It’s Friday night. We are in the living room, watching 30 Rock in the background. Liz Lemon is barely holding on to her life. We are both working. More than ever before in my life, a quiet Friday night at home with a book or a TV show is just about the closest to heaven one can get without holding a cupcake. A long week has come to a close; you are in loungewear and so society has no say on whether or not what you’re wearing will end you up on a list somewhere. No talking, no need to discuss, present, rationalize. You just sit and read or watch. The next day is when the weekend starts, so Friday night – if played well – is like a free weekend day. The day before. The Eve. Everyone knows the best part of the thing is the day before the thing. Usually.
There’s one point to make. Saturday is Cheat Day. And not even a relaxing Friday night can match Cheat Day.
If you’re one of those who has to incorporate a cheat day into your life, you get what I’m saying. The logic is simple. All week you eat a healthy diet, fruit, veggies, bulgur; you drink water, you never eat anything ‘bad’, no burgers, no heaping plate of pasta. Pizza? No, sorry. Your plate is bedazzled with an array of colorful vegetables that you choke down with a side of moral superiority. It’s great. Healthy living is great.
But once a week, there’s Cheat Day. Saturday in our case. Cheat Day is the day you can let the thirteen-year-old that lives inside you choose all of your food. It is the best day in the world.
Start the day with overnight oats laden with raisins and figs? Hell no. Doughnuts. Lunch on a veggie wrap? Pbbt. How about egg sandwiches with bacon and hashbrowns. Dinner of salmon and veggies on couscous? No sirree Bob. Patty melts and French fries. It was gonna be glorious.
Saturday morning we rise like kids on Hannukah. My coffee – usually black as my soul – is white with cream and agave. It’s like chocolate milk. I dance. I have more coffee. I dance to the bathroom.
I put on 30 Rock with arrogance and purpose. When you are forced by nature to eat a healthy diet and to get your gastronomical jollies on a day specifically apported for it, everything is a lie. In our case, that everything is how Liz Lemon eats and looks. Liz Lemon is played by Tina Fey, a lean, fit woman in her mid-30s. Liz Lemon eats junk food and meatball sandwiches and pop tarts all day long. The very fact that she is portrayed as a glutton and can still fit into pants made for a person whose weight starts with a 1 is absolutely preposterous. And since 30 Rock is our background show, we get to see her eat all of this bad stuff all week long while we have salads and convince ourselves that quinoa is better than pizza. Then I struggle into pants that are so tight they could be worn by a ballerina and I white-knuckle it til Cheat Day.
But today is Cheat Day. I can live and eat like Liz Lemon.
Burke goes out for doughnuts. I eat the remainder of a bag of M&Ms that I couldn’t finish before midnight last Cheat Day. (Yeah, there’s like a gremlin thing to it, I guess.) I am humming. I am ready to go.
A picture comes to my phone via Messenger. The local store is closed today.
“Huh. Weird.”
We decide that she should go to another store nearby that also has doughnuts. But I am alittel uneasy. When my phone rings, I know there’s a problem.
“Is today a national holiday?”
“I don’t know.”
It is. Saint Wenceslas can kiss my vastly expanding ass.
The whole day is thrown. We have not shopped before today as we planned to do it on Cheat Day itself. (A Cheat Day shopping excursion is more fun than drunk shopping. Highly recommend.) But now we have to rely on potravinys (sort of little shops/convenience stores). This means patty melts are out the window. We get potraviny doughnuts, which is like expecting ice cream cake, but getting a snickers bar instead. It’s okay. But it ain’t okay.
We decide to go for afternoon beers. This improves the mood, takes the sting out of our stymied Cheat Day where audibles had to be called. We order food after we get home. Everything is fine. It’s a moderately successful Cheat Day, but the plan was thwarted by Saint Wenceslas and his bad timing. We only had 986 years to plan for this and we blew it. On the TV, Liz Lemon mocks us. She might as well say: “Well, every day is Cheat Day for me, suckers.”
When midnight comes, I’m glum and tipsy. I have no reason to be, as I have eaten the weight of my pets in beef and French fries. As I get into bed and doze off, I think: it’s OK. Another Cheat Day is just around the corner. In 6 days.
