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The Calendar

Earlier this year, a calendar appeared in my room. I forget exactly where it came from, to be honest. It might have been one of those calendars that you get from a store after you buy something right around the beginning of the year. It might have been a gift (or a re-gift) that my parents didn't want. Either way, this thing appeared in my room.

Not wanting to waste it, I hung it from a hook. Now, this particular calendar was the kind where you tore off a page every day. That put the onus on me to keep the calendar up to date on a daily basis, but I figured it wouldn't be that big a deal. I mean, it's a freaking calendar. How difficult could it be?

Well, first of all, I wasn't quite in the habit of updating a calendar on a daily basis. Much like any other habit, it took a while to learn. So, for a good chunk of the month of January, I had the wrong date showing on my calendar. I didn't actually notice, truth be told. It's not like the calendar was humongous or anything, so I was somehow able to keep my attention from focusing on that particular corner of the room. Inevitably, though, I'd notice that the date was wrong, and I'd have an irresistible urge to right this wrong (let's just say that if you were to suggest I have OCD, I wouldn't dismiss you off-hand). I actually remember having to tear off about a week's worth of papers in a single sitting a couple of times.

Eventually, I started noticing the discrepancy enough so that I made a conscious effort to keep up to date, literally. By about March or so, I was pretty good about making sure I had the correct date showing on the calendar. Sure, I'd still slip up every now and again, but it was hardly the "oh crap, that's a whole week off" scenario that was common earlier in the year.

However, with all of the additional tearing of pages, I started to develop likes and dislikes around the way this process went down. First of all, I wanted the tear to be as clean as possible (let's just agree to call it mild OCD). Having all those jagged edges or extra rips in the page just seemed wrong to me somehow. And of course, there were plenty of opportunities to encounter these exact scenarios now that I was in the habit of consistently tearing off calendar pages.

This just wouldn't do. At one point, I remember deciding to tear off a little bit of the extra fuzz before tearing off yesterday's page. I figured that this gave me a better chance for a clean tear. In the worst case, it'd gradually get better, since I could slowly chip away at the left over jagged edges from days past. At least that was the plan. You know that saying, "there's strength in numbers?" The stupid little pieces of paper from previous days were an absolutely great example of this. It is surprisingly hard to tear off once you've got about a month's worth of half-a-centimeter-long strips of paper all clumped together.

This leads me to a bit of a dilemma. I could give up on a clean tear, but some part of my brain would rage against this plan for the rest of the year. I could also apply technology to this, by using a knife of some sort to get rid of the unwanted left-overs. That, however, would feel a little bit like conceding defeat to an inanimate object. Or, I could keep trying my hand at removing the fuzz before tearing off each page. The last option has the highest chance of failure, of course, but it seems like my most likely course of action.

Well, here goes nothing. I've got about six months to get it right.

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