Mondays

Springtime at last

Today is Monday. The terror.

Everyone gets all upset and out of sorts on Mondays. I work at a restaurant/bakery so I get to see everyone before they've had their morning coffee. Their true colors. Monday's are even worse. I don't know why though, and I was wondering this today. 

Cherry Blossoms in the yard.

Today I got the "Monday blues" at least four times. This was because I kept forgetting and re-remembering that it was even Monday in the first place. People kept reminding me. If they would just keep their misery to themselves, that would be lovely, and I could go about my day grinning at people and wishing them a "great weekend" or ask them if they'd like ketchup or hot sauce with their pancakes. Everything would be fine. Of course this never happens. I kept being reminded about the unfortunate day of the week and for some reason, it kept putting the heavy Monday damper on things.

So obviously that whole thing must just be a mental hang-up. "Oh its Monday, Monday sucks." but if you work all weekend and have Monday, Tuesday off, then Monday's aren't so bad right?

WRONG.

One of my customers said to me today that the kid they were babysitting woke up this morning and just started crying. He knew. He knew it was Monday. 

So that clearly solves it. 

Mondays suck. All the time. Looking back on it, Mondays always were a little bit less spectacular even when I was unemployed. 

If its a mental thing, its so well ingrained into our minds that we don't have a choice anymore. We've evolved to hate Mondays through years and years of mankind slaving away Monday to Friday. We learned to walk, make fire, and hate Mondays. Even though Monday technically never did anything wrong to us besides be the day at the beginning of roughly 5 days of work. 

A bumblebee showing the love

This was my thought process today.

Having said that, it was a lovely stupid Monday. The sun is out, the island is warming up, and the flowers are popping up everywhere. Its like people have been literally hibernating and just woke up and crawled out of their caves, because I feel like there are twice the amount of people milling around town at any given time of day (except for after 5pm, because let's not get crazy here. Everything is closed. Its like lights out at 5pm.) This makes me want to Google bears and see if they are also grumpy when they wake up from hibernation. 

So now its Monday evening, the blues are subsiding, and tomorrow it will be Tuesday and everyone will have another excuse about why this day of the week sucks. At least no one can complain about the cold anymore. Everyone get your whining ready for allergy season!

Here is a list of weekdays, and the common complaints about each: 

Monday: Is Monday
Tuesday: Is the day after Monday, as in "Its only TUESDAY?"
Wednesday: Mid-week, its always tough. Because its Wednesday and its mid-week.
Thursday: Not Friday yet.
Friday: Its almost the weekend, you can't expect anyone to be focused on this day, or get anything right.
Saturday: Rocks, but its also almost the weekend, so again, you can't expect anyone to be paying any attention to you.
Sunday: Is almost Monday.

This is an official list that everyone seems to be aware of from birth, although not everyone is aware of it until they get their first job. 

 

Good Morning at the Fogarty house

 

This is the sun. Making everything ok.

 Poppy relaxing and making the porch look gooood

10 Things

DISCLAIMER: This is very dorky.

Something I do every day, that not everyone knows about, is write down 10 things that made me even mildly happy that day. I'm writing this down for a couple reasons. Mostly, I realized that I've been successfully doing this for a little while now, and I get kind of proud of myself when I stick to something like this. Also, it has proven to be immensely helpful and I wish to share it with whoever might need a little pick-me-up now and then. So here it is, whether you want it or not.

I know it sounds so painfully cheesy and lame, but it is remarkably difficult. It started because I felt the need to clear my head of negative thoughts, and I think the best way to do that is focus on positive things. Also, I can go back and look at the lists and it will look like every day I've ever had was full of at least 10 great things. 

There are two rules to the list:

1. I write ten things and only ten. No more, no less. This is mostly to keep myself disciplined enough to resist skimping on the good things on the tough days.
2. They can only be genuinely positive. This is incredibly hard for me because sarcasm is something that seems to be so deep set in my brain, it happens by its own free will. If I can refrain for a few minutes, it all comes crashing out the second I'm free to use it again and totally counteracts the good-ness. It's a real problem.

