Working for/on the weekend
June 8, 2017 1:32 PM   Subscribe

 
I'll read the article on Monday...
posted by Samizdata at 1:46 PM on June 8, 2017 [6 favorites]


I've mostly worked shift-work for the majority of my life. It's only recently that I've worked for a company that is nice enough to have guaranteed that my two days off will at least be together. Sometimes it's in the middle of the week and every blue moon it ends up being on an actual weekend.

If I had the option of working longer shifts while guaranteeing a third day off during my week. I'd absolutely take that option.

Some interesting links, will definitely read them on my weekend (this month that is Sundays and Mondays). Thanks for making this post.
posted by Fizz at 2:49 PM on June 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


Why not demanding 24 hour weeks? 3x8 or 4x6? Ugh.
posted by symbioid at 2:58 PM on June 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


Kids are deeply, intuitively in touch with play. My son, Jude, now twelve, loves sports, all of them. [...] it’s sports that are truly playful. It’s sports that encourage abandon. [...]
[Daughter] shot a seriously touching stop-motion movie about two estranged rocks that find each other at last. But her play is often about hobbies and crafts, rarely about sports, despite being an athletic kid, fast and long- limbed. She seems to play — cheerfully — only in the organized games we pay for. The love of sport doesn’t drive her to play in her free time the way it does my son.
What? Sports have rules. And teams. And people expect you to follow those rules and wear appropriate clothes and fulfill certain roles on the team. People do sports for work all the time. If you're going to claim that sports are fundamentally "fun" and that crafts are fundamentally "not fun", then yes, I guess, you will probably find that modern gender expectations introduce some difference there, but seriously, what the hell.

She goes on to say she's not calling her daughter's play wrong, but she says that sports are the right kind of play and that her daughter doesn't engage in sports for play, and I don't really know how to take that. She seems not just devoted to the idea of leisure on the weekend, but to checking a lot of boxes about it being the right kind of leisure that I'm pretty sure I'd find exhausting.
posted by Sequence at 3:05 PM on June 8, 2017 [27 favorites]


Play is only truly play if you conform to the rules and work hard at it. We have always been at war with leisure.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:27 PM on June 8, 2017 [20 favorites]


I think the notion is that her daughter enjoys structured sports play like practice sessions with a coach, or games. However, she's not driven to engage in unstructured play *in sports.*

By contrast, her son enjoys unstructured sports-themed play. He'll just toss the ball around without purpose, and runs off with all sorts of sports gear because he enjoys the notion that he could do anything in a given afternoon. He's probably hitting his football with a baseball bat.

I didn't get the impression that she thinks her daughter's form of play is wrong, but rather, simply that her daughter enjoys structured play, and her son enjoys unstructured play.
posted by explosion at 3:28 PM on June 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


I really am not left with the impression after reading that that she just considers it a totally-valid alternate lifestyle choice to not be particularly into engaging in unstructured sporting activities. She considers it a fault that her daughter isn't doing it--and possibly her fault as a mother. All of this is in the context of whether men are better at disengaging from everything else to play in those unstructured ways. If it's totally okay to prefer structured play, there's no point in having mentioned the daughter at all.
posted by Sequence at 3:49 PM on June 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


I find her thought process disorganized and kind of weird. I agree that privileging sports over making a stop motion movie is completely backwards, in my way of thinking.
posted by MythMaker at 4:05 PM on June 8, 2017 [10 favorites]


I think it's important to recognize that she's making those statements in the context of a discussion of the value of sports and playing over treating exercise as a chore, rather than strictly making a value judgement of one over the other. Though both the title of the article and the way I framed it here doesn't help the impression that it's making a larger point.
posted by jacquilynne at 4:12 PM on June 8, 2017


It’s not that she’s playing “wrong,” but I worry that the sports ambivalence is my fault.

Yeah, fuck this My and many other's ambivalence to sports are exactly because of sports uber alles types like her.
posted by Sangermaine at 4:25 PM on June 8, 2017 [4 favorites]


I'm a man. In our household my obligation is to earn money, something I cannot ignore. I'm self-employed in the gig economy (got laid off from a job with days off and a pension during the Great Recession), so I almost always do a little work 4-6 hours per weekend :(
posted by My Dad at 4:33 PM on June 8, 2017


I run a small business. I love working weekends, because there are fewer distractions like ringing telephones. Weekend work can be very focused and productive in this way, and I can check off many obligations and turn them into money.

