The Art of the Sunday Drift: Tattoos, Somun, and the Quiet Logic of Pause

Sunday in Jefferson City doesn’t ask anything of you. Not even politeness. It simply offers itself—barefoot, unshaved, a bit sun-dappled and unapologetic.

I used to think of this day as a buffer. A prelude. The calendar’s layover between chaos and order. But recently I’ve started treating Sunday not as space before the “real work,” but as the realest work itself. A quiet reckoning. A soft reset.

There’s ritual in the rhythm. Somun warming in the oven like a Balkan memory baked into Missouri air. The steam rising—a ghost from Belgrade kitchens, carried through time and topography. On some Sundays, I trace the tattoos on my arm like stories I’ve archived on skin. They’re not just ink; they’re institutional footnotes I chose for myself. Some aesthetic, some symbolic, some just because silence needed a companion.

And maybe that’s what Sunday is—a tattoo you don’t show off, but wear anyway. Slow hikes that don’t record steps. Coffee sipped without purpose. The kind of pause where your brain finally finishes what Monday started but never resolved.

In a week full of workflows, Sunday is the only one without automation. And yet it moves us more than any trigger, any flowchart, any perfectly documented process.