a is for apple, m is for

onday is mop day, says my manager to me.

get it? the "m" in "monday" matches the "m" in "mop". alliteration...so damn clever. genius, in fact. alliteration was literally the only poetic device that i had confidence identifying on english tests back when i was a sophomore in high school. since i am almost always scheduled to work the closing shifts, as well as work on mondays, i have come to dread the letter "m" for what it currently stands for in my life...

first all the chairs must be secured onto tabletops and the entire dining room has to be swept free of debris before the mopping can officially commence...pushing the rag-head device forwards and backwards, submerging it into the sanitizing solution which, after just one rinse, already looks soiled, and then finally squeezing the excess liquid from the tip of the broom to initiate the process again. and again. what's not to love?

to my surprise my work week had completely been altered to accommodate others' schedules, leaving me with a completely open monday. what do i do? begin planning, of course. "let's see...i'll wake up relatively early, bike to yoga, hit up whole foods for their $2 monday coffee and a pastry deal, kill a few hours reading and writing, then attend a second yoga class before heading back home." fast forward to 7:30 a.m. today and you have me locking the door to my apartment and releasing the kick stand. about forty minutes later and i'm in my yoga happy place, sipping on this surprisingly good vanilla-hazelnut tea and waiting for vinyasa flow to begin.

this is when i notice that the girl in front of me has one of those fancy water bottles where you can etch your personal goals directly onto the bottle. i become overwhelmed with curiosity. she begins to unwind in child's pose as i begin to inch my way forward until i'm at the tip of my mat, head and neck outstretched, in what could only be called the "nosy child" pose. but i still can't quite make out what she had written. damn her cursive penmanship and barely visible bright pink pen. i just HAD to know what her goals were. maybe we shared a similar one...maybe we were soulmates. having grown increasingly determined now, i slide into an advanced variation of nosy child until i can just begin to decipher her first goal: "meet chip--". that's all i got. meet chip? after reading the word "meet" i'm thinking the rest of the sentence would be "the man of my dreams", but the name "chip" put that possibility to a screeching halt. who the hell is chip and how many people actually know someone named chip? could she be meeting him for a drink? or to finalize the guest list to an upcoming charity event? i just couldn't fathom who this chip character was and what he could possibly want from my goal-setting yoga bff. she's too good for him. i can totally tell by the way she pulled her hair back into an effortless ponytail. frustrated and confused, i had to find out more...but the bottle was rotated in such a way that i could not read the rest of that sentence! though, by shifting my gaze downward, i could see the second goal she had written for herself: "run the los angeles marathon". there we go, that's more like it. now that i can understand. but why was i so satisfied after uncovering one of her personal goals? should i be focusing a little more on setting and reaching my own goals and a little less on those of strangers?

anyhow, i dodged a mopping bullet today by not being scheduled to work. but just for clarification: m is for muffin. there will be no more sunday nights spent in bed thinking, "shiiitt, monday is mop day" but rather "monday is muffin day!" i see many more monday mornings spent biking to yoga and indulging in a plump and fatty muffin in my future. and maybe, just maybe i'll find out more about chip.