Calendar Worlds

I dreamed last night that Hillary Clinton was the antichrist. Really. But that’s neither here nor there; what I really want to talk about is calendars.

I realized this morning that I’ve finally slipped the last vestiges of the surly bonds of corporate indenture. For the first time in two decades, I’ve entered the new year without a Month-At-A-Glance™ desktop calendar.

In the past, by November, or early December at the latest, I would have procured a fresh new calendar, a clean slate for the upcoming year, onto which I would record the shorthand that described my working life, and more. I can rustle back through the old calendars, peeling away layers of my career like sifting through an archaeological dig, and reconnect with those events I deemed significant enough to mark as milestones. My desktop calendar was a lo-tek anchor of stability in an otherwise constantly changing world.

But I forgot about it this year.

Frankly, my passion for the desktop calendar had been waning. When I started working from home a couple of years ago, I began keeping a Palm software calendar, in addition to the paper version. The inefficiency of keeping duplicate calendars won out over the fear of losing everything to a software meltdown, and I began recording fewer and fewer events on paper. In fact, about the only thing I recorded in 2003 was rainfall measurements from my backyard gauge. (You have to live in the desert to understand. And, knowing your curiosity, we ended the year with 10.8″, none of which fell in December.)

So I suppose it was inevitable that I would finally move completely to the software calendar. It makes sense, logically. But, emotionally, it’s harder to accept. My old month-at-a-glance calendars could just as well have been labeled “life-at-a-glance.” There’s something comforting about being able to flip pages and re-live the past in such short order, like the fast-forward scenes in The Time Machine. You can move quickly past the entries reading “Funeral – 2pm,” or dwell on those like “MIA to Bonaire – 3:15pm departure (don’t forget passport),” depending on your mood. The sterile pixels of the online version don’t seem to have the same ability to re-create the mood.

Perhaps in ten years I’ll regret my choice to do away with the treeware calendar. But, if that’s the biggest regret I have in ten years, I’ll gladly put up with it.