I'm part of a small family. I therefore must also participate in family projects, such as love and transportation and food acquisition/preparation/remediation/disposal. These things cluster on weekends but bleed through into anytime. With the horological self-determination running a small business affords me I have the flexibility to check off many obligations and turn them into bonding.

I use the time that isn't either of these things to exercise outside, just like one of the links said about fancy New Yorkers. (I am not a fancy New Yorker, though.) I am not at all comfortable with actual "down time" and have difficulty not pursuing an agenda, even if that agenda is building a really cool sandcastle.

It is not unusual for me to be hazy on whether the current day is or isn't a weekend.

My wife has a job that features a boss, and strictly structured time. She is acutely aware of when weekends are. Sometimes weekends make her sad because she "doesn't accomplish enough" within their bounds.
posted by Construction Concern at 5:59 PM on June 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


I am the default family tech support guy. Weekends? Tell me more of your quaint legends and myths!
posted by Samizdata at 6:52 PM on June 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


Weekends are the best! Two days when you don't have to work and you can spend time with your family or your reading or your weird hobby (they're all weird). What's not to like?

Ok, some people are tethered to their work perpetually; I get that, and am appropriately sad. After three decades of teaching, I viewed weekends as either a vacation or a time to catch up on a few hundred papers to grade. It was a toss-up. At least I didn't have to punch a time clock on weekends, although it never failed to piss me off that all of the work I did on Saturdays and Sundays was not in any way part of my evaluation of my effectiveness as a teacher. I could have just slapped a grade on students' papers without any comments, and it would have made no difference in the school district's "rubric" for evaluating teachers.

Is there a word I hate more that "rubric?" Well, as an musician/artist, in certain contexts, I hate the word "content." That's all I can think of at the moment, aside from racial slurs and the word "Trump."
posted by kozad at 9:12 PM on June 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


IT'S FRIDAY. ALMOST THE WEEKEND. IT'S 3PM WHERE I AM AND 3AM ON THE EAST COAST. IN MY ROOM THE LIGHTS ARE ON AND THE CURTAINS ARE SHUT. THE AIR CONDITIONING IS SET TO 25c AND THE COFFEE IS HOT AND

AN IM ICON BELOW THIS WINDOW IS FLASHING.

IT LOOKS LIKE ANOTHER DOCUMENT. I WONDER WHAT THIS ONE WILL BE ABOUT. CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY MANAGEMENT PLATFORMS? TRACTOR PART REVENUE PROJECTIONS? ONCE I HAD A DOCUMENT ABOUT THE SKY. I REMEMBER THE SKY. IT HAD CLOUDS. IT REMINDED ME I STILL HAVE THE CAPACITY FOR TEARS, WHICH OBSCURED MY VISION AND I HAD TO STOP AND THE DOCUMENT GLARED AT ME IN ANGER.

PERHAPS THAT WAS A WEEKEND, BUT TIME IS ONLY MARKED BY FATIGUE NOW. THERE IS MORE OR LESS FATIGUE.

I MUST TYPE IN THE OTHER WINDOW NOW. GOODBYE.
posted by saysthis at 12:41 AM on June 9, 2017 [5 favorites]


She considers it a fault that her daughter isn't doing it--and possibly her fault as a mother.

I wish I could ignore my obligations, but as it is with severe inattentive ADHD, it's the fact I can become so insecure, anxious, and scared about slipping behind on them that makes them unmanageably emotionally overwhelming at times. Feeling guilty and ashamed about not living up to your own expectations is hard enough, but having the weight of a parent's disappointment/shame to bear, too, can be far worse. I hope she doesn't let her own expectations and ideas about what healthy play should or shouldn't be become a wedge in her relationship with her daughter or let them become an excuse to see her daughter's preferred forms of less structured, less immediate goal oriented forms of play as less valuable and legitimate.
posted by saulgoodman at 4:54 AM on June 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


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