Girls and the Weekend

It’s not just the weekend, it’s the mega-weekend. (And haaaaai, while I was half-watching Paul Ryan deliver his oversized FedEx foam-packed box of lies at the Republican convention, my very first boyfriend/love/adult sex called me twice and will be “in town” for “the weekend,” sooooOOOoooOOOooo let’s do a series of disgusting winks and cringey faces and thumbs-ups and eventually just shuffle away, embarrassed.) Done right, the weekend is a two-day-but-endless-feeling dreamy Theatre of the Absurd, and as such justifies itself as a sanctioned, pre-packaged Fun Time. Like, you can’t really argue with “weekend.” Actually, even when it’s done wrong, it does all that too, I guess. KAY BYE getting a cookie to stare at all afternoon while I wait ticktickticktick until six or whatever.

FRIDAAAAAY

There is a half-populated Girl News in my Documents folder called “Girls and Rape” (i-yi-yiiiii! Maybe next week? Maybe whatever week I spend quietly alone enough to feel comfzers and unweird devoting my good-times girly-times internet-pocket to the sickest shit we know about? Buuuuuuuuuh, right?), but because this is the extra-Friday-est of Fridays (like, obviously summer has already turned over and turned into autumn, but I have three days in which to pretend this is not so, and drink sandy Cokes and eat sandy peaches on the beach and finish reading all those September issues), let’s not go that way. Let’s not be sad. Let’s be “FRIDAY,” the most singularly celebratory battle-cry that I most recently shared with, get this, a series of men who I watched (from a sun-smoked Starbucks patio, last week, where I was crying into my phone) walk off a construction site at like 4:30 and dustily, sweatily climb into gel-shiny BMW SUVs and tear into downtown traffic, all hip-hop and hidden smiles. “Friday!” is universal.

HOLIDAY

Labor Day weekend is a holiday but not an important one to have plans for so instead of doing stuff how about fill a bowl with strawberries and milk and get a spoon and a book and walk that mess over to a park and lay down on the starched grass and just be there, aggressively doing some bad pushups or just lolling? Or whatever else you can do that is atypical of your usual weekend plan and atypical of your usual holiday but something that confronts the idea of “not working” directly, baroquely, fun-ly?

OUTFIT

Weekends are for taste-in-absentia, by which I mean there are or should be a lot of Exxxtreme Outfits. For your nighttiming, you want whatever you’re feeling as sexay in the moment before you go out, I don’t care, do what you feel, pumpkin-muffin; for your everything-else outfit, you don’t want some compromise-version of your ush, you want a satin-edged blanky pinned around your body in the manner of those Lindsey Thornburg blanket-capes, maybe some boxer shorts (PAUSE, here: why come nobody talks about cotton boxer shorts as maybe the ultimate in girl-schmattes? Fuck the perfect blue cotton Oxford shirt, what of the perfect blue cotton boxer shorts? Is this a conspiracy??? Have you seen the ways in which it maybe obscures but makes the best possible use of your butt-area???), slip-ons (Converse are SO. MUCH. WORK. that even before they were ultimately co-opted by olds they were official fashion), day-jammies, probably a ball cap somewhere in there; general, abstract experiments in freshness (if you never fail at fashion, you’re not trying hard enough). Mostly what I want is for everyone to dress on the weekend the way they dressed on the weekend in sixth grade, not for sad nostalgic value or reupped-cuteness but because there are a lot of good ideas within t-shirts and horseback-riding pants and massive socks.

INSTAGRAM

This is like when a 40-year-old with 327 Twitter followers calls himself a “social media expert” because the majority of my Instagram content is boring, nature-oriented, unsure of itself. BUT here is where your weekend succeeds in photo form: nutso elements of international hotel rooms; new clothes you have bought that are laid out nicely, shoes and accessories espesh; decontextualized rando shots of drunk people. Don’t harass me with your cat and your toes, OK?

