The only thing greater than a long weekend is an eternal weekend, and in a sense I have been experiencing one of those since late March. Not that I don’t immerse myself earnestly in my daily jobstuffs, but I no longer have to contend with public transit or the indignity of waking up more than two hours before my shift. The unpleasantness of my job has been whisked away to memory. Unfortunately, this project has not, which means that once more I am shackled to my computer to recount the events of another wild Sunday:
National Cheese Pizza Day
Okay, a quick survey of the year has shown that we have already celebrated this several times over.
To be clear, I am not particularly interested in a cheese-only pizza, unless the sauce and dough are beyond exemplary, like to the point of making up for the lack of any other toppings. I have had such a pizza, but not in this city. A cheese pizza is, for the purposes of this day, a pizza with cheese on it. If other toppings are added, that’s just groovy. As it happens, the pizza we ordered from Tony’s Pizza Palace was in fact their New York style, which is a cheese-only pizza. Then we added some toppings. So that counts.
National Pizza Day was February 9. Check. National Deep Dish Pizza Day was on April 5, and we made our own. National Pizza Party Day landed on May 15, and though the ‘party’ side of it was quite limited due to quarantine, we partied with pizza. We’ve got National Pepperoni Pizza Day, National Sausage Pizza Day and National Pizza With The Works Except Anchovies Day still to come.
So yesterday we simply had some pizza, and made sure there was cheese on it. It was terrific.
National Read A Book Day
We have also gone through several reading celebrations this year, so once again we are strolling into overly familiar territory here. Jodie is pictured above, doing exactly what the title of this day would suggest. I also read a little, but given that I had a few more technical hurdles to vault today as well as this writing and a heap of chores, I could only read so much.
There is no source to this one, so let’s just assume it’s some person or persons who felt the world could benefit from a bit more book-learnin’. And that person or persons was absolutely correct. It has been said that we are deep into Idiocracy territory now, a time when anti-science and anti-intellectualism are at an all-time high. Who said it? Well, me and a whole bunch of others online. What is our evidence? Just… look at the world. That should suffice.
Books are a pathway to learning, especially when you read heavy, non-fiction stuff (or high-quality fiction stuff). And learning is the clearest route to escaping this era in which the dumb have been granted a visible pulpit from which to decry science and rearrange their myths into ‘evidence’ that logic and common sense should be abandoned.
So pick up a book and read, even if you’ve got to get rolling with something simple, like a collection of Far Side cartoons.
Fight Procrastination Day
So this is the day in which I am supposed to deploy whatever I have in my arsenal to ensure that I don’t procrastinate. This would be terrific if it wasn’t for the fact that I have to do that literally every day. I find I am all too often poised upon the precipice of productivity, only to find myself sliding into a game on my phone, or a distracting article online, or an argument with a political dullard on social media. This is my every day.
And it’s not that this project is immune – in fact, it may be the most vile muse for my inspiration lately. I have not been shy about the fact that my passion for celebrating and re-celebrating the same things over and over again is diffusing. I see this project only partly as a chance to praise the greatness in the world around me (like cheese pizza, for example), and more of a slog through semi-interesting factoids about vultures, while trying to force yet another entry to detail why it’s not a bad thing to pick up a book.
Procrastination does its damned best to steer me toward literally anything other than the tasks before me when it comes to this project lately. But just as I had to overcome the notion of writer’s block even existing in order to produce 1,000 consecutive days of productivity a few years back, I must also push aside any sort of blockade to my creativity this year. The end result has been, at least to my disgruntled perception, adequate at best. The rigorous constraints of this project and our perpetually tenuous finances have kept this project from true greatness, I feel.
But here I am. And I’m writing, even though yesterday was a Sunday with the promise of so much glory (including a nap I never took). For me, the best way to fight procrastination is simply to not acknowledge it as an option. Or, more often, to embrace it and just make sure I get to what I have to do before it’s too late. Not the greatest wisdom to take away from this day, but it’s honest.
Happy long weekend to all who get one. We do, but that doesn’t mean we are exempt from digging into all of this:
- Labour Day. As union members and strong supporters of the labour movement, we’re happy to celebrate this one.
- National Beer Lovers Day. I don’t care if we’ve already celebrated a few days exactly like this one. We’re happy to celebrate this as well.
- National Neither Snow Nor Rain Day. Well, this isn’t really up to us, is it?
- National Acorn Squash Day. This is not a food I’m sure you can find around here. But we’ll look.
- National Salami Day. Hooray for meats.
- National Grateful Parent Day. I’m grateful that Penelope has not yet become a crushing disappointment. Oh, our human kids haven’t either, so that’s a bonus.
- National New Hampshire Day. We were supposed to make steamed clams for this. Do you know how crazy-hard it is to find clams around here these days?
- Google Commemoration Day. A day to commemorate one of the most successful companies on the planet. Neat.
- Mouthguard Day. I will guard my mouth with the utmost diligence today.
- National Feel The Love Day. *sigh* – see what I wrote above about repeat days.
- Grandma Moses Day. She was everyone’s grandma, wasn’t she?
- Superhuman Day. Well, this is for someone, not necessarily me. But we’ll look into it.
celebrate366.com 