calendar.

éthé's gazette #5: giving each day a (oddly specific) color.

Am I the only person who gets a certain energy, a certain aura from each day of the week? Like, am I weird for thinking that Thursday is olive green, Friday is dark orange, and Monday is grey?

Let’s take an emotional break. It’s Sunday, my angels, and in this issue, I’m talking about days, literally.

I’m giving them colors. Pinterest (the sponsor of my prompts and where I got the inspiration to start this gazette) told me to give each day a title, but my free will decided to give them colors. Why not?

Monday: grey. vaporous gray.

Monday smells like black coffee, two sleep paralyses at night, the annoying 7 o’clock alarm, and CJ’s famous quote from GTA San Andreas.

You’re just easily irritated, you hate living, you hate the day in which you were born, you hate the day you made a CV or had your parents drag you one day to school, just because of that damned 7 am alarm. Some have it worse and have their alarms ring even earlier! Fuck ass misery implemented by the industrial revolution.

The only good Mondays I recall having are the ones I live through on my school breaks, the ones in which I get to sleep more, worry less about the noise of twenty children in one classroom, and relax and stretch like a cat. Not saying that Mondays don’t get any better or change color, but most of my school and work Mondays started with a foggy shade of gray; either one of the morning sky, or the one in my brain that didn’t get enough sleep and still tries to process last night’s dream, what to wear for work, what to cook after work, and what to teach, all at once.

Tuesday: blue iris.

Through my doomscrolling, I discovered a reel of a French lady cheering:

C’est mardi, c’est bientôt le weekend!

It’s Tuesday, it’s almost the weekend!

And that’s been my life motto ever since. It’s one of the few delusions that’s been making my life easier these past couple of years. It’s Tuesday, it’s almost the weekend! It’s April, summer days are around the corner! So delusional, yet so sweet, manifesting the proximity of things that seem far, or just left recently. It gives you a sense of comfort, no matter how fake it might seem.

That’s the same sense of comfort amid the exhaustion of a week that the blue iris color gives me, that Tuesday gives me.

Why blue iris, though? It’s the color the sky takes first thing in the dawn, the comfortable hue before the sun rises, and also the one when it goes to hide on the horizon after a long day. To me, it’s the hue that announces new beginnings, the comfortable hue that is proud of you for making it out of your bed early to witness it and start your day, and it’s the same hue of violet-looking blue that gives you the final hug after sunset kisses your eyes and night becomes your bedroom. It’s the blue hue that tells you “what a tiring day it was, huh? Well, you got that done, it passed, and you can be proud of yourself for letting it pass. Now, rest.”

Tuesday gives me the same emotion; people always moan about its uselessness, a filler day that was made just so a week follows the same biblical calendar of God creating everything in six days and resting on the seventh, but oh, how much I disagree.

I won’t claim that Tuesday is the most important day of the week, or that it’s my favorite (this year it’s been my nightmare, for it’s usually the busiest day of my week), but I’d still defend its importance through the soft, silent energy it gives me to keep pushing through the rest of the week, that yes it’s just the beginning but the comfort you’ll find in the end is not far fetched. It’s Tuesday, the weekend isn’t that far!

Wednesday: mandarin orange

This might be the first time you’d ever hear this somewhere, but Wednesday is the September of weekdays. What also comes out abundantly in September? Mandarins.

Why did I make such an absurd claim? Such a funny, senseless correlation between Wednesday and September? I’ll elaborate.

On the calendar, Wednesday is the heart of a work week, and it’s the end of a week’s beginning before you start noticing the seduction of a weekend. Wednesday is like that colleague talking to you at an after-work café, saying something of high importance, you try to focus on, while there’s a good-looking person at the other corner of the café winking at you. Of course, you’d be an asshole for leaving your colleague and falling for temptations, but it just feels slightly annoying since you wish you were with that person on the corner instead. On the same discourse, but in a contrasting perspective: Again, you’re still with that colleague, same important conversation that cannot be postponed, but through the boredom of that important conversation, your brain still clings to the memory of the passionate kiss you shared with a pretty person while dancing in a rock concert a few days earlier, and you can’t wait for this to happen again soon.

