Sunday Wormhole

"Sometimes we think we want to hear something. And it's only afterwards when it's too late that we realize we wished we'd heard it under entirely different circumstances." Or perhaps not at all. At least that would be my edit to the statement made by Tyrion Lannister on last week's Game of Thrones. I've not yet gotten to watch this week's. As has been the case for four or five weeks running now, I never seem to be home to watch my various Sunday programs. I end up watching them sometimes days later. Sometimes weeks.

I think of Sunday as the seam of a circle. The beginning and the ending of a cycle we just repeat until -- eventually -- we don't. Not everyone's weeks are templatized. Mine certainly didn't used to be. But even when I had a great deal of freedom and a work life that never began or ended on any particular schedule, Sunday was often a pivot. A way of at least marking that something is over and something is next.

When I was in school and later working a very regular office job, Sunday began with the sad, looming dread of unavoidable Monday with its alarm clock demands and its homework deliverables. The entire day was clouded with it. It cast a pall over anything that Sunday might have been, just knowing that eventually it wouldn't be Sunday any longer. Sunday was the day-long buffer you had to recover from whatever trouble you'd got into on Saturday. And if you hadn't managed to find any Saturday adventures, well, then Sunday was an accusing reminder of what a wasteful sin you'd committed. I always loathed that Sunday anxiety. And even when I've -- at certain times in my life -- managed to free myself from it, I realize that a great many of my friends are servants to that persistent Sunday master, and that has its impact on the making of plans.

And Sunday nights have been fertile ground for programs I've loved over the years. Programs I've watched with people I've cared about. Programs I've rushed home to see. Programs I've recorded ON MAGNETIC TAPE. Programs that have been my companions through periods in my life that have been by turns nice and not so very. I can always tell when I'm in that place. That stuck-in-my-thoughts-and-ruminating-on-the past place. Every line of dialogue is a gateway to a feeling and every song lyric has the potential to be an extinction-level event, emotionally speaking.

So maybe it's a mercy that I seldom let those former Sunday appointments happen on actual Sundays these days. Maybe it's my subconscious way of keeping my calendar so unpredictable that my brain lacks the time to puzzle through the various problems a lifetime of Sundays can create.