It's A Tuesday

Remember how you would always say that on soaps, all the good stuff happened on Mondays and Fridays, so you could essentially miss or fast forward through every other day's episode and still know exactly what was going on?

Despite the fact that soaps evolved to include exciting stuff on other days, the Friday cliffhanger thing remained a thing, and it was generally true that the middle of the week days were often full of characters just being characters, going about their daily lives (somewhat different daily lives than ours, but...). And fans and detractors alike would razz the genre about this fact.

The truth is, regular life isn't really all that different. While our major events may not all happen on Mondays and Fridays, and while we get to have weekends (were there weekends on soaps, and we just never realized they were weekends?), in among the days of big events and earthshattering changes, there are days that are simply about doing laundry, or baking a pie, or cleaning a room, or talking to your kids about nothing much in particular. Soap writers might have been called lazy for putting up a day like that, but the reality is (and for many soap viewers, the soap worlds and characters were/are some kind of reality), those days happen.

When I get to a day like that, I sometimes wonder what I am missing--why I am not doing more, or making the day exciting. But without those "Tuesdays" in life (or in soaps, for that matter), perhaps there's no energy for, and not nearly enough contrast with, the "Fridays" and "Mondays." Perhaps, it is just those "Tuesdays" that give us the power to create the "Fridays."

So on those "Tuesdays," whether they land on Wednesday or Monday or Saturday, we simply take care of the business of life. And store up the rest of our story for the next "Friday cliffhanger."