MONDAY,
MONDAY
Now
before you start thinking this is an ode to The Mamas and
Papas, I want to let you in on a little secret: I am a Monday
Girl. Don’t know what that is? Ever heard someone say
‘I’m starting it on Monday’? Ever said it
yourself? I have, and am often amazed at the reaction I
get when I say it, like I have to be the laziest person
on the planet. These looks mostly come from the I Don’t
like Mondays crowd who believe people like me to be procrastinators
because we don’t start things right away; they think
that we tend to give up too easily, only follow the latest
fads and never finish anything we’ve started. When
in actual fact a Monday Girl is quite the opposite.
I
am a practicing Monday Girl; I am one of the few people
on the planet who sees a Monday for what it really is: a
day of endless possibilities and new beginnings, instead
of the majority of the planet who wake up with a scowl and
curse the universe for creating such a ridiculous notion
as Mondays. I am a Monday Girl. I was raised in a family
of Monday Girls. Anything of importance began on a Monday
in my family, and it could be any manner of things as long
as it was done with a little panache and a lot of heart.
Diets, entrepreneurial endeavors, exercise regimens and
hair augmentations courtesy of Miss Clairol were all concocted
on that most creative of days with varying degrees of success.
My
mother is considered to be the Queen of Monday Girls by
all who know her and she comes by it honestly, she was raised
by my beloved and much missed Gran who made the ultimate
Monday Girl statement by passing from this life to the next
on a late Monday night in August. For as long as I can remember
my dear old mom has been a Monday Diet Girl and she shows
no signs of slowing down. The first diet I remember was
the cabbage soup diet, and it began on a Monday. She was
not successful as I clearly remember the stench of decaying
cabbage emanating from our kitchen garbage. After the cabbage
soup debacle came the Three Day Diet that only lasted two,
the Atkins Diet that lasted a nanosecond when she decided
that her vegetarian tendencies wouldn’t let her sacrifice
anymore innocent cows, pigs, fish, etc. just for the sake
of her waistline, and the Bernstein Diet which ended because
she went a bit barmy when they told her how much it had
cost her to lose ten pounds. Most recently my mother started
on Weight Watchers and has stuck with it for the last four
consecutive Mondays and every day in between, which is cause
for celebration for all serial dieters out there. If my
mother can stick to it then you know it really works.
My
sisters and I have all followed in my mother’s footsteps
in one way or another. My eldest sister began her first
entrepreneurial endeavor at the age of ten. Every Monday
she would let us read her books at a rate of five cents
a day and would charge ten cents for every day that we were
late returning them. I recently found one of those books
in a long abandoned box in my storage room and quickly estimated
that I owed my sister somewhere in the vicinity of four
hundred and twenty dollars. This was also the sister who
detested exercise but who started regular Monday morning
yoga classes, though at the time I distinctly remember telling
her that the pose she was striking looked more like Sacrificial
Lamb than Downward Dog. She’s been going strong for
almost ten years now and she’s got the body to prove
it.
My
second sister and I have many things in common, the most
traumatic being that we both survived the Monday evening
hair dyeing wars masterminded by our mother. Neither of
us came out unscathed; for a week her hair had an unearthly
pink glow to it and mine was an all TOO earthly shade of
green.
And
my third sister? Ohhhh, my third sister. Clothing designer
and sweatshop owner all at the tender age of fifteen. Turned
her bedroom into a factory where she would turn out her
own homegrown brand of Prep/Punk/Goth/New Wave tee shirts
and who forced her one and only slave (Yours Truly) to work
in highly oppressive surroundings, (no TV.) and who fired
said slave when she realized that she couldn’t sew
to save her life. Thus ended the Monday evening of torture,
but not my sister’s love of fashion.
So
you see Monday Girls are neither procrastinators nor flaky,
they merely try new things. Sometimes they work, mostly
they don’t. The simple point is that we try. Don’t
ever tell a Monday Girl that she doesn’t take chances,
or that she doesn’t take the bull by the horns because,
like I said before, Monday Girls are very creative and they
don’t give up easily, so you might just find those
horns lodged in a very uncomfortable place.
If
you have any comments regarding this article please email
me. I’ll get back to you first thing on Monday.
he