I always look forward to the weekends here. It took a while, but now I find I have the weekend mentality just the same as I did on the outside. Once bath time ends on Friday, my work is done, and I have a massage followed by 60-some hours of free time. I get weekends off from exercising, so my only commitment is to be hungry when a meal comes. Whereas, during the week, I am tended to by a swift fleet of nurses, once Friday evening rolls around there is only one nurse on duty, and I usually don’t see her unless I ring for her. Previous subjects had warned me that the weekends would get lonely, but if I didn’t revel in solitude I wouldn’t have volunteered for the study in the first place. I love having so much time to kick around, and usually it’s nicely broken up by friends and family who come to visit. That all being said, the time passes faster on the weekends than it does during the week. Often I find myself looking at the clock and wondering how another three hours disappeared.
On the morning of Monday, September 11, I celebrated the halfway point of the study. Forty-two days down, forty-two to go. If the second half is going to go as quickly as the first half did, I’d better get myself in gear to write, read, and study as much as I can while I have the luxury of time.