So those are the two rules. There is no order to the things, no one thing is necessarily any more important than the next. The thing that makes it possible is that your list can be made up of anything, no matter how trivial it may be. I have some days when my entire list is quotes from a movie I watched while I was making it, or several of the things are all related to one event (example: 3. My pay check, 4. Spending my paycheck on these shoes, 5. These shoes.) One day, my list was almost entirely made up of characters from the HBO series "Weeds". You get the point.

There are times when I can physically feel my brain working so hard to fight off the urge to write "EVERYTHING SUCKS ALL THE TIME" in slots 1 through 10, and it makes it feel even better to finally get through to number ten without so much as a frowney face drawn in the margins. 

The other thing that I have to remind myself to do is not to censor myself. Having something that is for you and only for you is not something that people are entirely used to these days with so much social media. It gets difficult for people to be who they really are in private and turn off the "public face". This list can be as "profane", "stupid", "lame" or whatever, as you want it to be. The moment you realize that no one is going to judge you for having "Miley Cyrus's song on the radio" as number 4, is a very liberating moment. I'm not saying that is one of the items on one of my lists, but I'm not not saying that.

Today, as an example, my list is going to be public, because I'm sharing with you, and sharing is one of those things that sometimes makes me happy. Unless we're talking about a small bag of movie theater popcorn, then the deal is off. 

1. Movie theater popcorn. Copious amounts of yeast dumped all over it.
2. Spelling Theater the way I want to and not the way Canadian spell check wants me to.
3. Breakfast at Barb's
4. Calling Cornerstone and making an appointment.
5. "Young Homie" by Chris Rene
6. This video that my little sister Anna showed me today.
7. Ryan
8. Macaroni and Cheese
9. Amercan Dad! On Demand. For free.
10. Talking Koala Bears.

It would be SO easy for me to write a 20 item list on things that irritate me today, as it comes so naturally to me, but restraint is a quality I am teaching myself. Then again so is flying, so.....

Yeah.

Ok well, thats my list. I have to go now because I was going to post this YESTERDAY and now its TODAY so if I don't stop now, this is going to get way out of hand.

Local Music Rocks

Hey, wanna know what I'm listening to RIGHT NOW?

You do, because its good. And no, its not Adele. I promise.

Right. So, living on Salty can get a little boring, and nightlife is limited, but what we do have is our fair share of talented musicians. Which brings me to my point. The Barefoot Thieves (Owen Matheison, Jade and Jasper Snow-Rosen, and Josh Cook) : I've been listening to these guys lately since they came out with this totally awesome album, which you can buy online from their Bandcamp page here if you love it, which you most likely will. I might be a little bit biased since they're friends of mine, but that doesn't matter because it really is just super cool. For your enjoyment (is that a word?) I've put the tracks here for you to listen to to your heart's content.

I'm gonna plug these guys for a few fairly obvious reasons:

1.They rock.

2. Local music is worth supporting. Hurray!

3. They rock.

In case you were wondering, my favorites -if I had to choose- are: Sew The Breeze, Fly Me Somewhere, A Generous Kind of Nature, and The Barefoot Thief.

A Secret Note for You

For those of you who enjoyed my "Postcards", hopefully you will enjoy my Secret Notes as well. Since I am not traveling (at the moment) I have decided to create a separate blog for the posts that don't have to do with worldly adventures - It makes sense to me to separate them since the posts will be so different (but still hopefully somewhat entertaining enough to take up a few minutes of your day every once in a while.

Living on this island makes for a pretty routine schedule, leaving lots of room for the mind to wander. As I have found in the past, the best writing often comes out when I have nothing to write about. These posts won't have any sort of theme, schedule, or direction, but will more likely just be a little light reading in your inbox once in a while.

Until my next adventure abroad, this is where my writing will live.

This post doesn't count.

I just had to establish that this is me, and 'Postcards' is taking a break. Enjoy some secret notes in the meantime.

Cheerio

Chloe