Whitman news since 1896

Whitman Wire

Vol. CLIV, Issue 6
Whitman news since 1896

Whitman Wire

Whitman news since 1896

Whitman Wire

Getting a case of the Sundays

by Valerie Lopez

I always used to dread the advent of a Sunday, probably even more so than the nightmare of a Monday.

After an immensely onerous week, there’s nothing more therapeutic than looking forward to a weekend of a. explosive debauchery, b. 100 years of slumber-itude, C-movie marathons and defghijklmnopqrstuv’s of anything non-school related. Friday and Saturday nights are when you get to recuperate, by whatever means possible, from how the school week has screwed you up.

And then Sunday comes, and you have to return to reality. Panic and regret set in when you realize you haven’t done anything productive after a night of [insert personal activity] and suddenly you have to face an insurmountable load of work. And it’s not only the burden of homework that makes a Sunday, as Billie Holiday calls it, “gloomy.” It’s no fun when you wake up with a terrible hangover from a night of explosive debauchery. Nor is it any fun when you are forced to confront the awkward consequences of the decisions you’ve made the night before. Example: Wonder why that strange-looking fellow in the dining hall looks at you as if he’s seen you naked? He probably has. Perhaps streaking across Ankeny while screeching “Total Eclipse of the Heart” wasn’t the best decision after all. Such a scenario is just one of the many awkward consequences from impulsive, though not necessarily drunken decisions (after all, an admirable 38 percent of Whitties have zero drinks on a typical Friday or Saturday night).

Now that I’ve enumerated several reasons why Sunday isn’t so lovely, let me say why it is. Allow me to preface this by saying that the opinions expressed here are strictly mine and that if you have comments and suggestions, please submit them directly to the Opinion editor before contacting anyone else.

Although I’m going to sound like a corny advertisement for Folgers, there’s definitely a certain charm in waking up early on a Sunday morning and having a decent cup of coffee while reflecting on the events of the week. For one, you can definitely recount the ridiculous events of the night before and laugh about what you or other people did. Example event 1: bad bad bad pickup lines guys have said, such as “wanna get out of here and read my poems?” and “it’s just your sweat and mine, fits like a glove.” Example event 2: hmm, those banana leaves…enough said.

On a more serious note, Sunday is a weekly chance you get to fix your life again. No matter how hard the week weathers you, Sunday is when you know you’re going to be okay because you’ve just survived hell. Sunday to me is like what DNA ligase is to Okazaki fragments: It can piece you back together when you’ve become emotionally fragmented from stupid life drama. You get to drink your coffee and read the Sunday New York Times or PerezHilton.com…or both. It’s when you have to do you laundry and you clean up your place, or any other physical manifestations of fixing your life.

There’s a sense of comfort in slipping back into habitude. Plus, you get to recharge for a day before diving into the stressful cycle of the week. It’s no coincidence that God rested on the seventh day. He decided to bum around and read the New York Times (how else did he discover Adam’s apple adventures?). Sunday is when you can be lazy for a while until you are compelled by the necessity to do work.

I really don’t mean to glorify Sunday into a pedestal at all. If that’s how I came across, I apologize. I’m just trying to point out that Sundays aren’t as bad as most of us make it out to be. Because, even after suffering a week of papers, tests, bad breakups, horrid experiences, failures in general, great disappointments and such, I know I’m just going to be fine. It’s a Sunday, and I’m alive.

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