February is the worst month of year and it isn't even close.
The weather is cold, the days are short, it doesn't contain a real holiday, and nothing interesting happens in it other than the Super Bowl, which almost always disappoints with boring football and uninspired commercials. And don't even get me started on the horrors of Valentine's Day.
I know. January is cold too. And the weather is equally miserable on the warm side in August, which also lacks a real holiday. But January at least has two holidays, the NFL playoffs, and the tail end of the holiday season. August, at least, has daylight, and no begrudges you a summer vacation if you just can't take the brutal heat. In February, your boss still expects you to work extra to compensate for the lost productivity of the holiday season, and it's too cold to go anywhere anyway.
February just sucks. And as I type this I'm reminded that February sucks for an additional reason: it is wayyyyyyy too hard to spell. It has that unnecessary and largely unpronounced "r" as its fourth letter, inserted just to spite all of us. We can't even write about it without it causing aggravation.
Honestly, the month's only redeeming factor is that it only has 28 days. Whoever decided that the rest of the months should have 30 or 31, while February was so awful it should be limited to 28, obviously realized how horrible this month is. But they didn't do enough to STOP it.
Thankfully, it's almost over for this year. But once it ends Monday at midnight, it will still be out there, lurking, laughing under its cold wintery breath until it returns in early 2012.
So I suggest we go a step further than making February the shortest month of the year: we should eliminate it altogether. Really, wouldn't the world be a much better place if we had 11 months with 33 or 34 days each and just got rid of February?
I'm sure someone out there would argue that if we skipped February, March would suddenly just take its place as the month filled with cold weather and short days, and it would be just as bad. But that's ridiculous. For one thing, March is much easier to spell.
Besides, I'm pretty sure these skeptics are wrong. You can't believe everything you read on the internet, you know. And if by some weird stretch of logic they happened to be technically correct, we could still solve the problem by adding 28 days to January.
This would be much better, but it might cause problems for those only get paid at the end of the month. So, with this group in mind (which includes myself, now that I think about it), I offer the following compromise that should please everyone: shorten February to 1 day.
And get rid of that first "R" while we're at it.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
Chris Jericho told me it was time to blog again
Welcome back.
It's nice to be out of my self-imposed three-month blogging exile.
I never meant to be away this long.
December got busy with Christmas shopping, and by the endless array of holiday social gatherings and all the usual things. Then the first few weeks of January was spent recovering from December and compensating for all the life obligations that got shunned over Christmas. By late January, I wanted to blog again, but it had been too long to come back with just a routine observation or two complaining about my newest co-worker or a puzzling bumper sticker I saw. I had to come back with something big. But inspiration escaped me. I felt under-equipped to do something big, so I did nothing at all.
Such is life. Our dreams disappear slowly through steady, incremental neglect. If the things we want can't be immediately achieved, we often just try to forget we ever wanted them instead of moving labouriously in their direction. The story of why I stopped blogging is the story of why many of our dreams don't come true. But it's not the story in which I want to live.
I read a lot over the break. In between volumnes of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, I picked up what I expected to be a mindless guilty pleasure: the auto-biography of pro-wrestler/rock star/game show host/VH1 pop-culture commentator Chris Jericho. He's always amused me, and I was in need of something light to bridge me to the next series of Tolkein's epic battles. But in reading the backstory of how a skinny kid from a broken home in rural Canada became famous, it struck me not just how hard he worked, but his sense of joy while doing it, even through the awful parts. The hard work was worth it, because the goal, whether attained or not, was the purpose he envisioned for his life.
His tale reminded me that most dreams only come true through hard work. And if I settle for a comfortable but unfulfilling life doing something else, work will always feel like work. My current job pays the bills. It may continue to do so until the day I pass from this world. But it isn't my purpose. So while I continue to do what I have to in order to meet life's obligations, joy comes in working toward a bigger dream.
My ship will never come in if I don't bother to build a pier.
I'll see you soon. Very, very soon.
It's nice to be out of my self-imposed three-month blogging exile.
I never meant to be away this long.
December got busy with Christmas shopping, and by the endless array of holiday social gatherings and all the usual things. Then the first few weeks of January was spent recovering from December and compensating for all the life obligations that got shunned over Christmas. By late January, I wanted to blog again, but it had been too long to come back with just a routine observation or two complaining about my newest co-worker or a puzzling bumper sticker I saw. I had to come back with something big. But inspiration escaped me. I felt under-equipped to do something big, so I did nothing at all.
Such is life. Our dreams disappear slowly through steady, incremental neglect. If the things we want can't be immediately achieved, we often just try to forget we ever wanted them instead of moving labouriously in their direction. The story of why I stopped blogging is the story of why many of our dreams don't come true. But it's not the story in which I want to live.
I read a lot over the break. In between volumnes of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, I picked up what I expected to be a mindless guilty pleasure: the auto-biography of pro-wrestler/rock star/game show host/VH1 pop-culture commentator Chris Jericho. He's always amused me, and I was in need of something light to bridge me to the next series of Tolkein's epic battles. But in reading the backstory of how a skinny kid from a broken home in rural Canada became famous, it struck me not just how hard he worked, but his sense of joy while doing it, even through the awful parts. The hard work was worth it, because the goal, whether attained or not, was the purpose he envisioned for his life.
His tale reminded me that most dreams only come true through hard work. And if I settle for a comfortable but unfulfilling life doing something else, work will always feel like work. My current job pays the bills. It may continue to do so until the day I pass from this world. But it isn't my purpose. So while I continue to do what I have to in order to meet life's obligations, joy comes in working toward a bigger dream.
My ship will never come in if I don't bother to build a pier.
I'll see you soon. Very, very soon.
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