Day 23 - An Unexpected Day Off

Today, I received a wonderful gift - an unexpected day off of work tomorrow, in celebration of our girl’s basketball team winning the State Championship yesterday.  This is truly something new.

I blogged last week about the anticipation and expectation created by the possibility of a snow day.  This day is like getting a snow day without all that baggage.  We simply got an email that explained the reason for the celebratory break, congratulated the team, and encouraged us to enjoy the day off.

I initially had a difficult time wrapping my mind around the reality of this day off.  I was expecting to put in eight plus hours of work tomorrow, and suddenly I found that those same eight hours can be spent however I want. 

When presented with a hypothetical day off, I have any number of fantasies of how I will spend it.  I imagine that I might do any or all of the following in no particular order: sleep in, make a delicious breakfast, sit in my pajamas for as long as I want, read a book, take a yoga class, paint my nails, go shopping, visit a friend, take a nap, do a happy dance, clean my bathroom, vacuum, get Starbucks, do another happy dance, go for a run, go see a movie, clean my stove, tell everyone I know how excited I am to have a day off, lay on my couch, watch bad television etc. etc. etc.

Now, I’m pretty good with time management, and I can see clearly that I will never be able to do all of the above in a single day off.  Should I attempt to pack my day with even three quarters of those things, it will fail to be a day off at all.  10 pm will roll around, and I’ll be exhausted. 

So the question becomes, then, just how should I spend my day off?  Am I under any obligation to do any particular thing?  What if I sit in my pajamas, eat anything and everything edible in my apartment, and watch the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy? (I don’t own it, but what the heck – I could go out and get it for the occasion).  What if I sleep until noon, then go shop at the exorbitantly priced boutiques on Damen Ave. and spend way more than I can afford on scarves, dresses, and Lululemon yoga clothes?  What if I wake up at eight, load up on snacks and coffee, get in my car, then drive north until I hit snow?  I could get out, make snow angels, scream at the top of my lungs, and then sit in the muffled whiteness.  What if I spend all day using my teacher ID to visit, for free, every museum in Chicago?  I could peruse ancient artifacts at the Field Museum, make faces at the fish at the Shedd, and sit silently and contemplatively before Monets at the Art Institute. 

I could do any of these things – and the “what if’s” are endless. The beauty of a day off is that it gives us the chance to imagine – to act like children again, when days off could be filled with trips to moon on a bicycle or treks up Mt. Everest on the incline in one’s own backyard.  It’s fun to fantasize, but at the end of it all, a day is just a day – far too small to fit all the wild dreams of one eternally grateful English teacher. 

I don’t know what I’ll do with my day tomorrow – but I do know that those twelve or so “found” hours are my oyster, and I can’t wait to find the pearl.  Here’s to free days, and filling them with anything we dare – or just filling them with dreams.