Day Off or Fuck Off?

Saturday. O! epic Saturday, my first day off since I was first afflicted with overemployment. “What about Thanksgiving and the day after Thanksgiving,” you might ask. Well, let me tell you, I was working.

In any case, I'll consider today a day of thanks. I am thankful for the limitless possibilities. What to do with this glorious free time?

How about wake up at 7am and take a train into the city from Astoria. I am walking around the farmer’s market at Union Square when I get a text from Mikki, who is working a morning shift at Café Gypsy: “Don’t be fooled by the bright and sunny morning, it’s freezing outside!” Silly Mikki, it’s my day off, but that doesn’t mean I’m sleeping in! I cannot squander this boon of free time. I buy some lamb shoulder and hop back on the train back to Astoria; it might seem silly since, round-trip, I have racked up an hour’s worth of commute for a mere pound of lamb. But not a moment has been lost, having spent each sedentary moment on the subway bench finishing up the last few chapters of a damn good book.

I get back home, industriously clean up two piles of dog vomit that Prance has just started reingesting. After washing my hands with an excessive amount of antibacterial soap, I throw the lamb shoulder in a pot with some coconut milk and spices, and voila, makeshift, unauthentic, yet delicious lamb curry dinner for three—Mikki, me, and our new Swedish roommate, who I shall, lacking originality, name the Swede. Mind you, this lamb curry dinner will not be eaten for another nine hours because I'm still in the ante meridiem hours here.

(Side note: I looked up “am” on dictionary.com--"am" as in 11am--just so that I could use the full Latin term. Here I discovered that out of the myriad official definitions for “am,” one of the capitalized definitions is “Asian male.” I didn’t know this abbreviation existed on an official level, but maybe I’ve been out of the chat room loop for a while. In case you’re interested, 25/.5AF/qns)

With dinner taken care of, I’m onto the next project. How about… painting the kitchen! I impulsively paint the kitchen a dusky purple gray, using leftover paint from past projects and knowing full well that there’s only enough paint for one coat. I can’t help it though. I gotta accomplish some shit today. I get even more ambitious and attempt creating vertical stripes using a raisin-hued paint. Unfortunately, this ends in a disaster, and I try to salvage the single botched stripe by going over it with a paint roller, thinking this might give it a cool textured effect. Instead, the patch of wall is now feathered with an unprecedented Lisa Frank-esque amalgamation of the two colors.

I’ll get back to that later. I text Mikki about how excited I am to have a day off, how much fucking time there is in a day and how I’m in a state of disbelief over the fact that I’ve forgotten about said fucking time.

So, next project is…

And this is where the music comes to a halt, where my overemployed fate swoops in with cruel, jinxed irony.

I get a text from someone at Funfetti, entreating me to work her shift tonight. She’s sick with the stomach flu. Essentially, help me Obi-Mc Quenobi, you’re my only hope. So what choice do I have? I concede my day off and tell her I’ll work for her.

She promptly texts back, “Oh BTW, it’s the closing shift so you’ll be there til three in the fucking morning which means you’ll be waking up tomorrow at noon, only to be getting ready to come back to work where you’ll be working another closing shift, followed by a bright and early Monday at Badvertiser where you still have not figured out how to discreetly nap at your cubicle.”

Well, she didn’t actually text me that.

Alas, there passed my day off, a fleeting hope dashed to pieces by my overemployed affliction. Someday, days like this will come as to no surprise for me. But as for now, I’m still dreaming of the day that I can do whatever the fuck I want to do. Is that too much to ask?

P.S. I haven’t had time to eat any lamb. Which merely underscores the fact that the answer to the titular question is a resounding "fuck off."