Mean Rubber

Photo by Tim Patterson

Mondays are not unlike the crippled ginger love-child of Dane Cook and Carlos Mencia; they’re hated by everyone, and for good reason. Mondays are when we realize that we’re stuck with four more days of Debbie/Cathy/Carol/Eileen playing Sarah Maclachlan on adult alternative radio from her neighboring cubicle, gabbing it up with every other Debbie/Cathy/Carol/Eileen about American Idol when all you want is for her to waddle her fat clerical ass down to the supply cabinet and fetch you some paper clips, because you’ve got chains to make.

Mondays are when you try to kill half an hour in the stink of the office bathroom, lamenting not packing up all your crap and moving to Fiji to start your own fruit stand when you had the chance. Worst of all, Mondays are when new episodes of Two and Half Men air, just to remind you that even though you punched out hours ago, you haven’t escaped the Monday scourge.

This leads to a good deal of vitriol throughout the day from everybody everywhere. It leads to Facebook status updates along the lines of, “Jamie wants Mondays to die” and “Kittenpaw demands that Mondays be removed from the school week”. Now at first glance, these propositions definitely seem like something we should all get behind. In fact, it seems we’ve already started to, as there are 62 Facebook group results for a search of “Die Mondays” (Though this should be taken with a healthy grain of salt, since this includes such extraneous groups as “Rice Addicts Never Die On Mondays” and “Anal Monday Will Never Die”). But before you go writing your congressperson to get them to pass legislation to eradicate Mondays, let’s take a look at some unintended consequences that may come of this.

First let’s look at Kittenpaw’s proposal: removing Mondays from the school (or work) week. Now, would that mean that Monday would join Saturday and Sunday as part of the “weekend”? This certainly sounds nice, but it would mean that the weekend would constitute three sevenths of the week, which hardly seems like an “end”. More like nearly a second half. As such, weekend, a word we all cherish very highly, would suddenly become a misnomer. Though this seems like a fairly innocuous consequence, can we really afford to bastardize our language even further in our current world of lols and ~cUTie~♥ ♥s?

On the other hand, what if Kittenpaw’s mandate took the form of wiping Mondays out of existence entirely? This sounds pretty desirable at first glance, since we would just go from Sunday straight to Tuesday, which are both pretty solid days. But wouldn’t we wake up every “Tuesday” with at least a fleeting feeling of uneasiness, with the faintest sense that something is amiss? We could call it a Tuesday, but if it quacks like a Monday, would we just be fooling ourselves? Maybe this is actually what Monday wants to happen. I hate Mondays as much as the next guy, so I’d hate to think that Monday could be hoodwinking us like that.

More importantly, if we get rid of Mondays, then we’ll have six-day weeks, so no day will stand out as being the exact middle, or “hump”, if I may. That would mean that Wednesday would lose its “Hump Day” moniker, so I wouldn’t have an excuse to engage in some serious heavy petting with Cathy by the water cooler. I’m all for getting rid of Mondays, but not if it gets me slapped with sexual harassment charges.

Here’s another concern of mine: Throughout antiquity, man has feared the almighty power of the moon. The moon watches menacingly from a distance, toying with the tides while we slaughter virgin goats in hopes that we’ll never have to see its dark side. We even have a day of the moon, which is, of course, Monday. Now wouldn’t you be pretty pissed off if you had your very own day and some ungrateful bastards got rid of it? The moon might come hurtling at us in a violent rage, bringing about all sorts of The Day After Tomorrow terror (Or just “Tomorrow”, if today is Sunday). In fact, it seems like the moon is already pretty steamed about this whole Mondays Suck mentality. I’d argue that the negative portrayal of Mondays in Garfield is at least indirectly responsible for 2004’s Boxing Day Tsunami. Do you really wanna roll those dice?

The whole doomsday scenario sounds pretty bad, but I promise it can get infinitely worse. Brace yourself for this…

Ok, here goes. Remember “Manic Monday”, The Bangles’ 1986 hit? It’s the one that sounds like a bunch of chalkboards and horny, diseased cats in an industrial strength washing machine. If there are no Mondays, then we’d never have to hear that song again, right? WRONG. If we ditch Mondays, then a song called Manic Monday would become instantly ironic, which means it will immediately be embraced by hipsters. Eventually the hipsters will stop blasting it from their ‘ostensibly’ ironic Hello Kitty Walkmen, but only because they’re sick at how horribly popular it’s become. By that point the Bangles will be selling out Giants Stadium. Kanye will sample the song as part of his collaborative venture with Bob Dylan, allowing for the song to be played on just about every genre of radio station. A video of Barack Obama dancing awkwardly to the song will storm through the internet, getting forwarded from cubicle to cubicle. And I’ll come into work and Debbie will be trying her best to imitate the awkward dance, as Carol laughs menacingly. They’ll both grab me with their pudgy fingers and make me dance awkwardly with them, singing along to The Bangles all the while. And I’ll collapse to the floor, wallowing in my own tears as I pray for the moon to have enough mercy to end this hell we’ve created.

So next time you feel the urge to wish death upon Monday, remember that things could be infinitely worse. It seems like Mondays are certainly a necessary evil. Plus, Anal Monday sounds like a pretty sweet time.