Darn, it's the weekend again....

So it's Saturday, around noon, and I'm at work. I work for a college, and several times a year they have "college days" - a giant open house for prospective students. They feed them, give them tours, and have presentations on some of the specifics that students may be interested in - study abroad, honors programs, specific majors. College is like any other business, and these are our potential customers, so we try to make a good impression on them, and that means having someone onsite in case something breaks. I've done this a couple times, and most of the time I either get no calls, or maybe one call, which usually turns out to be something simple, like pushing a button. But it's like a lifeguard - sure, most of the time they will just sit in their chair, but if someone's drowning you want them there. (Unless they are the beach on BayWatch, where all kinds of shit seemed to go down on a regular basis, requiring lots of long slow running sequences).

I'm glad I'm working. Glad because I'm making 7 hours of overtime, and 7 hours of time-and-a-half pay is a good thing - I've got a new door to pay for, plus Christmas is coming. But I'm also kind of glad that it gives me something to do on a Saturday.

Most people look forward to the weekend. I do sometimes, if I actually have something going on (which can be as trivial as some yard sales or a hamfest). But when I don't, I really don't look forward to them, because it mostly means I'll spend the day sitting around my house watching TV and eating frozen pizza. Which serves to remind me of what a lonely loser I am. Not to mention the fact that being home reminds me that my house is probably dropping in value by the minute.

That isn't to say there aren't a whole lot of things I could be doing on the weekend - I've got a basement full of crap that needs to be sorted, organized, disposed of, donated. I've got a yard full of leaves that need to be sucked or blown. I've got a box of stuff that should probably get listed on eBay, a smoke detector that fell off the ceiling, and a pickup truck badly in need of a wash. But most of these are things that can wait, and I usually spend at least part of my weekend doing the errands that can't wait - grocery shopping, running errands, doing laundry, cooking, running the dishwasher - so it's hard to motivate myself to do the things whose immediate consequence of being put off is not apparent. If I don't do laundry, I have no clothes to wear. If I don't go grocery shopping, I have no food to eat. If I don't clean the basement, well, I only go down there once or twice a week anyway.

There used to be a group of us at work that had a Friday night tradition of going to a local bar and grabbing dinner, talking, and occasionally watching Jeopardy. The last few months, it's been hard to get everyone together, and I kind of miss it. I looked forward to it every week, and not just for the greasy food and stylish wood paneling. If it was just that, I'd go myself and be the loser sitting alone at the bar. But I also enjoyed the conversation, even when it didn't involve donkey porn. It was nice to talk to people in a non-work context, to gossip about work and about life. It was also nice to feel like I had some sort of social life, some reason to be around other people having fun. Sometimes I feel like there are all these parts of the world that I'm just apart from - like everyone else has their group of friends and their interesting lives and their fun activities, and I just can't find a place for myself in it, yet.

Oh, well. At least the workweek is coming.