What Sunday Is For

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In case you were wondering, the people that you know who use their Sunday afternoons to do all of their errand running, train for that 5K, bake a soufflé they saw on The Food Network, and finally get started on their novel — those people are not humans. Those are robots, created by burgeoning tech companies based in North Korea, sent to us to make us feel badly about ourselves. They have convinced us that they take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide like the rest of us, but don’t believe it. Don’t let those androids become the standard you should set for your own Sunday activities. You’re better than that. You deserve a real Sunday.

Among the many reasons I moved to France — or, really, Europe in general — was for its brilliant decision that nothing should be open on a Sunday. To just have the idea of a post office, grocery store, or dry cleaners haunting you with its availability as you sit in your pajamas and watch X Files reruns is torture, up with which the French will no longer put. A few essential things may be open in case of emergency–pharmacy, convenience store, etc — but they are universally understood as only serving those truly in need, who physically cannot wait until Monday to take care of things.

Sunday is for not doing the things you promised yourself you would do, and deciding that lying around is far, far better and more fulfilling on a spiritual level. Sunday is for dragging yourself out of the house at 2 PM and still being able to eat bottomless pancakes at the restaurant of your choosing. Sunday is for spending 1.5 hours making a single frittata, because you have unlimited time to make sure all of the ingredients are properly chopped and evenly distributed. Sunday is for browsing PostSecret and being like, damn, my problems are not so bad. Sunday may also be the day for browsing Etsy and finally buying that Pikachu-shaped oven mitt you’ve been hesitating over for the past two months, but only if you didn’t ravage your bank account too badly over the weekend.

Sunday is for calling friends and having them come over and watch sports, sprawled out on the couch grotesquely in a way only acceptable amongst friends, eating Doritos off your belly. Sunday is the time when everyone’s head hurts a little too much to be mad at anything, and everyone can just come together over a bloody mary and chill, the way God would have wanted it. We don’t appreciate Sunday enough, and we certainly don’t make the most of it — and not in the “think of all the errands we could run” sense. We don’t fully embrace its lethargic potential the way we should. Maybe we feel “embarrassed” for not being “productive” enough, or we don’t want to “waste” anything. We couldn’t be more wrong, because time spent reading old Harry Potter books for the 15th time while you eat straight out of the tub of mint chocolate chip ice cream, that is not wasted. That is the opposite of wasted.

That time is the most lovely time we can spend, hands down.

So change back into your pajamas, cancel your plans to run in the park with your overly chipper friend, find an Anthony Bourdain marathon on the Travel Channel, and get ready to make the most of this day. And when you go back to work on Monday and some asshat starts going on about how they completely revamped their entire vegetable garden on Sunday, you punch him right in the face. He deserves it.

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image – Sean Macentee