T.G.I.WTF?: Why Everyone Loves Fridays

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It’s here. The day we’ve all been waiting for. The day that will free us from our grind and let us back into the weekend wild. It’s Friday! (Freaky Friday…)

People’s attitudes towards Friday fascinate me. We’ve come up with our own lingo to express our excitement (T.G.I.F), we’ve crafted pop songs around it (“Friday I’m In Love” and that one other song by that girl. What’s her name again?), and perhaps most bizarrely, we’ve created a successful chain restaurant around the concept of the day whose actual tagline is “Where every day feels like it’s Friday!”

What does that even mean exactly? What would a week full of Friday’s feel like? People would spend their lives in perpetual excitement and anticipation, and then they would probably get drunk every single night. Wait, that sounds horrible because that means people would be consistently hungover as well. T.G.I.Fridays, you’ve created a hell!

Friday can only be put on a pedestal when contrasted with all of the other days of the week. If Monday is like the fat goth kid who’s wallowing in a sea of depression, Friday is the most popular girl in school. She’s the girl you’ve been waiting for, the one who’s guaranteed to give you a good time. “I wonder if Friday will hang out with me. There’s seriously like a waiting list to spend time with her!” Yup. Everyone wants a piece of Friday and not everyone gets the best slice.

Which brings me to the dark side of Friday. When Friday is good, it’s spectacular. It makes the bullshit of Monday-Thursday wash away in the I Don’t Care lake. It reacquaints you with a certain quality of life and reminds you of why you’re busting your ass in the first place. It’s all for that potential for an amazing Friday night. When Friday is bad, however, it’s terrible. It’s like ten Mondays rolled into one—ten fat goth kids listening to Avenged Sevenfold on the playground. This is partially our fault. Our culture has created a monster out of Friday so if things don’t go amazingly according to plan, it feels like a failure. Maybe you’ll recapture the spirit on Saturday, but probably not. How you spend a Friday night can set the tone for the whole weekend. If it’s not fun, you’ll have to wait another week for your life to be fun again. We’ve created this enormous pressure ourselves and we act surprised when we’re crying on a Friday night because we have no plans. Hellllooo.

Why do you think Rebecca Black’s “Friday” was so successful? I mean, sure it had a lot to do with the fact that it was hysterically awful, but it also articulated our feelings about the day in the simplest way possible. What is Friday? It’s fun, fun, fun! What are we gonna do? Get down on Friday! We’re going to go down collectively as a culture on Friday’s big fat dick (it’s the most well-endowed out of all the days). We we so excited!

But the reality is that we actually are! We are so excited! Friday is fun, fun fun! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go get ready for tonight. I don’t know what I’m doing but it better be good…

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