Today is Saturday.

There’s an interesting thing about Saturday, and I’m not talking about the wild parties that many youths more sociable than I attend, fraternising with their young compatriots and idling away the their free time in a manner much more fun but as equally unproductive as mine. I mean its etymology.

The word “Saturday” dribbled down into Modern English from its Old English cognate “Sæternesdæg", known in the romantic world of the time as “dies Saturni”; literally, “Saturn’s Day”. It is the only day of the week in the English language named after a mythological figure from Roman lore as all the others derive from German polytheism. In Icelandic it’s called “laugardagur”, or “washing day”.

Throughout most of the civilized world, “Saturday” usually means rest, socialising, catching up on housekeeping, engaging in pastimes or drinking beer. I would even go so far as to say that the word encapsulates a very loose meaning of freedom, with connotations that lend happiness to the recipient sure of its impending arrival. In Judaism, Saturday is the Holy Day; the Sabbath; Shabbat. Fittingly it is also a day of rest, albeit one that evokes different feelings when the name is heard.

What Saturday generally means to me can best be analogised by walking down a long corridor to open a closet door, and when you finally do open it the vast and tumultuous boredom casts itself down upon you, leaving just enough time to pick up the pieces and put them back in the closet in time for the next walk.

Saturdays are boring, and despite the fact I know that, the Friday hype never fails to escape me. Maybe it’s because, for all its boredom, Saturday still trumps the pentweekly excursions to school where, in between drinking in the syllabus and contemplating the nature of the existence of such establishments, I have only the ironic joy of looking forward to Saturday to keep my mind in one piece. Or perhaps at peace.

Y’know what would be a better name for Saturday? Limboday. In fact, the whole 2-day weekend should be called that; limbo. The name accurately depicts the unscheduled, unproductive and unordered structure between those 5 days of routine and work. Except that wouldn’t hold up to those who do structure and order their limbo.

It occurs to me that the phrase “the grass is always greener on the other side” is never more appropriate when describing school. I, like almost every other schoolchild in the past 70 years, frown upon my set school tasks during those 30 weeks of routine and order, yearning for my extended limbo in the summer, and when the beast finally rolls around I soon grow tired with the monotony of rise-shower-eat-sleep. I wish massage parlours were free.

The connotations of the word “Saturday” give credence to the theory that it should be the day where we feel most free. I find this to be untrue. I can only feel like a slave handed from one master to another when the fetters of rising early and forcing myself to assimilate information of dubious usefulness are replaced with those of boredom, a master of frustratingly benign motivations. Doing things you do not like incurs annoyance, but boredom is a sure-fire way to drive oneself mad.

It seems, contradictory to my earlier statement, that I am of two minds, about Saturday at least. I love/hate it, and it’s this love/hate that annoys me. From a more apathetic standpoint, I can see that the boredom Saturday inflicts on me is, in fact, almost entirely self-inflicted, and then I face the problem of whether to blame myself for that, my situation or my society, or a combination of all three and in which ratios, trying to decipher which is cause and which is effect, or perhaps it is the self-fulfilling prophecy of accepting the effect and allowing the cause to run its course with no motivation on my part to spark an intervention, and if that’s true, who do I blame for that? You are what you eat, and what you are is a healthy combination of what you’re made of and how society moulds your malleable clay into an ever-changing figure with a few discernable, unrelenting features.

I am a clay, and I am being moulded. I cannot change that, because to let the sculptors hands relinquish their grip on me would cause the clay to fall back in its original animalistic state, and I can take comfort in metaphors if nothing else. In my eyes, there’s something too sexual about the thought of a sculptor and clay, so I don’t take any comfort in that. One I do take comfort in is “all good things must come to an end”, because it evokes, to quote an unknown, “the sublime beauty of impermanence”.

Well now that shit just sounds gay.

I hunger.