DOTWW – Part 1

I am a creature of habit. If this blog is ever used as a sort of blueprint for reconstructing my personality within some kind of electronic android brain, I might as well put that facet of my personality right out in the open: I wouldn’t be me without a slavish devotion to pattern maintenance and reverence for tradition. I get how that can be inherently limiting, and as a result I strive to be open to new things, and to allow things to grow and change for the better, and all that, but the deepest parts of me, when left unencumbered by overthinking, are pretty addicted to routines.

This is so true that I catch myself thinking “I’m not sure if I can do that day, because that’s day” way more often than I can possibly feel normal about. Because it’s not always a matter of scheduling conflicts and specific repeating time commitments, of “I couldn’t possibly meet my old co-workers for a beer at 6:30 on a Wednesday, because my wife works late Wednesdays and I need to pick up our son from daycare and get him fed and in bed.” Sometimes the thought of doing something on a certain day feels discordant because the whole day has its own character and quality which is open to certain activities but weirdly inappropriate for others. Maybe this doesn’t make much sense in the introductory abstract, but hopefully it will make a little more sense in the specific. (Or maybe not – there are no guarantees, especially where hyper-examining my so-called mind is concerned.) In any case, I’ve decided to drag this particular mindset into the blog-light, as it were.

I will also fully cop to the fact that posting to the blog every single day sometimes leaves me wondering what I’m going to talk about on any given day when nothing newsworthy has happened, and nothing has caught my attention that I haven’t already talked about before. Thus, instituting “Days Of The Week” Week (DOTWW) at least gives me the satisfaction of knowing that I have a structure in place, a quotidian assignment beyond “write something”.

I was actually still somewhat on the fence as to whether or not to pull the trigger on DOTWW as recently as pre-dawn this morning, as I was getting dressed for work. But my wife, waking up early of her own accord, asked me how I was doing, and I replied that I was fine but a little sleepy (with no small amount of unspoken but strongly implied self-pity) and she commiserated, “Awww, sounds like somebody has a bad case of the Mondays.” So that pretty much settled it.


Monday does pretty much axiomatically equate to Work in my mind. It’s usually my most productive day at the office, as well as Most Likely To Involve Making a Detailed To-Do List, Possibly in Spreadsheet Format. It’s the day I’m likely to dress the closest to “business standard” whether that means an actual suit or just grown-up slacks and pin-striped shirt and conservative tie, as opposed to Dockers and a bright shirt and a cartoon tie that all adds up to say “high school kid at a cousin’s wedding” (those outfits don’t crop up in the work rotation until Wednesday or Thursday). These days it’s also likely to be a long day at the office, since my wife has Mondays off and I don’t need to rush to the daycare pickup, and instead I can put in 9 or 10 hours to burnish my team-player standing as well as make up for any time elsewhere in the pay period when other obligations make me jet early.

Monday is also the most stressful day of the week at work, purely for reasons I put upon myself. Because I am exactly the creature of habit that I purport myself to be, I tend to resemble a grown-up who actually has his shit together the most when I’m doing the same things over and over and over again. The interruption of the weekend always sparks a minor panic on Monday morning, then, along these lines of serious doubt as to my ability to remember all of the following: to bring my SmartCard for the Metro; to not zone out, and get off at the right stop on the Metro; to bring my badge to get in the office building, and my CAC card to log on to the government network; to call to mind my various passwords for sites and systems I need to access to do my job; to bring lunch so I don’t end up rationalizing a cheeseburger at the greasy spoon a cross the street. As the week goes along I know those physical objects are where I put them the night before, and those pieces of information are relatively intact in my memory, but priming the pump on Mondays is a bitch. And I love a good three-day weekend, but losing that whole Monday back-in-the-swing ritual can (and usually does) throw my whole week off.

All of which means I tend not to make extracurricular plans on Mondays because I’ve got just about all I can handle in merely showing up for work on time and recalling which desk I’m supposed to sit at. The notion of anything non-work-related is anathema. (Ask me again on Tuesday, because that is a totally different story.)

Incidentally, Monday night is Bean Burrito Night at dinnertime at our casa, as well. This was never designed by intention, it just grew into a habit over time, which is how these things happen, I suppose.