Day by Day Calendars--It Never Ends

In the past 30 years a cottage industry of "day-by-day" calendars has sprung up in the United States. I think these calendars grew out of the enormous success of the "month-by-month" calendars, where you have a different Impressionist painting on each page, or a different National Park portrayed for each month, for example. You see these "day-by-day" calendars in almost every variety store. They increasingly cover almost every area of life, and like making of books to the author of Ecclesiastes, there seems to be no end to them. In this and the next essay I develop a sort of 'system' explaining these calendars before arguing for the development of "day-by-day" calendars for the real learners among us.

Bill's Categories of Calendars

I think there are about six categories of "day-by-day" calendars out there. You have to figure out the kind of person you are and, presto, there is a calendar for you.

1. Let's say you or someone you know is a person who is into "cute." You know the person. You are at your family reunion in South Dakota in the hottest days of July, sharing pictures from the past, and there are always two or three of the family members (usually women) who say, "Oh, isn't that cute!" to every picture you examine. These people are candidates for what I call the "cutesy calendars." Most popular in this category are the "365 Dogs" or "365 Cats," though the latter is a bit questionable, as can be seen by the recent development of a "365 Bad Cats" calendar. The "Bad Cats" overlaps with the "moral" category below, so I won't say anything more about it. The "cutesy" calendar genre is an expanding one, as marketers strive with all their skill to discover things that people consider "cute." Thus, the Boston Globe has just announced their "Cute Overload Page-A-Day Calendar 2009." It has the "singular mission" of "scouring the Web for only the finest in cute imagery." Apparently their "award-winning blog" on this subject was so successful that they had to try to turn it into a money-maker. I wonder what award their site won? Probably the "Boston Globe award for the best site on 'cute' things..." So, if you or someone you love is a "cutesy" person, there are calendars for them/you.

2. The "You Have A Dull Life" calendar. The entire purpose of this kind of calendar is to make you wistful for the life you think that others enjoy and that you would like to have someday. Chief in this category is the "1000 Places to Visit Before You Die" calendar. I wonder how 1000 places can fit in 365 days, but where there is a buck, there is a way. You sit at your desk at work, look at the Pyramids of Egypt, and think, "Boy, do I have a dull life!" But you are ashamed to mention this to others, lest they figure out what you know about yourself. The kind of person especially susceptible to or desirous of this kind of calendar is one who spends a lot of time beating him/herself up or who lives in longing. You know the people--they always think that tomorrow or next week or next year will bring fullness to their lives, finally. These are the calendars for them.

3. Closely related to # 2 is what I call the "fantasy calendar." These are directed mostly to guys, since guys wear their fantasies on their sleeves but, as with almost everything in life, guys' bad habits are beginning to be shared by women, and so these calendars directed to women will no doubt grow. What do guys fantasize about? Well, what don't they fantasize about is probably the better question. But the top two sellers in this category, I would image are the "365 Cars" or the "365 Babes" calendars. Now you can see how this is related to # 2, because just as you won't see the 1000 places that someone else thinks you ought to see before you die, so you won't actually get the babes who are seductively pictured in that calendar. What, on the other hand, do women in this category want? Well, we won't get into that rather "black hole" question, but with respect to fantasies, I think they might have their "365 Kinds of Chocolate" or, increasingly, their "365 Hunks" calendar. Calendar makers who can skillfully combine the "cutesy" and the "fantasy" type into one category might score a huge hit with women. What might that be? Hm...Hunks with ribbons around their necks? Don't know. [One reader, a woman, instinctively reacted to the question of how to combine fantasy with cuteness by saying that women would do this through SHOES. How slow of me not to notice..]

4. Then there are what I call the "moral advice" types of calendars. These can be further broken down into the "religious advice" and "secular advice." The former might be a "Bible verse a day" calendar, while the latter is nicely captured in the "365 Daily Success Quotes" calendar. The web site of the "365 Bible Verses-A Year" book says that it "remains America's best and bestselling Bible calendar." Remains? That might mean that it might have a track record of two years.... In any case, we are told that each page features a nature photograph (why not a picture of blood running on the streets during Armageddon?) "with a message of comfort, faith and wisdom" quoted from the KJV. Ah, this is a soft-core version of a comfort calendar I see. Well, what does it mean to be the "best selling Bible calendar"? I looked and saw that its Amazon sales ranking is #491,417 which puts it well behind such classics as "British Security Coordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940-45."

Well, if you don't want a Bible verse calendar, you might do no better than the "365 Daily Success Quotes." These quotations are, of course, meant to motivate you to get out and succeed, whatever that means, and they have proved to be quite popular. I decided to look up some of these "success quotes," since I frequently struggle with the idea that my life has been a failure. Here are a few, for your consideration. Joan Lunden, whom an Entertainment Weekly poll named as "television's favorite morning anchor" duiring her years at Good Morning America, has this to say, for January 9: "Remove failure as an option." Or, Les Brown, whose web site bills him as "The World's Leading Motivational Speaker," says for January 11: "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you will land among the stars."

But as I thought about these two "success quotations," I found myself disagreeing with them. Actually, failure, in my book (if we really know what success and failure are), is usually the catalyst for success. When you blow something that you think you ought to have done well, it can send you into a spiraling depression but, most often, it steels your resolve to master the problem before you and actually do things right. If you removed failure as an option, you would also, in my book, remove success as an option. They are wedded to each other. Then, when looking at Les Brown's comment, I thought. Hm. What he says isn't true if you know your basic astronomy. If you miss the moon, you may very well fall back to earth or you may explode in outer space. It definitely doesn't mean that you "land among the stars." Actually, if you aim "too high" in what you do, it can be counterproductive. Learn to develop more realistic goals--that isn't bad advice.

Well, I guess I am not a good candidate for the "success calendars."

I still have a few categories to review--before looking at my suggestions in the next essay.

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