On My Brief Stint as a Weekend Warrior

Bleary-eyed, this morning at lunch with Joe, I looked up and said, "I really don't think I can do this weekend warrior shit anymore."

Seriously, here's to you, frat boys and binge-drinking college students. God bless you, but it's a hard damn life. Unbelievably fun, it turns out, but liable to wear you the fuck out.

Maybe I'm just getting old, I think to myself, at the ripe old age of 24, as I finally extricate myself from my "sleeping" place on the couch and retreat to the kitchen table to write my grocery list. I can't sleep well on the couch because, well, a million reasons. Like: the metal in my back makes it uncomfortable, or because I've never been too good sleeping sitting up. Or because I can't stop thinking about aquaporins and research. Because I can never stop thinking about research.

Joe points out that I can't be a real weekend warrior, because weekend warrior's don't have weekend responsibilities. They don't have to go to the lab to make buffers or run PCR or do extractions--that is, they don't have to be functional on the weekend. I, on the other hand, do have weekend responsibilities: lab stuff, sure, but also cooking and cleaning, running errands. My apartment does not, as it turns out, organize itself. And if I don't get groceries, then two people don't eat. And so on.

I don't really have that much of a desire to be a weekend warrior, anyway--it just turns out that I have a lot of friends here now, in a lot of different circumstances. And for a lot of us, it just makes sense to do things on the weekend. But doing one thing often spins out of control, until I have planned myself to the hilt. Enter hung-over mexican food lunch at 11 AM. Enter Rocky Horror Picture show at midnight. Enter going and going and going until I collapse, exhausted, at the end of the day.

It makes for some incredibly fun weekends, filled out with tequila and laughter and sitting with my back up against the arm of the couch, turned sideways with my feet tucked in under me, bent forward and talking about something--politics, history, medicine--as the long hours wind by.

But next weekend, I think I'm just going to stay home. I may be boring, but at least I'll be rested.