Friday night lights (out).

Here's the wonderful thing about Fridays. They come attached to Friday nights. I know people who like nothing better than to go out on Friday night to raise hell and put a block under it. As for me, it's all I can do to drag myself home.

On any given week, I'm focusing all my strength on just getting to 5 pm Friday. After that, I don't really have a plan. I like to drift along, rudderless. I take a great big old pass--on anything and everything.

Saturday through Thursday nights, there's no real excuse for not doing the reasonable, adult things. Lock everything up tight; floss and brush your teeth; wash your face; set the alarm; turn off the lights, and go to sleep. On Fridays, I like to do that last thing first, and then I let the rest of it all go to hell.

Who's to know?

That was pretty much my thinking as I carried my coffee to the computer last Saturday morning, wearing the same clothes I'd worn to work on Friday. Oh sure, I admit to having had a brief and fleeting thought that this would be an excellent day for Tawana to surprise me at the end of her early morning run. This is a favorite trick of hers. If she can catch me in my bedhead and before I've brushed my teeth, she can lord it over me how much more industrious she is.

And so she must be. She did manage, at least, to remove her work clothes and actually go to bed. I had fallen asleep on the couch and stubbornly resisted all attempts by Muffin Uptown to convince me to get up, put on my pajamas, and relocate to the bedroom. Instead, I slept all night on the couch in my work clothes. I disobeyed convention; I snubbed my nose at the mores. Respectability be damned.

So when I answered the inevitable knock at the door, Tawana took one look at me and said, "Where are you going all dressed up so early?"

This, I did not anticipate. I had expected to be ridiculed, was prepared to be chided for my lack of fortitude. But this? I had an epiphany. Either my clothes wear extremely well, or my everyday look is such that those who know me have very, very low expectations.

If that is indeed the case, I am spending way too much time and energy trying to get it together to leave the house every morning.

photo, Stephen Gibson