Weekends
It is hard to go from a four-day weekend to a two-day weekend. It is literally half of the previous weekend.
You get to Sunday, your hands are tired from bouldering and your legs are tired from your new bike (okay, I biked like four miles, so its less of a physical soreness and more of an existential one: your body going, ah, I see how it is, this is a thing we’re doing now), you make a burger (feta, mustard aioli [okay, this is a fancy way to say “mustard and mayo”] , arugala, hot sauce), it is six pm and you finished re-reading The Folded Clock and you are thinking about watching a movie.
You think to yourself: what a good day, and yet there is so much weekend left.
And yet.
Summer in Seattles are perfect, I guess, and it’s tough to come to grips with the understanding that even perfect summer days have ends.
I remember being a kid, and having summer days melt away into the ether as if by magic — and I remember being a teenager, and marveling at how summer days melted away into the ether as if by magic — and now they do the same thing again, which is good. The melting is good, that is, but not the having melted.
Heidi Julavitz wrote in The Folded Clock, as the first of many treatises on days:
Today I wondered what is the worth of a day? Once, a day was long. It was bright and then it wasn’t, meals happened, and school happened, and sports practice, maybe, happened, and two days from this day there would be a test, or an English paper would be due, or there would be a party for which I’d been waiting, it would seem, for years. Days were ages. Love bloomed and died in a day. Rages flared and were forgotten and replaced by new rages, also forgotten.
I think there was a point where the week was the main unit of time (maybe on weekdays, it still is), but the weekend days can sometimes be so powerful and so short that when they are suddenly doubled and cut in half again it feels somehow unfair, as if you are granted a brief and earth-shattering glance into a more frictionless world.
(The irony of this all being that I truly love Mondays, too. Just… not as much.)
Technically speaking
Some miscellany:
- I have been writing lots of tiny posts on my blog, which makes me happy. Removing the friction from publishing to a blog has been wildly conducive to an actual publishing cadence.
- Buttondown is officially launched, which is terrific. Once the dust settles I will write about the launch process, and also the backlog of items has swelled from twenty to around fifty, which is a good sign. Known work is more comforting than unknown work.
- I’m trying to finish up my toy React Native app, which is already perfect in every way.
Three things I really liked this week.
- 17776, a strange and brilliant narrative about immortality and leisure.
- A great collection of Mexican package design.
- The Poetry Foundation got a terrific redesign.