Thank God It’s Friday

Since I retired, I’ve noticed an unusual phenomenon: I find myself looking forward to Friday, and when it arrives I feel a kind of contentment that lasts until Sunday, when I start to have anxiety about looming responsibilities. As I explained a few months ago, …since none of the jobs I had after 1987 had traditional Saturday-Sunday weekends, that inability to feel free of looming responsibilities eventually seeped into every day off, aggravating my lifelong characteristic inability to relax into a lifelong Sunday-shaped pathology: unless I was actually under the influence of a drug, whatever tasks I might have to accomplish were always lurking behind me, impossible to ignore regardless of my efforts to pretend they weren’t there. But now, five years into my retirement, I’m at last starting to have a little success in convincing myself that there really aren’t any obligations haunting my free time… When I wrote that I hadn’t really begun to notice the Friday effect yet, but over the…