Nothing and then some

Weekends. Funny isn't it the need to 'do' things. I think having a busy week infects the nature of the weekend. My brain ticks over in work mode, whirring, planning, making grand aspirations about the weekend, trying for the perfect plan which balances select scatterings of glamorous down time ('yes, yes, I'll go read in the courtyard of my fave cafe, yes, I'll potter! I'll go to yoga!') with plans to make and do things, however humble ('oh yes, I'll cook individual lentil pies and freeze them for lunches! I'll do gardening! I'll finish my zine, yes hello Kinkos here I come! I'll go to the studio and make monster t-shirts! I'll catch up on my blog! I'll check my emails! I'll call people back!') and maintenence ('oh yes, I'll order vegies for next week, ahuh, I'll do my washing and make my room ever so tidy and maybe even iron shirts, I'll pay bills, I'll buy birthday cards for my rellos who have birthdays this month') and then, when it actually rolls in, like a big wet wave, I find myself thinking 'hmmm, I'll lie on my bed and feel the breeze and listen to Bob Dylan and think about nothing in particular', 'I'll go out for dinner with my housemates and no particular purpose other than to hang out', 'I'll dance around the kitchen to Justin Timberlake and do the dishes in between songs I feel like dancing to', 'I'll buy another second hand book and as it sits in my hand a solid weight dream up long essays that I feel like writing, but not write them'. etc.

Which is not to say that I don't end up doing some things off this list (ugh, the double negatives!!), it's just more random, the mutually exclusive activities battle it out in my subconscious and I end up doing some combination that later I couldn't quite explain. Lots gets left undone. I stop caring, the list gets fainter, the 'should do' voice gets fainter as a travel further away from the dry land of Monday to Friday. Maybe this is it, the week is ruled by the conscious mind, the weekend gets to be ruled by the subconscious, once you drift fully and deeply into it. Therefore it defies rational explanation, and becomes morphed into a beautiful, inexplicable, but somehow deeply meaningful dreamscape, things that you know are important but that don't have market value because they are slight and translucent and personal.

I did plant herbs and enjoy getting dirt under fingernails. I did do some washing. I lay on the couch and watched precisely the kind of crappy ABC detective dramas that make a tired girl happy on a Friday night. I did have a little cry to my housemate about the shitty end to my week, and all my work worries, we did both laugh through snotty tears over toast at the breakfast table. I did read some of my book and laugh out loud and wonder whether Italo Calvino is secretly my brain double, he manages to say what I think, how I feel, how I see things, and makes them both beautiful and deeply ridiculous. Aaah, just like my weekends.

Maybe one weekend I'll write the ultimate to do list, and it will wind out the back door and down the street, and then I'll tear it up into squares and all the kids and dogs and dreamers in the neighbourhood will set up a big fingerpainting session out on the road of our quiet street, under shady trees, and we will eat cake, and laugh, and paint beautiful wish flags, and all we will wish for is days like the one we are having. We'll tie them up high to the steeples and masts of our houses and leave them there as a reminder of our wisdom, and as talisman to scare away the drab spirits of the working week who would hand wring at us ceaselessly unless calmed by the colourful mess of our joy.