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Jaybird 53 Comments

Back in the 90’s, I watched The X-Files.

Every Friday Night, I knew that The X-Files was going to be on, and the only question was whether it’d be a new show or a rerun. It’s how I pretty much kept track of the week. “Is X-Files on tonight? No… it’s on the day after tomorrow. It must be Wednesday.”

Well, this week at work, they had The Test From Heck and so they needed people to man the lab 24/7 (well… 16/7). I am low enough on the totem pole to get the weekend shift… which means that, last week, I had my weekend in the middle of the week (Wednesday/Thursday) and went in fresh and spry to work on Friday to be confused by everybody greeting each other with “TGIF” and saying goodbye with “Have a nice weekend!”

I come in today, to my Friday, and everybody is acting like it’s Tuesday.

With the deepening secularization of society (no religion), and with the definition of the workweek changing due to increased productivity, and with the advent of DVRs, and Box Sets, and Live Streaming I realize: we, as a society, no longer have any reason to know OR EVEN CARE what day of the week it is.

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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53 Comments

  1. (Which is one of the things that this blog helps with. What day is it? Oh, it’s Recap Babylon 5 day.)

    • That would be effective if the guy in charge of “Recap Babylon 5” was on the ball.

      Or near the ball.

  2. During one college summer break, I left the following message on a friend’s phone…

    “Hey buddy, it’s Kazzy… It’s Thursday… about… umm… hmm, ‘Judge Judy’ is on so I know it’s at least 4 o’clock… so, yea, it’s Thursday sometime after 4. What’s doing for tonight? Call me back.”

    I’m generally pretty good about saying productive, active, and engaged. That summer? Not so much.

  3. Weird. My music post that goes up tonight mentions X-Files. Synchronicity!

    • Vince Gilligan (the show-runner for Breaking Bad) started out in TV as an X-files writer.

  4. I realize: we, as a society, no longer have any reason to know OR EVEN CARE what day of the week it is.

    Unless you live in Minnesota, a state deeply afflicted with Lutherans and Blue Noses… oh, it’s Sunday, I can’t get a beer. May Jesus, whose first recorded miracle was the turning of water to wine at Cana, smite all such persons with carbuncles and haemorrhoids upon their nether parts.

      • I thought Bergen Coun was going to stop that…Oh well never really mattered given you can go to the all the surrounding counties or NY for all the booze you want.

          • But we have some of the greatest malls on earth right HERE!

            Oddly, I actually find it more irritating now that I live up in Orange County, NY. We have some shopping options here, but they are limited. Bergen County still remains the best bet. But we’re a solid 20 minutes from even the closet portions. When I lived there, I could run to the mall and back in 15 minutes on a week night. Now, we wait until the weekend to make a day trip, but if we don’t make it Saturday, we either have to wait a week, go to the Palisades Center, or head on over to Westchester.

          • But we have some of the greatest malls on earth right HERE!

            I can’t parse that sentence. How can “greatest” and “malls” go together? It’s sort of like saying you have the squarest circle or the dryest ocean or something.

          • Do malls exist? If they do, then doesn’t it follow that some malls are better than others?

          • Kazzy, in the same way that it is possible to say that some infinities are larger than others, and therefore some are of necessity smaller than others, it is I suppose possible to say that some malls are worse than others, and therefore of necessity some are not as absolutely awful as others.

          • I feel like all this mall-bashing is really just some sort of hipster snobbism.

          • Mall-bashing is so pedestrian. The true hipster has progressed beyond mall-bashing. The true hipster (there are so many fakes about these days, have you noticed?) — revels in the sameness of it all, these cathedrals of capitalism. The apostolic creed of mediocrity, the common man purchasing common things — is the mall not the Great Equaliser, the Fellowship of Capitalist Saints?

            Likewise the truck stop. Life would not be complete without a shot glass reading “Minnesota” or a casting of an Indian Maiden all bedecked in Indian finery. The hipster beholds the rack of cheap felt cowboy hats and sees in it America writ large, the Myth of the Wide Open Spaces.

          • In Austin, the hipsters are at the friggin’ mall. Maybe they’ve become so uncool than they’re cool? I don’t know.

            I’ve always hated malls, though. Too many people, too many stores with mall markups, too much smelly stuff, food courts with bad Japanese food, overly serious security guards, and even shopping the way I shop — go straight to the store, and the rack, with the stuff you want, buy it, buy it, and then get the hell out — takes at least half an hour.

          • I loved working at the mall. Most fun years of my life.

            And Mallrats ruled.

            But I avoid it like the plague now.

      • New Jersey is a wonderful state but it cannot be contemplated as a whole. For my money, northern New Jersey should be used as a firing range for neutron bombs: nobody with a conscience would be thus killed.

        But southern and western New Jersey, a very different story. Idyllic, chock full of wonderful people and architecture. Surprisingly rural, most people don’t tour around on the back roads like I do.

