Saturday

For many of us, Saturday is the only true day of the week-end. This is because we head into the following day knowing that tomorrow is Monday, back to work or the beginning of a new week. I find it somewhat challenging to decide what to do on Saturdays given my predilection for working on the week-ends and my rather routinized life activities: yoga, writing, CBC radio at noon (Quirks & Quarks- science geek out time) and four pm (The Next Chapter), maybe groceries, spending quality time with my cats in my pajamas, eating healthy smoothies as well as chocolate and maybe also chips, possibly catching up in the New York Review of Books, and maybe- just maybe- finding something fun to do with friends or new people.  Watering plants and giving my cats their B12 shots, also Saturday activities.

I wrote this tiny poem years ago and it captures a bit of my ambivalence about Saturday as well as time:

It seems like so long ago

But here I am again

Saturday

With its uncertain taste of freedom

The mention of time is particularly relevant considering that the Roman God after which Saturday is named, Saturnus, was associated with time as well as agriculture, liberation, plenty, wealth, and dissolution. We use such a mixed bag of histories and cultural associations in what is now called English: Roman, Germanic, Latin, Nordic. In most of the languages, including Hindi, Japanese, and Korean, this day is associated with Saturn. The importance of the heavenly bodies in dictating the concrete and social framework of our lives, and how we know them, is astounding. We so often think of ourselves as fancy, modern peoples of this earth over which we have dominion. Not really…This place is one of a billion places that exploded through time and space that warps all matter of history as we think we know it. The world is so cool, so much stardust and cosmic matter, just like us. 

Here’s a nice illustration of Saturnus from the early 16th Century by my guy, Caravaggio.