Saturday Night Lives
Seeing as it is that Sunday is the only day on which most Natural Sciences students are able to waken at a time of their choosing (except during weekdays for those people who make the choice of not going to lectures), Saturday night must be the most appropriate time to satisfy the hedonistic desires accumulated over grinding math lectures or agony-inducing practicals, though seemingly only the locals do such things (as pointed out by A--, "his moral standards are rather dubious, which S-- then pointed out as a fitting descriptor of most people in Cambridge).
Rather than allow thumping music to resonate inside my skull while staring blankly into a glass of leftover ale, the small hours of Saturday night are generally dedicated to perhaps the diametric opposite of the practice of "partying", a term widely used to describe any variety of selections from the smorgasbord of intemperance, with starters of binge drinking and entreés of gratuitous debauchery, a meal taken in a dimly lit room with disco for muzak, and that is ironing. Provided the power stays on, the release provided by ironing sometimes leads me to iron in places that others will not see. Instead of smoky, hazy environments there is the clinical, fluorescent-lit laundry room, and instead of all the excess there is unprecedented minimalism, for there is only one tool, and that is heat.
Probably, it is ridiculous to glorify ironing in this manner. But, as it is the stuff of dark secrets, there is something that each individual enjoys that fulfils a certain role, a hazy role but nonetheless one that feels comfortable doing. Because there is a certain overlap between everybody about such matters relating to the mundane, we tend to find such activities in the rank corners of people's lives, sometimes bordering on the controversial. It just so happens that while for most people it is getting drunk and wheeling a battered shopping trolley across the street, ironing, while not the number one satisfaction activity, is, in my case, an analogue for this.
What people do on Saturday night, complications notwithstanding, tends to be what they value most cost-effective for their time, or most worth their time, more accurately. It is the prime-time slot, just like in television, for our lives. What is shown during that time is often more or less a reliable indicator of the quality (sort) of what occurs during the rest of the time.
Naturally, I am usually alone in doing this, but sometimes I see that this time slot is an accurate indicator, though a rough one, of what kinds of other people are doing. For example, I used to see a person wearing a T-shirt that said "Will work for bandwidth", which, of course, is only owned by people with more geekish tendencies. It doesn't take much prodding to put this in perspective. Probably, laundry wasn't his thing, it was a necessity, but he was sticking around at 12 a.m. on Saturday, not out there, not out cold.
It's not to say that I don't like to do other things, like cook, or drink, or hang out in general, which, of course, must take place on Saturday night generally for lack of a better time. But our Saturday nights are precious, and like all that is precious, the manner in which we choose to utilise it is wholly edifying.
