A friend (new GOO devotee Aaron Weiss) once said he had read about a psychological study that found people don't feel like they've had a weekend if they didn't have free time on Friday night. That was my experience this weekend: At the office till eight, then sitting down with pizza and a DVD only to nod off on the couch by nine thirty. I may have woken up refreshed on Saturday morning, but there was this crushing feeling that the weekend was almost over, that sort of numbing dread you feel every Sunday night an hour before bed. I trudged through the weekend working on various tasks and got plenty done, but it never once felt like a weekend.

And the sad part, besides all of it, is that I took out my frustration on myself. I denied myself fun, forcing myself to work on projects to "make the most of it" as though it was a curse to have free time but not enough of it. When Sunday night came, I kept staying up later and later, refusing to go to bed because I felt "cheated" out of my weekend. I entered enough goos into the site to last through September, but by the time I was done it was time to get up and go to work (I needed a six o'clock start that morning for complicated reasons) so I just got dressed and went. All day long, the office spun on an invisible axis while I waged war with my eyebrows to keep them open, and though I tried to blame myself or promise myself I wouldn't do it again, I couldn't. Why do we take out our frustrations on ourselves and only make things worse?


One Reply to Weakened

Jackie Mason | August 17, 2006
[hidden by author request]


Logical Operator

The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »

Pug Life

A friend recently contacted Kelly and me out of the blue to ask if we could take care of her dog for six days while she was on vacation, since the arranged sitter was suddenly unavailable. Neither Kelly nor I have experience taking care of dogs, and we're definitely not dog people. I was attacked by a dog when I was little and I've never been comfortable around them, especially any dog large enough to leap up from the ground and reach my face with its teeth. Go »

Final Chapter

The movies that are going to be written about in Brittany Murphy's obituaries are Just Married, 8 Mile, Clueless, and maybe Sin City. But the one most sadly relevant is a movie that few people saw, The Dead Girl. Each chapter of the movie shows how a different woman is affected by the discovery of a woman's body in a field, until the last chapter doubles back and shows us her haunting final days. Go »

Scott's Pet Peeve #2519

Why do some microwaves have a convenient quick-start option if you press 1 or 2 or 3, so that they instantly start cooking with 1:00 or 2:00 or 3:00 on the clock... but DON'T have this same functionality programmed into 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9, which do nothing when pressed alone? How does an engineer possess both the vision to provide the former and the lack of imagination that results in the latter? Go »

Day 178

People have been asking me how the diet is going. I'm still at it, although I cheat much more often than I'd like, so the daily caloric average is now 1500-1800. However, I've been stuck on one seriously cruel plateau. Go »

I Wonder

Is there any way I can program my car's CD player to make an "om nom nom" sound when I slide in a disc? Go »

The Revised Revised Revised Story

Last spring, This Modern World ran a great parody charting the decline of civil liberties in recent years, after the then-shocking revelation that the government was building a database of every call made in the country: (link) I was reminded of that over the weekend as the latest shocking revelation came out, that the FBI has vastly abused its new ability to request confidential information in the interest of national security (link), almost as if it was the next panel in the strip. Except I'm not laughing. Oh, what I'd have given to be the reporter at Alberto Gonzales's press conference this morning. Go »