Stella wishes me a “fun-filled weekend.” Stella collects productivity hacks like Santa Claus figurines. Stella believes in metrics and matrices. Stella’s theology involves an eschaton in which all creatures make the highest and best use of their time.

 

Stella prefers action items to circus peanuts. I believe Stella has a recurring calendar alert to wishme a “fun-filled weekend” every Friday at three o’clock.

 

Stella genuinely wants me to have a “fun-filled weekend.” This is not some psychological layer cake with a jalapeno inside. In the Epistemology of Stella, it is the highest and best use of other beings’ time to schedule fun in medicinal doses. She exempts herself from the society of soft-bellied beings, but she defends the hypothetical right to frolic.

 

Her home has a motion sensor to warn of whimsy, but she wraps up rhinestone cats and finger- puppet aliens for my birthday. If peace or corn syrup loiter in her driveway, she gives them directions to my house. She wishes me a “fun-filled weekend.”

 

She does not mean to throw down a gauntlet. But wishes pack question marks for the trip from mouth to ear. My first impulse is to assure Stella that we quiver on the same branch of the phylogenic tree. I, too, get hives when I pause. My second impulse is to defend fun as the hand- crank for work, as though rest is the seraphs’ personal productivity hack.

 

My more garlicky impulse is to prove myself. I wish, at once, to prove that I am hot and cool. I want to show Stella that I have covered my Check Engine light with black tape, the better to crash my monster truck through my own boundaries. I want to show her that my Sunday T-shirt says, “Write Like You’re Running Out Of Time.” I want her to see the trail of stardust as my meteor burns.

 

I also want to grant her wish. I want to report that I procured certifiable fun. If I must slosh among the soft-bellied, may my forehead glisten with beads. I know that “fun” has more faces than a stadium crowd, but I sprint the surface like a water bug.

 

I would like to tell Stella that I met cosmonauts at the Crayola Factory. We melted down colors until we found our own, and now we draw honest pictures. We walked arm in arm and caught the ice cream man. We tried soft serve in twelve flavors and named them for apostles. We walked until we forgot self-discipline, then competed for the title of Slaphappiest.

 

I would like to tell Stella that I fed fennec foxes at the zoo, their ears folding over my arms like tamales. I was authorized to take them on an outing. I emptied my backpack of textbooks to make room for their tails. We put our feet in the water and picked gooseberries. We stopped for a busking saxophonist and dropped a hundred-dollar bill in her jar.

 

I would like to impress Stella with fun that makes the cut. Instead, I will tell Stella how I filled my weekend. I will tremble at the tip of the branch.

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I will tell her I accepted the scandal of sweatpants. I did not heat-style my hair. My bangs stood like wooly bear caterpillars in ecstasy. I summoned my mother’s face on a screen the size of a chocolate bar. We spent forty-five minutes discussing matters from marjoram to Medicare. We devoted most of our valuable time to recaps of reruns and artifacts from TJ Maxx.

 

I can only fill Stella’s ears with the fun that was had. It may be on the wrong docket in the Court of Weekends. I brushed my cats. They blinked sacramental Morse code at me.

 

I drove to a store that looks the same in every zip code. I purchased purple replacements for holey underpants. I enjoyed wide aisles. I tried eight lipsticks from the back of my drawer and made kiss marks on looseleaf. I watched a man named “Uncle Flapjack” sing a song about rainbows on YouTube. I enjoyed it so much I watched it again. I did not meet anyone for Oysters Rockefeller.

 

I will tell Stella that the highlight of my weekend was neither a parade nor a checkbox. I sat cross-legged at a desk with ink stains and a gash from where a cat once misjudged gravity. I wrote unremarkable prose. I wrote until the wild returned. I took it to the supermarket and bought a bag of circus peanuts.

 

I had a fun-filled weekend. No one notarized it. I lay among dandelions without a timer. I watched them turn from yellow to white, from alarms to wishes. I blew urgency away and dreamed that stalks became legs. I ran into the weekend, and I did not return empty. I wish Stella the same.