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
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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 »

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Sadness is not when one of your favorite bands (Smashing Pumpkins) puts out their final album in MP3 format only and you miss it because you don't want to get into file-sharing. Sadness is five years later, when you happily stumble across a website with the entire thing available for download and you finally learn how heinous and unpublishable the album was all along. Go »

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I recently got to talking with friends who liked The Shining, both Stephen King's novel and Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of it, but who were unaware that King has always loathed the movie, despite its reputation as one of the best horror films ever made. It's hard to imagine that a writer doesn't know his own work better than someone interpreting it, but I think this is one of those rare cases where the writer is just too close to the story to get it. Here are three reasons why I think Kubrick's film better understands the material, and is better overall, than King's novel: 1) In King's version, Jack Torrance is a fundamentally decent man who wouldn't hurt a fly, but who is down on his luck and desperate. Go »