WEEKEND VALUE

Don’t the fuck ask the fuck me the fuck what I am doing on the weekend! Who cares? Why do you care? No, why. Because you are evaluating my and others’ social value in the least classy and interesting way possible, I guess? COOL. Anything that is/ was worth doing is only something I can tell you about on Monday, and even then, probably not. Next time you get a “What are you doing this weekend?” just flutter your eyelashes together and moan.

BRUNCH

I’m politically opposed to waiting in a line but the idea of remaining inside my apartment in the daytime on a weekend gives my imagination lice, so, yeah sure I’ll go. Once I went to a black metal brunch where Corpusse took a tomato off my plate and rubbed it into his chest hair so that kind of handily balances out all of the gnarly cups of coffee.

TV

There isn’t good TV on the weekend until Sunday night (WALT NOOOOOO) so unless you have been lassoed into a full-season marathon, the yoke of Perfect Era television will not descend on your social life on the weekend, which means, I guess, being out in the air taking car rides and making stabs at adventures and getting allergies and hating your pants and stuff.

TWILIGHT

In high school, when my friends and I called each other on our parents’ house phones (we got cell phones in 12th grade, don’t worry about it), our moms and dads had to leave little paper notes around documenting our messages and their teenagery details. My dad’s fave thing was to spell everyone’s name aggressively wrong so I had to figure out that “Auyleesunne” wanted me to come over. He also signed them “The Mgmt,” which, fair enough. Anyway, the best was when you’d come home from wherever (I guess I was at tennis, and then “walking home”/ smoking drugs up against tree trunks in the park?) and have this little fistful of nighttime possibilities (also since I’m from Canada half of these would be in regards to rules-less “bush parties”) and the feeling of loose whateverness plus the impending/probable clit-touching would be so intense and exciting that you’d have to immediately pee. It’s sort of like that now around Saturday-dinnertime, but less so because of oppressive iPhoning, oldening, having had sex so many times already-ening.

MONEY

Buying things on the weekend becomes interpretive, abstract. I’m magnetized toward any store that has twinkle lights so sometimes I’ll come home at like seven and slowly pull bizarro-me’s version of “home décor” out of fussy paper bags and be like “I guess I bought this… bowl?” And then what?

What else. The kinds of candy that you, personally, don’t like and won’t eat (Wine Gums!) but that will look good, welcoming, wholesome and sinister, for your friend or roommate, I buy that.

I buy flowers on Sundays and spend the week watching them die.

MELTING

Without getting too wine-gum-sticky-prissy about this, girl, you need some time off, especially after getting a little hectic inside from work/school/doings of things. Get off all that. Off the boy-train, off work, off looking good and trying to look good, off off off. Being on 24/7 cruise control of doing your life things is really good and probably necessary but you need a weekend to melt into the margins of that life you’re making up and find out what’s going good and what’s going bad. Anyway, as an established “You in danger, girl” feminist, but also a “Pfffff’tevs” feminist, I feel strongly that as much weekend-away-ness as possible from what you are building with your hands is a long con into more and better… there-ness. When you’ve cast off whatever heavy thinks are still pressing you from the boundaries of M-F or whatever configuration your schedule provides, that melting is going to show you some new stuff.

NO BRA

No bra.

SPORTS

Since this is Girl News and I’m the CEO I will remind you that the culture of sports and watching sports (oooh is there a correlative between “rape vs. rape culture” and “sports vs. sports culture”? There must be!) is outside of our scope. If someone is watching the game at a bar or your house you have to say “Oh, is this The Game? I’ve seen this already.” It kills!

MIDWEEK WEEKENDS

If you are considering a life of Cool Jobs and funemployment and “contracts” and “working on this thing for this guy I know,” don’t. (Yesterday, instead of driving to the beach to hang out with my A-girls and their comedy tattoos, I stared at the screen of my MacBook, tilted waaaaaaay back, all arms-crossed and “So, are we going to do this, or….?”) However, the one upside to all that is the option to take your weekend whenever you want. Except only sort of. OK forget it.

SATURDAY NIGHT

I haven’t been to New York in like seven months but I think it’s still illegal to go to a bar on Saturday night.

SUNDAY

Terror.

Follow Kate on Twitter @KateCarraway

Previously - Everything is the Worst