Friday, August 6, 2010

"TGIF, my friend"

The quote in the title of this post comes from the parting words spoken to me today by my seatmate on the Metro this morning. It is still stuck in my craw, fourteen hours later, because ... how odd. Not odd that someone on the Metro would say something vaguely convivial to a stranger (although that certainly is anomalously rare) but really just an odd variation on the standard "have a good one", no?

I kind of get some of the underlying logic, I think, in that my seatmate was getting off the train and wanted to say something to me to the effect of "have a nice weekend" but clearly he couldn't say that under the circumstances because it was Friday morning, obviously we were both headed in to our respective jobs for one more day and the weekend had not yet properly begun; "have a nice weekend" is what you say when you leave at the end of the day on Friday. (Indeed, I said as much to my officemates when I left this afternoon.) So, ok, my fellow Metro rider backed it up a bit and referenced it being Friday, but ... TGIF? Thank God it's Friday? That's not really interchangeable with "have a good one." It's interchangeable with answers to the question "how's it going?" which is not the same thing, except that they all fall under the heading of "banal niceties" I suppose.

Well, it was a strange day anyway, since for the first time in a long time I wasn't making up missed time at the end of the week and I could leave a couple hours early, which I did. Then I spent a couple hours at home just tending to little personal projects before picking up the little guy from daycare, about an hour or so ahead of the usual schedule. A few minutes ago I was looking for a book I had set aside earlier and found it on the couch, with a box of spaghetti on top of it, which the little guy had taken out of the pantry and moved to the living room, because of course why wouldn't he? And then I realized I hadn't blogged yet today. So here I am just under the wire. More weirdness tomorrow!

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