I worked on Sunday, rather than take a day off, largely because I missed 3 days of work last week going to watch the election coverage in Zurich. At the time, this seemed like a quite virtuous decision - making up for lost time, working on a day when people normally rest. Granted, work is probably not on the list of Italian virtues, but this made it all the more appealing.

In the end, I would have been better off not being virtuous, as "virtue" has turned me into a Tuesday burn-out. Tomorrow I have effectively three choices, as I see it:

(a). Work, but go easy. Go to work, do a normal day's work, come home, play the guitar, go to bed early, hope for the best on Thursday.

(b). Short-shrift work. Maybe take a half-day, maybe take the whole day off, relax around home, go for a walk or three, play the guitar until my fingers fall off, entertain my roommates with the most ordinary things, nap.

(c). Work, but afterward do something irresponsible and mildly self-destructive but not really self-destructive, and nothing out of the realm of the broadly socially-acceptable. There is a group of people that get together for drinks on Wednesday nights at the only Wednesday-night hang-out spot I know of in Genoa. Some of them are northern Europeans, which means that in all likelihood I can find a heavy drinking partner or six. Projecting this trajectory out to its inevitable end would only make it sound less appealing.

While both (a) and (b) seem reasonable alternatives, I must admit to having a slight preference on aesthetic grounds for (c). However, it was my own reprehensible sense of the aesthetically pleasing (valuing becoming a work robot over being a human being) that got me into this situation in the first place, so perhaps this time around discretion will be the better part of valor. On the other hand, there is something appealingly consistent about consciously making the same mistake over again for both the same reason (being unwilling to consider fully the future result of present action) and at the same time for the opposite reason (in the name of work, in the name of not work).

In other news, why had I never heard of American Tune by Paul Simon before? Unfortunately for everyone around me, this song is (a) extremely appropriate to my current circumstances, (b) just enough in my range to make singing it a possibility and (c) just enough out of my range to make the whole process awkward for everyone involved.