By Matt Kyle | Staff Writer
Monday. Judgment day. The day of days. Everyone despises the first day of the week, the day that rips our relaxing weekend away and brings us back to reality with a cold, hard and unforgiving slap.
Yeah, Monday sucks. Everyone knows this, and just about everyone agrees. But what I feel everyone is overlooking is just how bad Sunday is.
So, let’s talk about Sunday. As a college student, my weeks are stressful, so all I want to do from 5 p.m. on Friday to midnight on Sunday is relax. I want to do stuff that I couldn’t do during the week, like sleep in, play video games and hang out with my friends. At the same time, though, my weeks are stressful, and so every weekend I tell myself I’ll get some work done to get ahead for the week.
This creates a paradox. On the one hand, I feel I deserve to relax for all my hard work done during the week, but on the other hand, I want to reduce the amount of work for the next week so that I can get some downtime during the week.
Relaxing on Friday and Saturday is easy enough; I’ve got another day to get my work done. But come Sunday, I get caught in the paradox. I sleep in because it’s the weekend, but then I feel guilty for sleeping in too late, as I’ve just wasted crucial time that I could have used for homework. I get up, make coffee and breakfast and try to start my day off nice and slow, but then I end up spending too much time again and feeling guilty once more. Before I know it, it’s 5 p.m., the sun is about to set, I still have a bunch of work to do before Monday and the dread for the upcoming week kicks in.
Sundays are almost like limbo — or purgatory. I get stuck in this trance where I feel like I should be working but can’t because I want to relax, and I can’t relax because I feel like I should be working. I’m unproductive, and almost nothing gets done. I can’t relax, and thus my stressful week begins.
As a student, Sundays are the worst. I can deal with Mondays; yes, they suck, but I’m over them by now. I can deal with having to go back to work. But what I hate is what Sunday does to me. It pains my soul. It breaks my mind. They’re really, truly, honestly awful.
Maybe Sunday will be better when I’m done with school and don’t have homework to do anymore. Maybe not. But for now, all I know is this: Sundays are way worse than Mondays. I’ll take work over existential dread any day.
