One Week

We're about a week into 2024, and I don't have anything more intelligent to offer you than this inessential bit of textual analysis I've been low-key working on since before Christmas: is the one week in the Barenaked Ladies song One week actually one week (and two days 'til they say they're sorry)?

There are three verses in this hit from 1998, which I listened to on the radio (the radio!) when it was still in top-40 territory. Each one covers nine days of a relationship quarrel, from initial conflagration to the still-deferred apology. I'd always thought of the verses as being a sequence of sorts, with Day 1 of verse two being Day 3 of verse one, and so forth, but now I'm inclined to read the lyrics as being three different Rashomon-style perspectives on the same fight, albeit from one source, the increasingly penitent (if still irreverent) Steven Page. 

Since this is an analysis of no interest to anyone except 90s kids, I'm not going to quote the whole song here; you can refresh on the lyrics at Genius (along with a lot of rather obvious annotations). Here, completed in a burst of procrastination before some kind of obligatory Christmas event, is a breakdown of the fight. I wrote it out trying to figure out how the sequence of the verses fit together, but, as I say, I now think it's all the same week. Anyone needing to procrastinate may feel free to offer further insight.

***

Day 1: She looks at him, cocks her head to the side and says, "I'm angry."

Day 3: She laughs at him and says, "Get back together, come back and see me."

Day 5: The living room, where he realizes it's all his fault, but couldn't tell her.

Day 6: She forgave him, but didn't say so.

Day 9: He will say he's sorry.

Day 1: She throws her arms in the air and says, "You're crazy."

Day 3: She tackles him and give him rug burn on both his knees.

Day 5: She realizes, in the afternoon, that it's not his fault.

Day 6: She forgave him, but didn't say so.

Day 7: He's sitting back and waiting until she says she's sorry.

Day 1: She looks at him, drops her arms to the side, and says she's sorry.

Day 3: He laughs at her and says she just did just what he thought she was going to do.

Day 5: In the living room, they both realize that they are both to blame, but what can they do?

Day 6: She smiles at him.

Day 9: They both say they're sorry.

***

AND now that I've put all this work into writing this out, I discover that someone has already put this into calendar form.

source: https://ilovecharts.tumblr.com/post/18448564253/bare-naked-lades-one-week-joel