In Which I am Not Myself

She thought that Mondays after Spring Break should be reserved for Intensive Coffee Drinking and Other Forms of Relaxing, such as Not Lecturing and Not Teaching. Even Going to the Doctor seemed preferable to Talking to A Room of Students Not in Attendance. Collecting Papers seemed a task invented in one of the lower Circles of Hell, possibly the Circle in which Administrators languished, no doubt Drinking Coffee and Inventing Other Tasks, such as Assessment and Teacher Evaluations. Grading Papers, she knew, was a task reserved for Some Other Day, certainly not Today.
No, Today was Monday. Today was the Day for Not Being Ones Self, wholly, but somehow Partially and in jeans, no less. Today was Monday, the day invented by those who, obviously, do not Toil but only Work, whatever that means. Today was the day the Students, by which she means those registered for the class not necessarily those who Show Up, thought was Optional, which they understood to mean Not Required, just like the Papers they Didn't Turn In, which, frankly, was like A Lot of Other Things this semester.
Oh yes, the Monday after Spring Break is a special kind of Monday. A Monday which needs Vodka Drinks and other things, like Chocolate and possibly Cookies and definitely Alcohol to be Gotten Through, by which she means endured until Passing Out which, in her opinion, is the only acceptable conclusion to the Monday After Spring Break.

The Day After

And so they found themselves, as happens after numerous meals comprised of fowl and root vegetables, squash and beans, bloated and satiated, happily drowsy and gazing into a glass of wine or tea, contemplating the coming day, usually devoted to the purchase of gifts, for others and oneself, gifts in celebration of the approaching winter holiday, obtained this day at a drastic discount in order to save money for other purchases: the festive evergreen, the white lights that blazed like candles, the shiny silver balls that reflected back the spherical faces of children hoping to decipher the cryptic messages of box and bow, the candy canes, and the secret coveted gift, the one each so desperately wanted and yet failed to articulate so that when the holiday came and went without the gift being given or received, the desire remained secret and so the disappointment, but perhaps a little extra income remained so that the one who desired the secret gift could buy it for herself and keep it secret, only taking it out at established intervals and cherishing it in that way that only secret possessions are cherished, with a concealed fervor that stands in for all secret desires, private hopes, thwarted passions, and so this day, gazing into the scarlet liquid they can almost see the peaks and valleys of the impending season, what may come to pass and what will, how things hoped for and imagined rarely, if ever, came to pass, instead those coming days bore a striking resemblance to the days already passed, and those resembled the days before and so on, so that life, interrupted by feasts and famines, was really, when they stopped to think about, nearly always the same.