by Michael A Kazanjian
editor in chief
Saturday holds such high expectations. Either you work all week, or you go to school all week, or you’re one of the lucky few who gets to do both and you just can’t wait for Saturday to come. Saturday, however, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
It was so much easier when I was 10. I’d wake up, eat three bowls of something covered in chocolate with a splash of milk and proceed to watch cartoons until my ass hurt. Well those days are gone. Now I wake up, shower, shave and go to work. I’m not even sure if Saturday morning cartoons still exist. My entire Saturday isn’t shot though. I get off work at 1 so after that I’m free to frolic. The major difference between Saturdays when you’re a kid and when you’re supposed to be an adult is the planning. Nothing just happens anymore, it needs to be planned. This is where I fail miserably. Three Saturdays from this past summer come to mind immediately.
Saturday number one. My very significant other and I decide to take a ride into Lancaster. I guess the plan was to see how differently people live even though they live no more than two hours away. Well, we really didn’t get that far. After an hour or so of driving we hit some major traffic. You really know traffic is bad when horse and buggies blaze by you and your “luxury” automobile. The next hour and a half was spent crawling up the street. We finally got into Lancaster realizing that neither of us were interested in Amish people. The only thing we did was go to the GAP outlet. I drove three hours to go to the GAP. In case you missed that, I DROVE THREE HOURS TO GO THE GAP! I didn’t even buy anything.
The next Saturday wasn’t much better. After our failed attempt at Amishville we decided to try something more traditional. Off to the Jersey Shore we went. Well, sort of. Again I dealt with the demon known as “traffic.” A ride that normally takes no more than an hour and fifteen minutes lasted for about four glorious hours. Eureka! We hit the beach. Unfortunately, so did the storm clouds. But we stuck it out. As people fled the beach in horror we stayed. Damn it, it took me four hours to get there and I was going to get stung by a greenhead fly, no matter what force of nature tried to drive me out.
While these last two Saturdays weren’t a success, at least they weren’t volatile. The final Saturday of the summer was the Saturday to top them all. My mother’s friend owns a few apartments on Broad Street in Philadelphia. She told my mom that some tenants had just moved out and they needed the place cleaned before the new tenants moved in. My mom told her that her son and his girlfriend might be interested in doing it for some extra cash. So we agreed. We walked into that hellhole three days later and regretted it ever since. Dirt was caked to every corner of this place. The more we scrubbed the more dirt seemed to pop up. The kicker, however, was the refrigerator. I pulled that door open and nearly tossed my cookies. The feathers that were stuck in the carpet should have tipped us off to something shady. What I discovered was as horrific sight as you could imagine. Residing on the bottom shelf of the fridge was a dead chicken. We’re not talking about Purdue here, we’re talking about a chicken that was beheaded in the living room and tossed into the icebox in a pool of blood. I’ll allow you a minute to cringe. Okay, are you feeling all right? Well, I wasn’t dumb enough to touch it, don’t worry, I left that lovely task up to the landlord. Was it worth the sixty bucks we got paid? No way in hell.
So this is what Saturday has become. What a shame. Thank God there’s always Sunday.
