Getting ready for Monday.

My wife keeps one or two scratch-off lottery tickets in her workspace, the kind that pay off money in installments for life to the jackpot winner. She's not a gambler at heart; what she is is someone who finds creative ways to blow off steam. When she gets frustrated or tired at work, she has a ticket handy as an escape hatch, either to look at it and dream of retirement or to scratch it off and hope for the big dough. Just having it there gives her a smile. 

As a friend of mine learned in statistics class, it's worth buying one lottery ticket but no more, because the difference between 0 in 1,000,000 and 1 in 1,000,000 is infinite, but not between 1 and 2 in 1,000,000.

It's a way to deal with Mondays. 

Another, older friend once told me that he called the attack of nerves on Sunday night Ed Sullivanitis, because when he was a kid his parents never missed The Ed Sullivan Show, which ruled Sunday nights through the fifties and sixties. When the show was on, he knew his weekend was dead and it was back to school in the morning.

Yet another friend tells me that the closing theme of Car 54, Where Are You? can still make him break into a cold sweat sixty years later, because when that show was going off it was nine o'clock on Sunday night in his house, and that meant bedtime and school on Monday.

The hatred of Mondays is not only deep, but starts early, and is pervasive. 

I don't mind Mondays as much since I work from home now. I spent decades schlepping into Manhattan from places outside Manhattan, and that alone was enough to make me dread the start of the week. The Census Bureau says that the average time to commute into work in the United States is 27.6 minutes; from the time I got my first job in publishing to the time I started work at home, my one-way commute was between one and two hours. I got a lot of reading done in those days, but it made for early mornings. Not to mention delayed trains, broken-down ferries, heavy traffic, and everything bad about subways.

These days my weekends are so busy that I almost prefer the workweek. All I have to worry about is work. Plus, I often have to work on weekends anyway, which is forced in among the other weekend commitments. So since I'm working anyway, it might as well be Monday. 

Bring it on! We fear no Ed Sullivan in this house! Well, I don't, and my wife has her lottery ticket.