Sundays
Time flies?
I know how cliche this sounds, but the weeks are really going by too fast. Time diminishes with every action I take... sometimes I had the power to make every moment last longer... like Jack Bauer.
It's a Sunday. It's interesting what Sundays represent, and how it feels to be in my shoes and to wake up on a Sunday. It's not always interesting to be in my shoes. On Saturday, for instance, I wake up after a grueling WSN at around 10a.m. to the sounds of yelling, running, cooking. A dread fills me: the knowledge that I must set up a new program for Life Care, which has probably long gotten sick of my playing the same stuff over and over. The expectation of wasting a morning, of eating lunch too early, of using the computer and feeling either bored or aggravated at the yelling for me to get off. Today is not a Saturday. Today is Sunday.
Years ago, Sunday had negative connotations. It represented a torturous way to end the weekend, similar to Saturday, which is detailed above. Fortunately, Saturdays of this day and age are much disgusting than Sundays of auld. Starting in first grade, Sundays meant Chinese school. Ask any Chinese kid what Chinese school experience is like, and "traumatizing" will always be the response. It's amazing how some situations bring out the worst in certain people. Chinese school brings out the worst in Asian kids. At least, that's what I hope. Because it would suck if those people were such idiots in reality.
My typical Sunday in the nineties went like this: Get up, get dressed, get cleaned. Eat breakfast. Do Chinese homework. Play piano. Eat lunch. Go to Chinese school. Come home. Eat dinner. Watch TV. Shower and go to sleep.
When I look at it in bullets, I think, "That's really not so much!" And the problem is, it isn't. The above ten or so items had to last me at least twelve hours. And Chinese school consumed a massive portion of it... one thirty to around five thirty. To give you an idea of how pathetic I was: I would hide outside to avoid getting in the car to go to Chinese school. I would stall by locking myself in my room to waste time, hoping that we'd get so behind schedule that it wouldn't be worth the time to go to Chinese school (this was always the case). I would wake up late to luncheon as late as possible, such that perhaps my parents would forget about Chinese school. In other words, my Sunday used to be all about wasting time. If I were successful, what would I do? Usually stay at home and do absolutely nothing. But I still preferred it to going to Chinese school, which was run by Taiwanese hardliners and was occupied by the least savory of my race. The high school facility which housed the institution was also disgusting.
Thank God it's not the nineties anymore. It's been three, four... maybe five years since I've been rid of it. After an active anti-Chinese school campaign and becoming almost old enough to graduate from Chinese school, my mom finally offered me a choice. I can't remember what the other option was, but I picked it. Best move ever.
Well, it's 2006. That's a pretty damn impressive number, when you think about it! We've made it this far without getting shot. And now Sundays are a different situation.
My Sundays' main attraction now is actual still an all-afternoon chore, but my attitude toward it is very different from my attitude regarding Chinese school. I wake up on Sunday mornings with very similar thoughts as I did before, to be honest: How can I waste the most time before I go to the hospital? Fortunately, up till now, volunteering hasn't sufficiently repulsed me so as to resent going there horribly. I face Sundays resignedly, knowing that it is the end of the weekend.
The weekend brings with it an interesting psychology for me. I won't lie: I like school. I like human interaction, and trust me, I don't get it on weekends. It is therefore almost solely in school that I see my friends, talk, release my pent-up energy (ha, just kidding). Thus, I haven't truly disliked a Monday for several years.
But weekends have grown massively in my favor over the last five or six months. I formerly disliked weekends because not only did they mean separation from my friends, they also meant spending more time with The Asians. And let me get this straight: They may be my parents, but there is no way in hell that this obliges me to like them. My parents are singularly disagreeable, and they repulse me with their words and presence. Weekends once carried little enjoyment for me, because their only apparent purpose was sleep and torture via Chinese school.
This year, weekends are different. For some reason - God knows why, blame it on the miracle known as "junior year" - school days have become incredibly stressful. The Asians have gotten more bitchy to make sure that staying at home doesn't become more favorable in comparison, of course, but the point remains that while I may not be getting less relaxation at home technically, it feels like I need more. Enter the weekend, when I can wake up as late as I want. Today, for the first Sunday in many fortnights, I got up before 10. And that's only because there's no real stress or work this week due to school not pressing this week. Typically, weekends are now a chance to uncoil, to hide from the Asians, and to play Spades amongst much unsolicited bitching.
Sunday, thus, is the unique end to the weekend. I try my best to maximize my sleep on Sunday, so my feeling about waking up on Sundays is a strong feeling of regret that I didn't sleep longer and of foreboding that I can't sleep late. When I get up for the two hours before I leave home for the hospital on Sunday mornings, I flourish in my remaining weekend hours. A sense of yearning to return to school and a desire to make the weekend last longer tear at me, and usually I compromise by either whining on the internet or reading. Sundays also carry with them a very positive connotation: No Chinese school. Every Sunday morning, I wake up with vestiges of the feeling I had when there were snow days on Chinese school days; a pathetic, childish instinct brings joy to me when I realize that no longer does this disgusting place bind me as it does my sister.
Like any good American, I never do my homework on Fridays or Saturdays. This makes Sunday traditionally the day of homework. Emerson hospital volunteering lends itself well to this task; it provides a typically non-distracting environment in which I can smack my calculator and my Finney or shake my head at the antics of Macduff and Banquo. This certainly helps to prevent hospital trips from feeling like Chinese school. The fact that rude, ugly Asians don't surround me also helps. A slow flow of time accompanies these trips, always enough to get bored, but never enough to make me wish that I am in Chinese school. In this way I am grateful to my parents for making me go to Chinese school: They remind me, on every Sunday, that I have survived worse than whatever is currently happening.
As I reread what I have written (yes, a lot of this was written before being transferred to cyber), I notice redundancies in my statements. Apparently, if you have read this tedium, I have beaten into your heads my rather shallow opinion more thoroughly than Jack Johnson beat black superiority into Tommy Burns way back when. I originally intended to have a lot more content and a lot less empty repeition, but obviously that failed. I have become pompous and disrespectful to the reader's feelings; my ramblings are long, and it becomes clear that I'm only typing to hear my writer's voice and to fill the white space. I apologize for mincing words... I only wanted to entertain myself and to give you something to read on your Sunday.
So I'll just leave you with this final note on my observations while delivering stuff: Running upstairs for six floors repeatedly is tiring, and it makes me think about human mortality and the basic meaning of life. It reminds me of how out of shape I am as I pant and my legs ache when I hand over the documents, and I have moments of self-intimacy and profoundness, which leak out of my head through my ears before they can flow out through my hands to my pen or keyboard.
When running downstairs, I cannot help but think of 24. In season one there's this one amazing scene where Jack Bauer runs down around ten floors of stairs to beat an elevator.
Jack Bauer is fucking God.
SD
Feb. 19, '06
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