What are weekends for, anyway?

Some people describe themselves as saying that they live for the weekend. This usually suggests that weekends should be nonstop fun, a veritable orgy of enjoyment spanning from 5pm Friday to 8:30 Monday morning.

madanthony's life, sadly, is devoid of orgies of any sort. But while it's nice to think of weekends as existing for personal pleasure, as a chance to relax from the stresses of work, weekends for me tend to be the time that I get things done at home.

In some ways, I'm not used to having weekends. Soon after I started my job, I got offered the opportunity to work overtime on Saturdays, basically babysitting the technology at one of our satellite campuses. This lasted for about 2 years, and was quite lucrative. At the time, I was also taking night grad classes, which meant much of my weekend was spent doing homework.

I don't work every Saturday anymore, but it's not unusual for me to work the occasional Saturday - this one was spent babysitting, well, the technology for a potential-student open house.

But when I'm not working at my real job on a Saturday morning, I'm often doing other stuff to make some scratch - during warm weather, I'm hitting yard sales, and otherwise I'm often going to auctions or pursuing other possible sources of revenue, like my recent trip to Chambursburg to the Staples Outlet. It also means one of the to-do's on my weekend list is often testing, cleaning, describing, taking pictures, and otherwise readying inventory for eBay or to drag to a Hamfest.

I also try to keep up with my trips to the gym on the weekend.

This leaves me with Sunday as the day to try to catch up on sleep (except for the 8 or so Sundays per year that I have to be up at 5am to go to a Hamfest) - which starts a vicious cycle. I sleep late on Sunday, thus getting me to stay up later, thus making me wake up late on Monday and getting to work late, incurring the wrath of my boss. Stupid Sundays.

Sunday also winds up being the day that I end up setting aside to do chores around the house - vacuuming, cleaning, laundry, ect. I spent part of this afternoon raking leaves. Of course, since I live alone, Sunday often becomes the day that I come to terms with the fact that I'll be putting some of this stuff off until next weekend and living with cat hair on the carpet for another week.

I do spend more time than I should goofing off on weekends - surfing the web, watching TV, ect. I sometimes wish I had cooler hobbies, ones that got me out of the house and surrounded by people (well, people other than at the gym, where everyone is in their own iPod-protected world). But I still usually find myself where I am right now - on Sunday night, looking at my to-do list and my messy house, wondering why I didn't accomplish more and why everything I did accomplish took me twice as long as I expected and came out half as good.

And my life is pretty simple. I'm a single guy living alone, with no responsibilities beyond my insane kitty. And yet I still feel overworked and overwhelmed on the weekend. People with actual stuff to do - spouses, kids, businesses - must find weekends even less fulfilling.