        • some people are fans of socks and sandals country more than others, apparently.

          • I like the Jersey Shore but there are lots of other, more interesting places in New Jersey. Alloways Township. Salem, a bit run down at the heels, but still interesting. Bridgeton, too. I despair of the Socks ‘n Sandals crowd. Cape May is great if you like house porn, and I do. But there’s lots of good historical architecture elsewhere in New Jersey.

        • See, this is where we have to rectify what we mean by “southern” and “western”. Everything south of Newark was South Jersey to me.

          Western Jersey? Unless we’re going to Action Park to risk our lives, it’s the home of devils and people headed towards the Poconos.

          • as kazzy said, anything south of newark is south jersey aka socks and sandals land.

          • South of Newark is at most the start of central jersey, not south jersey. south jersey starts at seaside or pt pleasent.

          • greginak – with all due respect, no. middle jersey is a term used by south jersey to deny their own south jerseyness. 🙂

            glyph – i did. it smells fishy. it’s not entirely unbelievable, but on the other hand, it kinda is. i will not be shocked if they dump him a week or two from now or maybe politely ask him to leave.

          • Yeah, some people in that article’s comments were speculating as to whether France just wants him out.

            Someone else pointed out that living on a farm in the bucolic French countryside was “totally metal”.

            God I love AVClub comment threads. I was laughing myself silly on a Dexter one last night.

          • On the contrary Dh…South Jerseyians love their south jerseyness. they think they are better and more pure then those tourists from North jersey. They call central jersey, basically around Rutgers, that so they have a buffer between the big city northerners and their good southerness.

          • God I love AVClub comment threads. I was laughing myself silly on a Dexter one last night.

            There were a lot of cutting remarks?

          • Yeah, that show is so awful that all the knives come out.

            And it is AWESOME.

          • cherry hill is indeed south jersey but is better known as a burb of philly.

          • Everyone I’ve ever met from South Jersey indicates their location relative to Cherry Hill. This has led me to conclude that the entirety of South Jersey is Cherry Hill.

          • That is a funny map. Great funny stereotypes. I grew up right on the border of Friendly White People and Melting Pot which is a pretty good one. What is special is how a state you can drive from tip to tail of in three hours can be so split into micro areas.

          • I hailed from “Christie Country” though would push back against that for my particular area. Whatever “conservative” element we had was largely a function of the area’s Jewish population and does not map towards how we typically use that word.

            NJ is really uniquely situated because the two ends of it are suburbs of fairly large cities, neither of which are actually in the state. And then just all sorts of clusterfucks in the middle.

          • And then just all sorts of clusterfucks in the middle.

            I resemble that remark (Raritan Valley/Farmers border, working in Lawyers Driving Hybrids country).

            So the reason everyone from South Jersey says they’re from Cherry Hill is that their choices for towns that people from elsewhere in the state might have heard of are pretty much limited to: Philly (not in NJ), Camden (aka “Worse than Detroit”), AC (separated from the rest of South Jersey by the Pine Barrens, where few people actually live; also, who wants to say they’re associated with the namesake of one of Springsteen’s most depressing songs?), and Cherry Hill. So of course they say Cherry Hill.

          • People live in the Pine Barrens…?

            That makes sense re: Cherry Hill. But when I went to Boys State and met kids from down yonder who said as much, it gave the distinct impression that Cherr Hill was as big as Jupiter.

          • Well they like to call it living.

            People from Cherry Hill conform to most of the negative stereotypes of people from Philly. They are different from the jersey shore types.

          • I’d say that French authorities should give the benefit of the doubt…but when you are a church-burning convicted murderer…well, you are probably going to get hassled by “L’Homme” once in a while.

          • “I’d say that French authorities should give the benefit of the doubt…but when you are a church-burning convicted murderer…well, you are probably going to get hassled by “L’Homme” once in a while.”

            granted, but this is a bit of step past fucking with his car or bicycle or warhorse or however he goes and gets his anti-jewish groceries in the morning.

          • He probably rides on the shoulders of a giant rock troll.

    • You should see Pennsylvania.
      The Prohibition Party still gets votes in national Presidential elections.

  5. One of the witnesses in the OJ trial knew what time he’d heard the victim’s dog barking because it was during the walk he took in between Nick at Nite’s Dick van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore reruns.

      • CAN WE TALK MORE ABOUT “MY COUSIN VINNY”? LIKE, EVERY DAY?

          • You mean Yute.

            Ute’s are the mascot of the Univ of Utah and an Native American tribe out there. Geez people don’t even misspeak English as well as they did years ago ( shakes fist at passing cloud)

  6. There were times during grad school when I would be so tired and disoriented that I would have to walk by a classroom to make sure it wasn’t a day on which I had a class there. This might be because I didn’t remember what day it was, or what day the class was on, or some combination of the two.

    I don’t miss that.

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