----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- laundry day is a very dangerous day There are a few things from my youth/ upbringing that I have a hard time getting over. One of them is getting a calendar every year. My parents made a big deal about getting nice calendars every year. It started out just one or two then it got to be just part of the obsessive hoard addiction and they had them all over the house. I had to recycle literally totes and totes of old calendars when I was cleaning out the basement. They were so full they broke the bottom of the totes open and I had to make innumerable trips up and down the stairs carrying handfuls of old calendars to the recycle bin. It took me months to get rid of them all. My dad used to say calendars were "poor person's art". I think when they were young they wanted to fill their house with art and art prints but they had no money, so getting a calendar every year was a way to have art in the house without going broke. They used to hang the pages up like posters for a long time, I remember. And once they showed me a memory box and it had old calendar pages in it from the 1960s (some weird photographer that liked to use surreal effects to make people look like they had two head and grew out of trees and stuff like that, but I have no idea what his name was). I have bought a calendar almost every year of my adult life. But lately I have been really wondering if that tradition serves me anymore. The most important thing for me on a calendar is the moon phases, and a lot of calendars don't even have that on there. I don't see the point of getting one that doesn't at least tell you the phase of the moon. I use a calendar to remind me of the date when I journal. Otherwise I don't usually have much going on where I need to know what day it is. I usually have to stop and remember what year it is, to be honest. I used to cross the days out with a big X every day just so I could keep it straight what day it was. If I didn't do that, I would be totally lost. But I started to feel like a prisoner in a cell marking off the days so I stopped doing that, even. The art is always nice. But when you buy the same artist over and over again, they start to re-use images and it's not as worth it. I used to always make envelopes out of the pages every January, but I ended up with way more envelopes than people to write. I thought about doing that thing where you re-use calendars every nine years or whatever it is. There is even a website that tells you what years you can re-use what calendar for now. But the moon phases and holidays wouldn't be the same, so to me that would just annoy the hell out of me. It would be nice and maybe comforting to have a small stash of calendars with art I liked and bring it out every few years but the usefulness of that is just not really there. We got at least 3 calendars from charities this year, so I was just going to use those. We only need two. One in my studio so I can look at it, and one in the kitchen to write any doctor appointments or other obligations on it. So, that's what I am doing. Maybe this will be a new thing for me. I like getting new art through a calendar every year, and I like collecting linens. (But I actually use all of them). So. No one cares, but I think it's a nice way to carry on the weird tradition my parents really programmed into me but it has more of a purpose than using up all that paper year after year. And I don't need to have posters on my walls, I don't even have enough room for all my own art, let alone thin paper that just gets dusty and eventually ripped and shredded. I guess we will see. I don't think most people have this issue. I really have been torn up about it. I know most people just use their smartphone nowadays. But I spend almost all my time at home. I don't even really probably need a calendar at all, but I like to have one to check in with mass reality from time to time. Knowing when there won't be mail delivery or when someone's birthday is coming up or just what day or even what month or year it is. I have a really horrible concept of time anymore. I think part of it is just getting older and not having much contact with anyone, and partly it's brain damage from all the booze I've ingested over the last decade. I've even considered going to the dollar store this year and getting a monthly planner to keep track of sobriety and fertility. I think those two might be related. I figure for one dollar, even if I don't use it, it won't be a huge loss. I bought a wall calendar at the dollar store last year, my way of trying to save some money (usually the calendars I buy are right around $15). It had cute paintings of farm animals, but when I opened it up, it also had bible verses each month, which isn't the end of the world but I've been annoyed by it all year. Also the paper is super thin and I had to put paper clips on the edges so it wouldn't roll up in the humidity. On a weird whim I bought markers for my bible that tell you where the chapters are. My parents gave me a leather bible with my name stamped on the cover when I was 9 and I have tried to get rid of that thing so many times but it keeps making its way back to me. Not long after my parents died my brother found it in the house and gave it to me and I was like, great....thanks. It used to have those stickers on it, but the pastor at the church we went to one time got on my case and said it was "cheating" and I needed to memorize where all the chapters were and be able to flip to them more or less by memory. So I cut them off the pages. And my dad threw a big fit and yelled at me because my mom took time to put them in there. And lately whenever I look at it I can hear my dad yelling at me, so I spent $6 and got some new ones. They have floral patterns and look pretty cool I must say. Also must say I stopped and read some passages here and there while I was doing that. That book is so full of woman hating and plain simple bullshit. A few nice lines and "food for thought" but mostly it just pissed me off. So, that went back on the bookshelf next to Bhagavad Gita that I got out of the library dumpster in Rochester. If I can get a copy of the Quran, I will have a nice little set, I think. In case I get in a flame war with someone sometime. Just kidding. I never talk to anyone, let alone about religion. People get really pissy about that shit. 3:18 PM - Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2021 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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