Happy Weekend!

I'm sitting here in my Old City flat, and the church bells are going mad around the corner at Christchurch Cathedral. The first few times I heard them ringing wildly on an evening, I thought certainly something special must be going on. Perhaps a wedding? Christening? Church anniversary? But now I've heard them repeatedly, every Friday evening, and I've realised what is actually going on: the bells are celebrating, and heralding, the start of the weekend. "Yippeee, it's here!" they seem to call out to anyone who can hear.

A while ago, I was texting a friend to invite her and her partner over for dinner later in the week, and she said that she was nursing a Saturday morning hangover, and generally having a lazy day. That week wouldn't work for dinner, because she had a project due at the end of the week, and would be hitting the books pretty hard. I texted back "Rest up, and get back to work on that project!" Immediately she responded "No way! Weekends are for relaxation and definitely NOT work!"  It struck me how true this was, and how much I agreed with her, given the relative leisure of my current life in Dublin, where I don't have teaching or administrative responsibilities. I've been been slowly rebalancing my life, which I think was quite out of hand for the last few years. But what surprised me about her text was not the sentiment, but the clarity of that sentiment: I will not give up the small bit of leisure time I have - I want to relax, wander about the markets, and spend time with my partner. This all may be very true to many people out there, but work has a way of creeping up, and I am getting the sense that Dubliners do a better job of keeping it at bay than we do back in work-driven Toronto and environs. Yes, the Irish economy is in the shitter, but they're still going out for pints! Balance needs to be approached from both directions. 

The culture of work-life balance is certainly cultural in a geographic sense, but it is also historical. I've just finished watching the first season of the television series Mad Men, and have become quite addicted to it. I think it's fantastically well done, but if we can view it as even remotely representative of middle class life in the early 60s, then it is also fascinating from a cultural standpoint. The main character, Don Draper, is an ad executive at a competitive Manhattan agency by day, and by night, he either goes home to his family in the 'burbs, or his to lovers in the city. It's a sexy show with good production values, a hefty feminist bent, and strong writing. They manage to work the 'origins' of contemporary attitudes into each episode - for example, the most recent one I watched was talking about how all the young people drink coffee, and how it must just be a fad. They also include some of the politics of the day (e.g. the election of Kennedy to the White House). It's clever. But what is most astonishing is the image the series present of work culture: these people are well-paid, they have large suburban houses and drive nice cars, and all they seem to do all day at the office is drink, smoke, socialize, and read newspapers! Then they go home at 5pm. Surely it never was this way? Or was it? Of course the women in the office spend every minute typing away and dealing with barf-inducing sexism, and I bet it really was that way for them. The show is clearly operating in hyperbole, trying to show by exaggeration and contrast how men's lives and women's lives differed so drastically. But the relative amount of time dedicated to leisure by the high powered execs is remarkable (even if the leisure is questionable and bad for your health).