{"id":1876,"date":"2004-01-02T14:17:31","date_gmt":"2004-01-02T20:17:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2004\/01\/02\/calendar-worlds\/"},"modified":"2022-02-14T16:34:54","modified_gmt":"2022-02-14T22:34:54","slug":"calendar-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2004\/01\/02\/calendar-worlds\/","title":{"rendered":"Calendar Worlds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I dreamed last night that Hillary Clinton was the antichrist. Really. But that&#8217;s neither here nor there; what I really want to talk about is calendars.<\/p>\n<p>I realized this morning that I&#8217;ve finally slipped the last vestiges of the surly bonds of corporate indenture. For the first time in two decades, I&#8217;ve entered the new year without a Month-At-A-Glance\u2122 desktop calendar.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>But I forgot about it this year.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8243;, none of which fell in December.)<\/p>\n<p>So I suppose it was inevitable that I would finally move completely to the software calendar. It makes sense, logically. But, emotionally, it&#8217;s harder to accept. My old month-at-a-glance calendars could just as well have been labeled &#8220;life-at-a-glance.&#8221; There&#8217;s something comforting about being able to flip pages and re-live the past in such short order, like the fast-forward scenes in <i>The Time Machine<\/i>. You can move quickly past the entries reading &#8220;Funeral &#8211; 2pm,&#8221; or dwell on those like &#8220;MIA to Bonaire &#8211; 3:15pm departure (don&#8217;t forget passport),&#8221; depending on your mood. The sterile pixels of the online version don&#8217;t seem to have the same ability to re-create the mood.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps in ten years I&#8217;ll regret my choice to do away with the treeware calendar. But, if that&#8217;s the biggest regret I have in ten years, I&#8217;ll gladly put up with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I dreamed last night that Hillary Clinton was the antichrist. Really. But that&#8217;s neither here nor there; what I really want to talk about is calendars. I realized this morning that I&#8217;ve finally slipped the last vestiges of the surly bonds of corporate indenture. For the first time in two decades, I&#8217;ve entered the new&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2004\/01\/02\/calendar-worlds\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Calendar Worlds<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kitchen-sink","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1876"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7352,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1876\/revisions\/7352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}