Same for September to people in academia (students, teachers, or professors), except it is the beginning of the end; the end of the summer you always yearn for, and a year in which you put so much life and built many memories. You yearn for a past summer, its fruits, the waves of its beaches, the beauty of its outfits, the lukewarm dinners after a hot day, and the musical memories. You look forward to the school year as something to deal with that will eventually pass, like every year of your life, but not as much as you do to Halloween, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. September is just there in the middle, a thing you have to go through, and so is Wednesday. You can’t have a week without a Wednesday.

But hey, you at least have the possibility of a mandarin-like sweetness!

Thursday: Olive green.

Is it just me, or are Thursdays oddly relaxing, no matter how pivotal they could be?

Thursdays feel like touching grass, it either makes you in touch with reality (and sometimes, it could be ugly, devastating even), or puts your neurons in the mode of finishing your weekly tasks. Hence, you get to celebrate your little successes and achievements on the weekend, just as you usually reward yourself.

I had most of my core memories and canon events made on Thursdays (Let’s be fair, I was born on a Thursday), but other than these core memories, I had a habit of taking Thursdays for mental rest after work; I take a nap, make myself a decent meal, spend a couple of hours at the gym, then return for a more fulfilling dinner next to an entertaining TV-Show/movie. Thursday is as relaxing, demure, and lukewarm as the heat of May, the songs of Marco Castello, and the taste of olive oil.

Friday: Spectra yellow.

I think the thing that made me associate that color with Friday is a moment this week in which I was on my way back from work, when the sun was so golden on my brown eyes, and the sky looked like gold water.

Fridays make you excited for the weekend; it’s the last day of a work week, and you think more about the weekend plans (that if you didn’t think about them throughout the entirety of the week) than whatever is left to do with your work. It feels like the last day of spring before summer comes, the last minute at work before you start your holiday, and the moment in which you wake up excited for a beach day, having a lovely breakfast, packing your sandwiches, putting on your swimsuit, making a decent playlist, and having a fun day.

Saturday: the shade of blue in this image

The star of the show, you can’t ever change my mind. EVER.

I gave it a shade of blue that I cannot verbalize, but a shade so glittery. Saturday is the star of the show; it’s the weekday you live for. Don’t try to convince me that you live for Mondays, unless you have a trauma-bond with your work, unless your job is your only source of joy somewhere forsaken. Saturdays are what we live for; we work five or six days a week, so we spend the bonus of our money on living Saturdays.

On the concerts you attend,

The clubs,

The drinks,

The food,

The good memories,

The moments in which the world feels like a small village,

The moments that feel like there’s no tomorrow,

The revival of connections,

The creation of new ones.

Sunday: wispy-cloud-white

Many qualify Sunday as the beginning of the week, whereas the majority of the planet (for falling under capitalism, Christianity, or both) disagrees. I join their disagreement; I cannot start my week with an inactive Sunday. Sundays feel like limbo, a restful border point between the immense heat of a week’s end and everything you’ll leave behind with fragments that will stick to you a little, and the new beginning of a new week that you most probably dread because it will just feel like being back in a loop. Sundays are there for you to be hungover, take a shower, have your fattest meal, be lazy, create something, and then plan your week. Good thing we don’t work on Sundays.

This Sunday, I spent more than four hours in my comfort café of the capital, taking the day slow, writing this article, looking at beautiful people, chatting with my beautiful people online, softly living through my hangover from last night, listening to some Japanese jazz fusion, and not stressing a bit about how I’d return home because I’m working on Monday morning. I don’t live for Mondays, so why would I overthink what’s assured? I won’t get to live what I’m currently living on any other day but Sunday (until summer, when all of my days turn into Sundays), and that’s an opportunity, a privilege I cannot miss on when I have the option to live fully.

The white, though? The color of how light my soul feels through it, so light it floats.

Your turn, have you ever thought of giving your weekdays a certain colour palette? a set of flavors or tastes even? or are your days just normal, almost similar with few differences, and I’m nuts for making such an article? The answers are yours.

With much love,

éthé.