Sunday Evenings Bring me Down

When I was a kid, Sonny and Cher were on Sunday night.  After I had my bath and blew dryed my hair (it was really long then too), I’d watch Sonny and Cher and then it was time to go to bed.  Except for a long time, I’d get sick to my stomach by the end of the show.

It wasn’t the fault of Sonny nor of Cher, but because I had to go to school the next day and I really hated my teacher.

This lady had a serious vendetta against me.  I never understood exactly why.  I knew I added work to her schedule because I was reading 3 grades beyond most of the class so I had to have my own reading group.  At the start of the year, I was also a vivacious talkative little girl.  By the end of the year, I was reserved to the point of shyness.  Any infraction meant being called in front of the class for rebuking and ridicule.  Other children were encouraged to rebuke me as well and would refuse to play with me on the playground because I was a “troublemaker”.

My mother had more than one conference with this teacher and the principal.  All my mother could really get out of me was that she was “mean” to me.

The next year, we moved to another area and I switched schools.  There I found the best teacher I had until high school who looked at my super achievement at reading as something of a challenge and kept me busy and happy.  Although I never have quite recovered from the shy part… but that’s another blog post.

The point is, I have a long hatred of Sunday evenings.  All the stores shut down around here about 6 pm and in the summer time, there’s still 2-3 hours of daylight. 

I liken it to what Douglas Adams describes in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe when he talks about the Wowbagger The Infinitely Prolonged:

In the end, it was Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55 when you know you've taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.

Except my teatime starts about 7:30.  Whether its because I just dread Mondays or don’t want the weekend to end, I don’t know.

I just hate Sunday evenings.