I’ve missed Saturdays. It’s been years since I had a proper one. In fact, it’s possible that I never have. For the two years of graduate school, Saturdays weren’t Saturdays; they were an Opportunity to Work Harder. While unemployed or underemployed, Saturdays weren’t Saturdays either. They were just like every other day: a day during which I had to figure out how to con someone into hiring me.
This I finally managed to do, and Saturday was the first of what I hope are many Saturdays.
A good Saturday is a day you can relax, whatever that means. For me that’s sleeping in, having a cozy cup of coffee, deciding not to go for a run and choosing to read a book instead, and it doesn’t matter that I’m lazy because it’s Saturday.
Or, if you want to spiritualize it, you could say “Sabbath” I suppose.
When you don’t work, everything is a Sabbath, and when everything is a Sabbath, nothing is. And nothing is a Monday either. I’m not sure what the spiritualized term for Monday would be. If Saturday is, for me “Sabbath,” perhaps Monday is the first horse of the apocalypse? The “valley” or “desert” of the week? A “time of testing”?
In any case, I’ve definitely missed Mondays, too. Or perhaps never had one. Not so much for their character-building component, but more because I feel like they unify millennials. A couple of months ago during a wedding reception as we were all talking about our current jobs, one of my cousins said, “I’m beginning to think a job you actually like in your twenties is a myth.”
I have some typical twenty-something experiences: I’ve done the vagabond traveling thing, joined the expat life, suffered through graduate school, and been helplessly unemployed. But I’ve never had a cubicle. Never had a corporate office. Never had a typical nine-to-five, TGIF, bags-under-the-eyes-on-Monday sort of job.
Just as last Saturday was, perhaps, one of my first “real” Saturdays, last Monday was one of my first “real” Mondays. And that’s the sort of thing you simply have to document. In bullet points. For posterity and giggles.
Things I definitely wasn’t thinking all day on my first day in corporate America:
- Why are cubicle walls so high?
- Are people watching how often I get up to pee?
- What is a floating holiday? I hope there’s cake. Floating
- Why does that door keep clicking every time I walk by it?
- What if there were an Aragog-sized spider behind it?
- How cool would it be if I vanquished it with my desk keyboard!
- I miss my cat. And my sweatpants.
- Would it be weird if I took a selfie in front my company’s logo sign and sent it to my mom? Yes it would. That’s probably something twenty-seven-year-olds don’t do.
- That dog with the mortarboard who has no idea what is going on: that is me. And I am it.
And so are you. Happy Monday!

Elaine Schnabel (’11) spent her twenties traveling, blogging, and earning various master’s degrees. Now earning her PhD at the University of North Carolina in organizational communication, Elaine researches and writes at the intersection of religion and communication. You can find her blogging at Religious (Not Crazy).