It's January 1 except on the calendar

My favorite part of the new year has always been the traditional changing of the calendar. Screw the black-eyed peas; give me a blank calendar and some colored Sharpies and my New Year’s Day is complete (assuming the Rose Parade is over).

Since prehistoric times, humans have devised methods to mark time. Moon phases and months and holy days and weeks all sort of mixed and matched over centuries. (How cool would it have been to “invent” a month?) Say what you will about Julius Caesar (love your salad), but he’s the guy who woke up one day in 45 BC and declared, “Hey, let’s make 365 days into one year.” I think shortly after that Julius Hallmark said, “Cool. We’ll make calendars with puppies and kittens and beach scenes, and we’ll all be rich.”

And the Aztecs? Forget it. How would you ever know when to throw a cinco de mayo party with that complicated system? No wonder they died out.

The system used pretty much since the 14^th century, the Gregorian calendar, is the result of a bunch of math that makes my head hurt. Leap years, except if the year is divisible by 100 unless it’s also divisible by 400, equinoxes, the square root of a hypotenuse and who knows what else. Like most mathematical equations, I don’t need to understand why. Just tell me the answer.

I have a system for “calendaring” (even though I hate this used as a verb). All good calendar freaks do. First, I go through with one color Sharpie (usually blue) and write in everyone’s birthday or anniversary. I put a B in a circle or an A in a circle and the name. Occasionally I write in a number, if I need to remember a significant one. Then I go through with another color (generally green) and write in book group every first Wednesday. Then, I write in events I know are happening, like Girl Weekend or 3-Day Walks and map out the days.

Once all the fun stuff is out the way, I take a yellow highlighter and mark off holidays. “Real” holidays are colored in and floating holidays like Presidents Day are marked with a slash through the days.

Everything else is written in Blue Bic medium stick pen, the greatest pen in the world.

A system is critical. If you think any of this sounds weird, you are not a calendar freak. Some of you are rolling your eyes at the absurdity of this. Others are you are weeping knowingly.

Sure, I could keep track of this on phone or computer, and I do. Actually, I have two separate calendar programs on my phone. The iOS is quicker, but Calendar+ is prettier. I’m probably the last person in America who prefers the Outlook calendar to Google calendars.

Recently, I decided I needed to keep a more instantly visual calendar that I could keep open on my workspace, so imagine my thrill when I discovered a 17-month desk planner with big spaces to write in. Not only could I use it immediately, but I could put all of July’s tasks in it and cross them off. It’s a dream come true.

Here it is August, and I’m organizing my 2017 calendar. I’ve got the Sharpies spread out and four calendars open to sync everything up. (Look, I’m not saying it’s a perfect system.) But it feels like my world is becoming more orderly because I’m writing it on paper. Why is that? Is there something about seeing it in print that makes it real? Why does it feel different than seeing it on the screen? Psychologists have suggested that picking up a pen forces your mind to think differently than tapping a keyboard. I’d argue that’s true for me. Apparently, turning pages triggers the passage of a time in a way that scrolling doesn’t.

I don’t have to open an app or do any scrolling or hope my fat fingers land on the right letter or appropriate time zone. But I don’t have infinite room to add details. (Unless I add Post-Its to the mix…. and that’s a blog post all on its own. You should see the new sticky notes changing my life!) On the other hand, my printed calendar isn’t going to remind me 24 hours in advance to check in for a flight or tell me I have two hours to find a quiet spot to take a conference call. But I don’t have to remember a password to see my schedule, and it doesn’t use up my battery.

I’m not a complete Luddite. I tore out the address book pages for my “contacts” and laughed as I recycled the pages specifically designed for me to write down all my URLs and their associated passwords. Like I said, it’s not a perfect system.

According to my calendar, I have some free time on January 1, and I’m not certain how I feel about that.