Silly Tuesday: a new personal tradition
There’s an iconic line in a Seinfeld episode called The Sniffing Accountant, which goes, “Monday has a feel. Friday has a feel. Sunday has a feel. But Tuesday… Tuesday has no feel.” And while truer words have never been spoken, it doesn’t mean they have to be.
I first took to this line when I was a 19-year-old runabout living in a share house in the city, and when Newman first uttered those words from the backseat of Jerry’s car, it changed me. I pulled them from the sitcom from which they came and consciously welded them into the very fabric of my life. I transformed them into something else. Into something beautiful. Into something I call: Silly Tuesday.
Silly Tuesday is all about giving the most mundane day of the week, Tuesday, a feel. It’s about giving it a point of difference, a real hot spot on the podium. It’s something I’ve been doing for the last 11 years, and it’s something I hope to continue doing for many more to come.
It works by giving your daily life a shake up and making decisions that you wouldn’t normally make each and every Tuesday. It can be the smallest of actions, like brushing your teeth with the opposite hand, a process infinitely harder than it seems. It can be that of driving a different route to work, something which more often than not leads to wrong turns, but also leads to discovering new streets like Batman Lane. Or it can even be as simple as signing off emails with a stupid phrase like “cheerio” or “regrettably”.
But it’s best when these decisions are bolder actions, like selecting a completely bizarre menu item for lunch instead of a usual: a risk of extreme proportions that often comes with a bout of food envy. It can be talking to a complete stranger, stepping out of introversion to ask about a dog’s breed, a question of utmost importance. Perhaps it’s a drastic action like that of shaving one’s head. Intense changes like the latter are dangerous and often foolhardy, but they are what make Silly Tuesday live up to its very name.
It’s a name that came about with no consideration at all, born from the sole fact I started out making decisions about how my day progressed that I deemed as silly. Silly, by very definition, is about lacking common sense and judgement; it is being absurd and foolish for the sake of it. The real irony here is that I’ve found my foolish decisions can bear opposite results.
Silly Tuesday has blindsided me into a new world of personal discovery. I find that quite stupid. By allowing me to experience the full spectrum of life’s what ifs without any of the guilt of missing out (you can do that on the other six days of the week) it has become an evolution of my favourite childhood memory: Opposite Day. What’s changed is that it’s not choosing the direct opposite of a decision, it’s just doing different for different’s sake. It’s keeping the trends of Primary School alive well into your thirties. It’s swapping your usual long black out for a Just Juice popper, a Peter Pan-ism innocent enough that everyone can get behind.
Since coming to this discovery, I have formed the belief that Silly Tuesday exists as such a standout part of my weekly life because, really, I’ve never expected any kind of profound meaning from it. Silly Tuesday’s charm comes from a subconscious-like repetition week-in and week-out. It’s a frame of reference to make sense of just how stupid our lives are. It’s a marker, a timestamp, a stain on the week’s sidewalk. It’s a kid colouring in the crossword puzzle. It’s painting your light bulbs blue one night of the week or putting in washout orange hair dye. It’s not clinging on; it’s throwing yourself outward. Silly Tuesday is a double exclamation point in a professional email, one that says sometimes you need to break the rules, even if it makes someone else cringe.
Personal traditions like these keep us in check. It’s the commerce of a relationship with our inner child that can pay out dividends to our inner adult. And the best thing? It’s easy to get started. Next Tuesday you should go to McDonald’s and order a quarter pounder with hotcakes instead of the bun. They can’t stop you.