The "Weekend"

As I have now moved from the full time occupation: Student, to the full time occupation: Specialist, Sci-Med & Professional Education, I am started to learn that ‘weekend’ has an entirely new meaning. Prior to entering the workforce, to me, weekend was a time of relaxation and fun. Friday night (well in all reality Thursday night) meant it was time to let loose and have some fun! Although this is still sometimes the case, I am finding that I am now looking at the weekend in a more literal sense, meaning the work week is over, and now it is time to do all that stuff I was way too tired to get accomplished during the week. Things like laundry, groceries, general chores and visiting family/friends. Not to minimize family and friends into the category of necessary obligations, but simply to justify that making time for people outside of the immediate living situation can sometimes be difficult when working a ‘9-5’ job.

I had a chance to catch up with some old friends this weekend. It was really nice to chat, fill in the ‘what’s new’ which in my case is just about everything, and to just enjoy some FANTASTIC Baltimore football. However during our ‘what’s new’ conversation, I made a comment about how the ‘9-5’ job wasn’t as fantastic as I thought it would be, as far as having time to do other things was concerned. When I said this, my friend (who has been in the work-force a bit longer then I have) chuckled and quickly corrected me with “oh you mean 7-6:30 job”

Somehow, I feel like the reality of the work day, is that even if you are supposed to work 8 hours, or 8.5 for me ( 1 hour lunch included) it really never ends up being that way. For some, like my dear friend who just recently became a CPA for a major accounting firm, 9-5 some how equates to a depressed text message at 8:30pm Saturday night that reads “just finished my 70 hour work week, FML” For others like myself, it means working the allotted 8 hours, and assuming there is no extra work that needs completion, driving the grueling 60-90 minutes home thru traffic. Add 60-90 minutes each way to work, and somehow 8 hours turns into almost 11.

All that being said, I’m finding it really hard to balance work / family / friends. This weekend I went home to visit with my family. It was so nice to just be able to relax and know that someone would take care of me. I spent the majority of the weekend camped out on the couch watching re-runs of Law and Order with my mom. I did have lunch with a girlfriend and her adorable daughter, breakfast with a lovely journalist friend, and like I said, watched some great football with some old friends, but somehow I feel like the weekend was slow. Slow in the sense that I didn’t get anything accomplished. I didn’t do laundry, I didn’t go grocery shopping and Ginger didn’t get the bath she needed - - but honestly I don’t really care. Maybe my weekend wasn’t the ‘let loose and have fun’ weekend that it used to be, but it was full of familiar faces and down time, and I think that was exactly what I needed!