butter, aspartame, and nonstop bitching. I was accepted to a highly selective university*, completed my freshman year without dying, and now, a third of the way through my summer, I find myself working two part time service industry jobs. I get all the drawbacks of being a dropout without any of the enjoyment of not having to complete high school. I am now ever watchful for velociraptors.

*The University of Oregon accepts roughly 90% of its applicants, but I’m sure to the other 10% it seems like a pretty selective school.

I put in 20 hours a week at Carl’s and 12 hours a week at Bella Fresca, and the two days I work at Bella Fresca are consistently the two days I don’t work at Carl’s, so I’ve essentially been going for about two weeks now without a day that I haven’t either made someone a milkshake or poured them a glass of water. I don’t suppose I should be complaining, because both jobs are great and at the absolute most I work six hours out of my day, but there’s something about knowing you have to go to work at 5:30 that makes you view the rest of the day through crap tinted glasses. 1:00 PM isn’t 1:00 PM anymore, it’s EXACTLY FOUR AND A HALF HOURS BEFORE YOU HAVE TO GO TO WORK. And then suddenly I’m second-guessing everything I do.

Xbox 360, really? My Subconscious is asking. Is that really how you want to spend your four and a half hours of freedom?

“Well, maybe it is. I like video games! I should do things I want to do in my free time.”

Look at you! You’re in the prime of your life and you’re sitting there killing virtual hookers. Whatever happened to living each day like it was your last one on Earth?

“Well, that just isn’t feasible, Subconscious! If it were my last day on Earth, I’d go find the guy who cancelled Firefly and beat him to death with his own bad taste, but I’d probably get sent to prison, and what’s worse, I’d have to go to California to find the guy, so I think killing a bunch of virtual hookers is a very realistic goal for my day.”

Why don’t you read instead? Didn’t you say you wanted to read more this summer?

“Well…”

Or how about writing? You’ve got the blog to write tonight, and the ‘ol adventure novel won’t write itself, after all.

“But… But that requires so much effort…”

Fine then! It’s your life. But in case you were wondering, this little debate has taken five minutes, and now you only have EXACTLY FOUR HOURS AND 25 MINUTES BEFORE YOU HAVE TO GO TO WORK, minus the five minutes it’ll take you to walk there, and minus another 10 minutes before that that it’ll take you to get ready for work, and then, well, you were going to practice the trumpet today, weren’t you? So that’s another 45 minutes, and… Wow, do you even have time to play your XBox anymore?

It’s these sorts of things that turn what would otherwise be an ordinary summer day into a pile of dread wrapped in a thin layer of wasted opportunities – this, dear readers, is a burrito that no amount of chipotle can make palatable.

It’s sort of tough for me to distinguish where I am in the week now, because while during the school year I, along with the rest of America, actively counted down until the weekend, now that I work every day I’ve lost my compass and am hopelessly adrift in a sea of milkshakes and ice water. It seems that days off were really the only things holding together my very conception of time as we know it. It’s not so much that I’m burned out, because I have plenty of time to relax before and after I spend a few hours working, but it’s that every day consists of almost exactly the same routine now. The weeks have begun to blend together as each day is now equal parts leisure and work. If this goes on much longer, I may forget what year it is. I may forget where I live. I could well forget my own name – because at Carl’s and Bella Fresca I have no name; I am merely Guy Doing Nonsexual Task For Money. And so long as we’re talking about money, I am proud to report that I am making wicked mad fliff from working 7 days a week; however I have sacrificed the sturdy pillars on which I built my world.

I suppose the value in staying in school is that this sort of thing will end in the fall, and that presumably, in summers to come, I’ll have internships instead of jobs, wherein I’ll work longer hours for no pay.

Wait, no, that’s not quite the moral I was looking for….

I suppose the value in working my not-as-muscular-as-I-wish-they-were buttocks off over the summer is that I don’t take the thought of working these sorts of jobs lightly. Sure, it was easy in high school – three girlfriends ago, 250,000 cans of Diet Coke ago, 3000 quarts of peanut butter ago – to dismiss the value of my education in a fit of hormones and math-related confusion, but now that I’ve actually been working for some time in the sorts of professions that some people are forced to have as careers, it’s all the more motivation to study hard, even if I have to take another economics class. Because even when I’m toiling in school and then in my future career (provided that I ever find one), at least there’ll be weekends. And a future with weekends is a bright one indeed.

Truman Capps means no offense to buffalo, but much offense to certain Sprague High School administrators.