I've completed the year without weekend weekends.

Facebook reminds me that I posted this exactly a year ago:

This is my last real weekend — weekend weekend. It's not that I'm not going to work ever again, but I'm never going to have work scheduled on a weekday/weekend schedule once classes end this coming Thursday. That means this is my last chance to feel the feeling that is The Weekend. Not that I'm not working this weekend. I am. But in my own way, on my own schedule.

Having retired from my lawprof job, I experience weekends as the time when the people with structured jobs flow into activities that the nonstructured among us can do all the time. That affects me slightly. My job was already relatively unstructured, except for class times and the occasional meeting, so I was already experiencing the joy of the unstructured life (especially in the summertime). And when you let go of your structured employment, you will employ yourself doing something. In my case, I was and continue to be strongly structured to write this blog every morning, but the nonstructured thing about it is ending the process — breaking the trance. I don't have to break the trance because a structured task is approaching. I love that! I was pretty sure I would love that, and I chose to retire from my lawprof job so I could jump fully into the nonstructured life. Looking back on the year, I'm thoroughly happy about where I have landed.

Before publishing this post, I spent a long time thinking about whether there was enough reason to use the unfamiliar word "nonstructured" rather than "unstructured," which I could see I'd also used. I must have believed there was a distinction between the 2 words, and I even got into a long discussion with Meade about what that distinction might be. His idea about the difference was just about the opposite of mine. Does the prefix "un-" suggest the original state of things or the way they are after a previous condition? I test my theory with the word "undressed." You wouldn't say people who had never worn clothes were "undressed." And, yes, I realize that you also wouldn't say they were "nondressed." Or maybe you would, if it fit your style and it carried a nuance you liked. I can see how "nondressed" might convey humor or contemplative seriousness.

So I searched the internet for "nonstructured," and the first thing I found is that it's a term in computer programming. I've paid almost no attention to computer programming other than that I can see that many readers of this blog are immersed in computer programming, and for you, my use of "nonstructured" might feel like a metaphor, and I'm blind to your associations. My using "nonstructured," then, may be like writing about hot dogs and using the word "wiener" with no awareness of its double meaning as "penis."

The second thing I found is a blog post "Unstructured vs Non-structured: Seeing With the Third Eye," which I assumed would delve into the kind of spiritual/psychological material that feels natural to me:

My wife Kathy is a first grade teacher. Working from my office at home, she often catches up on email about situations at her school. While doing her email recently, she asked me about the difference between “unstructured” and “nonstructured,” which her email text editor had indicated was misspelled....

Ha ha. That's so close to what just happened with me and Meade.

As I explained it to Kathy, the appropriate usage seems to depend on whether structuring ability was available and could be turned off (as in “unstructured FrameMaker”), or whether structure was ever there to begin with....

Oh! He's talking about writing computer programs.

I’ve been in the structured writing world for so long, I can no longer see the world as I did before my original “aha” moment with structured writing. Perhaps it is like the denizens of 2-D Flatland being unable to perceive anything with height in their plano universe. I learned programming using BASIC back when the distinctions were first being made about unstructured (spaghetti) vs structured (procedural) program writing approaches....

I think the computer metaphor undermines the unstructured/nonstructured distinction I had perceived. The computer metaphor seems to support saying that people who have never worn clothes are "undressed." Now, I'm in the (metaphorical) rathole where I have to look up the "un-" and "non-" prefixes in the OED.

"Non-" is "absence or lack of’, often corresponding semantically to ‘not doing, failure to do’ (where a verb is implied by the noun, as in non-accomplishment, lack of accomplishment, failure to accomplish) or to ‘not being, failure to be’ (where an adjective is implied by the noun, as in non-activity, lack of activity, failure to be active)."

"Un-" is "Expressing negation." We're told it's "very extensively employed in English" and "can be used with the greatest freedom in new formations."

So "non-" has some specificity that's lacking in "un-." When "un-" seems insufficiently expressive and you feel drawn to "non-" — which is what just happened to me — it must be that you want to lean into the negation, to emphasize the failure or the absence.

By the way, that blogger husband also explained to Kathy that you're supposed to put a hyphen in "non-structured," and I observe that adding a hyphen will get the spell-checker off your back, but I don't think the hyphen is needed. I could lengthen this post — perhaps beyond your tolerance — with a discussion of the way hyphenated words tend to close up over time, but for now, I'll just say goodbye.