I’m not entirely sure why, given that I’ve now been off from work for about eleven days, but I haven’t been able to shake the feeling all evening that today is, in fact, Friday.
So I’m going to go with that, and ride out this long wave of Fridays until the end of the year. Seems like a plan.
Meanwhile, I didn’t do a whole lot more exciting today than help my father set up the new high-def television my sister, my mother, and I bought him for Christmas. More than that, I helped him move the old, faltering TV, which is about twenty times heavier than the new larger one. (At this rate, in ten years, they’ll have a TV the size of a wall that you can easily carry with one hand.)
That reminds me of a funny story I found myself re-telling just this weekend, about the time at Penn State when the university police pulled me over because I was carrying a large TV/VCR across campus. The TV really wasn’t meant to be carried, despite a kind of handle on the back, but I had rented it for the evening in my capacity as Monty Python Society president. I’d done this on several occasions, actually. Sometimes, if we were meeting in the same building as the AV department, I might rent one on a rolling cart, which was easier in some ways, since I could just push it onto the building’s elevator. But it also meant that I had to trust that the unit wouldn’t be stolen or moved overnight, and that I could get into the room where I’d left it before whatever morning class had started so I could return it and not be penalized with a late fee. The more portable unit could sit in my dorm room overnight, although I did always have to carry it from the AV department to my dorm room — something like a half-hour walk — then back to the club meeting, back to my dorm room, and the next morning finally back to the AV department. And don’t think I don’t look back on that now, with my herniated disc and everything, and want to yell at my idiot self, because I do. At the very least, I probably should have tried taking the bus.
But anyway, I was carrying the unit back to my dorm room after this one Society meeting — did I mention my dorm was about twenty minutes away, and uphill? — when the police pulled me over. They were very understanding, I must say, when I told them my story, especially since it turned out that I didn’t have my ID card, much less any proof that I was telling the truth. “If I was going to steal a TV off campus,” I almost wanted to say, “do you really think I would still this heavy piece of crap?” They sent me on my way, maybe with a warning, maybe with a chuckle, and I headed over to the student union — thankfully right across the street — to search for my ID card. Because I’d had it on me earlier, when I’d been making some photocopies in the union building, and because I wouldn’t be able to get back into my dorm room without it.*
So I should thank those officers for pulling me over and filling me momentarily with panic, because I was able to recover my ID card, which until then I hadn’t known was missing. I could have trekked all the way back to my dorm, TV in hand, only to discover then, already late at night, that I was locked out. And then this story of my ridiculousness wouldn’t involve the cops, and would seem significantly more boring because of it.
Nothing even half as exciting happened today. We set up the TV with a minimum of headache, despite some not very clear instructions and a few parts that seemed to have been included just for the heck of it. And earlier in the day, I mailed out some copies of my “Best of 2010” mix, about which I’ll have more to say later. (The mix, not the mailing.)
Looking forward to tomorrow’s Friday.
* Then again, that reminds me of another Monty Python Society story, when I went to the Homecoming Parade dressed as a lumberjack and had no trouble getting back into the dorms, even with my roommate’s axe in hand. (My roommate, it should be said, was a camper, not an axe murderer. I’m fairly sure.)