The Calendar

The Most Abused Stationary Award has to be given to the calendar on my desk. Life must be a torture for my calendar. Either some part-time mental patient students are stapling the pages together, or some slightly more sanely ones reminding themselves of their own birthdays that's got nothing to do with the rest of us. Parents are usually pointing at them, some using the middle finger or cursing at the untimely date of the holidays. Some like to doodle on the pages, always drawing horns on people's heads. Don't quite understand this part cos I never see people with horns before. Is that why they call people horny? For me, I usually spill coffee on it, thats why I got to change the calendar every year.

I usually scan the calendar for public holidays. Holidays are actually pieces of evidence that human beings are a lazy bunch of people. Somehow along the way, we got dissatisfied with the invention of weekends and we have to find reasons for doing less work. Thats why some genius came up with the idea that every twelve months, when that second hand passes 12 midnight, we let go some fireworks and party till we drop and not work the next day. One or two months later, news got to the Chinese and they did the same thing. Except that the Chinese booze harder and needed one extra day for cleaning up. But its the same globe turning every year you see.

If you think about it, we are actually not working one-third of the time. 48 weeks of weekends is 96 days, plus 12 days on average of public holidays. And occasionally the school wins a National championship and you are off again and some companies don't work on the eve of holidays. Thats a 100 plus days of holidays! And mind you, thats excluding the June and December school holidays. See how clever and lazy we've become?

I looked at my calendar and I see birthdays all over the place. Just had one last Friday. I am not allowed to say whose 'cos I don't want to be censored again by the Association of Fast Talkers and I also don't want to be blamed for PDI ... Public Display of Information. I don't want to be accused of ruining people's long term happiness. I wondered who coined the phrase 'long term happiness', is there a middle term happiness or extended term happiness? Didn't know happiness has a fixed period and an expiry date.

To me the real reason for celebrating your birthday is that you survived the last twelve months. No plane crashes and you didn't say hello to a suicide bomber. And for that accomplishment, you get a photo frame or a piece of soap.. If you ever get another photo frame for your birthday, essentially what the giver is saying is "we have not given any thoughts to this gift but we get this feeling that you have a lot of pictures to hang around the house."

But for the jungle people in the tribal society, the birthday is a big problem. They have no dates to begin with and there are no candles around. To them its the same moon same sun everyday. They cannot tell which day you were born except to tie it with something significant. "Son, the day you were born, there was a huge unusual lighting and two gorillas were petting heavily by the side." And that would be the poor chap's birthday. Thats why they can save on the calendars cos you'll never know when the lightning and gorillas are doing it again.