...or, 'If this is Sunday it must be Monday'...or, 'If this is Thursday, it must be Friday'...
I now live in a country where the first day of the working week is Sunday, and where it finishes on a Thursday.
It is quite disconcerting. On a Sunday morning when I am getting ready for the first day of the working week, most people I know are either still asleep, because it is a 'real' Sunday, or are just getting ready to go out, because it is a 'real' Saturday. On a Thursday afternoon, whilst we here have the "TFI.." feeling, nobody I know anywhere else has it because it is a 'real' Thursday still. I could take a plane and go somewhere 'for the weekend' but, of course, it wouldn't be a 'real' weekend. I would have to leave on a 'real' Thursday, which for me would be a Friday, and return on a 'real' Saturday, which for me would be a Sunday.
There are various other countries that work like this, but because I don't know anyone who lives in any of them, it's quite...isolating.
At the same time, and because of how it is here, no single day feels like any other day, yet all of them feel like each other. Shops never appear to be closed, whatever day or time of the day it is; the traffic in the city doesn't seem to behave noticeably differently on different days, and these are just two random, banal, examples. I could go on, because I could go on, but there is no point; there is no discernible way in which you could work out what day of the week it is if you didn't already know.
I was recently in The Hague, in Holland, and in Ankara, in Turkey. In both places 'real' Fridays and 'real' Sundays were, in fact, Fridays and Sundays. In The Hague, things closed at 6 in the evening, and in Ankara (what a deceptively intriguing city that is...) everyone was out on Saturday night.
And I was disconcerted.
Or rather, anisyxos.
Baudrillard, I think, must have known this:
“La presencia no se borra ante el vacío, se borra ante un redoblamiento de presencia que borra la oposición de la presencia y de la ausencia.”
I feel a permanent absence of presence and, yet, at the same time, a continual absence of presence.
