Sunday Guilt: Insight Into Regretful Laxity

There are a lot of things that I dread about Monday, one of them is waking up and yet I still manage to do so. For a start there’s the weekend emails, where people have emailed you four times in a three hour period because you haven’t replied despite the fact that you don’t work weekends. Or the hurried planning of the week ahead, trying to make sense of what exactly there is to be done. But the absolute worst for me, the most triggering question of all is, “how was your weekend?”

My answer is usually some banal retort of, “fine thanks, I just did some washing” or, “my sister and I did a food shop in Iceland, did you know they sell frozen Gregg’s pasties” and quickly make my way to the water machine and try to escape the updates on everybody’s packed weekend schedules. In reality, I most likely hardly moved a muscle.Well, besides my mouth from opening and closing in order to eat some high calorific food that will undoubtedly cause havoc on my gut and breathing quality for the weekend. My Saturdays fall into one or two categories but never anything different. Saturday is either for repeatedly boiling the kettle for tea and two tubs of pringles (cheese and onion, and sour cream and chive are the only flavors that exist in my reality), before a late night shower and moisturizing session. Or Saturday begins at midday, blinds pulled down to meet the laminate and a hungover me, folded like a soiled pretzel on my 1.5 seater brown leather hand-me-down sofa with no company other than a blistering headache and Netflix. I wish it could be more glamorous, or at least be a fun hangover full of cigarettes and jolty quips about my behavior the night before. But my Saturdays are never fun, and quips about the night before are almost never jolty, they will make me laugh yes but those laughs will always leave a gentle bruise of regret and humiliation — even if I have nothing to punish myself over.

If hungover, the Sundays will begin the same as my Saturday but always earlier. Sunday seems to be the one day I can wake up at a “reasonable” hour but in no way, shape or form does this mean I am ready to conquer the world or at least make over 500 steps. It is straight to the hand-me-down sofa for me, duvet in towe and usually a very-close-to-empty bottle of Coca Cola (vanilla preferably) in hand. And thus begins a cycle of TV shows I’ve seen before, twenty minutes of a film I’ve been desperate to see but can’t commit to, and an endless process of refreshing apps on my phone to become annoyed at some new Twitter word that seems to have appeared on everybody’s profile. Today’s word is cake, as Twitter users cannot seem to shake themselves from the ground-shaking discovery that cakes can be made to replicate everyday objects but, gasp, they’re cakes! Am I a cake? Are you a cake? Let me upload a picture of my perfect ass and ask you to bite it to check if I’m a cake! ……colour me boring, I understand this won’t be a very hot take but Jesus, talk about killing the joke. I never thought I would have to mute the word cake on a social media platform, and not because I’m trying not to eat it.

If not hungover, it is exactly the same. And I dread the Monday morning cold opener of explaining to everybody around me that I am either too lazy an individual, or too annoyed and full of regret from drinking heavily on the Friday that I could not possibly do anything all weekend. Except fill myself with radioactive toxicity and stare at myself in the mirror for any length of time wishing that I could skin anybody remotely more beautiful than I and wear their face in my daily life. My weekends are for hating myself evidently. Maybe it’s the hangover talking.

Maybe tomorrow when somebody asks me what I did all weekend I will say, “Nothing, I just lay on my couch masturbating constantly for two days and stopped to eat half a pizza that was so lacking in taste or consistency, I had to add three teaspoons of very lazy garlic, and I lay on my living room floor for two hours and stared at my ceiling.”

It fills me with regret and jealousy that other people are not like this, or do not tell me their weekends are the same. Some people even go for walks, imagine that, fresh air and company, ha! Some people spend their time creating creative endeavors for themselves, and I’m so very happy for them. But I’m not some people, and I’m certainly not going to change my ways anytime soon. Instead you can find me, folded pretzel, melted over my hand-me-down sofa, post-masturbatory and huffing and puffing over the bountiful activity of those on my followed list on Instagram. And no, I won’t apologize for it, and by the way, neither should you.