calendars raze in 1995, it was sports cars. in 2003, guitars. the next year, a beatles calendar with lines in the margins to jot down notes for each month. i wrote about those twelve months the same way i wrote on blather back then. always holding something back, when i had no one to hide from but myself. i couldn't even reckon with what was happening in my own life on some glossy pieces of paper no one would ever see. last year it was birds. this year, birds again. last year's birds were real. this year's birds are watercolour paintings, which makes them more real to me than any photograph. i've always had a hard time throwing these things away. i don't write anything in the boxes that demarcate the days. it's just an x here and an x there, some sloppier than others, some as perfect as any cross lying on its side my hands have ever made. i don't know what it is. maybe i feel like throwing away a record of the year, however inconsequential it might be, is the same as throwing away the year itself. some years you want to chuck straight in the trash. but not all of them. 220102 ... nr we got them every year at channukah for as long as i can remember. last year we got them at christmas instead, i think because the whole family was together then. my mom always picked them out, and last year she picked one with a woman saying sassy things like "i was going to wake up early and go to the gym, but then i remembered i am not going to do that," "girls just want to have fun... and nice handbags... and equal pay," and the like, one for each month. she found it funny and thought i would too. yesterday i looked at it, feeling some grief, wanting to keep it at december. some things have to end, disappear, but calendars can stay. 220102 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I JUST finished putting my classes for this term on my Google calendar. I feel exhausted after so much potential time has sifted through my tap-tapping fingers. ... Five charities saw fit to give me free calendars, so when I had Christmas on the 27th with my family, David, and Lia, I was all, "Here! Take the one you like! I am very generous at giving out free things!" I've got the arthritis society one! No one wanted it and that made me a little sad, so I adopted it, joking that it had pictures of arthritis for each month. My paper calendar doesn't contain records of classes. Instead I write approximately how much sleep I get each night. I also mark a square when my period starts so I can predict the next one (for pun's sake, it should be a dot - but squares are easier to see). Sometimes I put in other reminders or notes. And it gets taped to the side of a bedroom bookshelf, near the door. ... My third kind of calendar I call my Non-Hidden Agenda. I've been making one for every three months ever since my Focus_Group last year. Yes, making: I put it together using sheets of yellow grid paper that formerly belonged to the Presbyterian College's student records system - of course, that stuff hasn't been on paper for years, and Dad took the unused sheets home. One side of the paper has the grids; the other is blank for writing notes. The grids I divide up into ten vertical slots, two for each weekday. Left side of the day is for plans, right side for what I actually do. In the note part, I'll write things like 1) Syntax assignment 2) answer X's email 3) become a time-traveling witch with a hyperdimensional bird-cat companion and then write the numbers of such 'to-do's in the grid, between scheduled things (gah, I still have to put my class schedule into this agenda) but anyway, I already organized the booklets themselves, yesterday: "Kirsten's Non-Hidden Agenda" for Jan-Mar 2022 has a blue cover, and the one for Apr-Jun 2022 has a green. Again a feeling of exhaustion, of reckless mental speeding through six months of time. I am already a time traveler and not enough of a witch. 220102 ... raze now it's squirrels, so i can look at something i love every time my eyes drift to the wall beside my headboard. 240513 ... e_o_i Yesterday I finished making my Non-Hidden Agenda for May-Aug 2024 (the last one ended May 11). These days, I divide the weeks into six days (and on the seventh day, Non-God rested from potential scheduling - Numbers 24:6, Non-International Version). But this time I had the wrong paper cutter and, as a result of that and my impatience, cut the paper wrong...so now there's no space at the top of each day for a daily to-do. I took that as a chance to try something different. On the blank facing page, I'll write to-do lists for the week instead of for each day. Last night I got started on my lists. I wouldn't have much, would I? Now that my term's done, my tutoring sparse? Alas! Last night alone I listed 17 to-do items, several with their own subdivisions. 240514 what's it to you? who go blather from