It has become abundantly clear that I do not know when holidays are anymore.
Friday morning I got up and flipped through the television listings. Huh,\ I said to myself. ""I wonder why there's a ‘Leprechaun' movie marathon on the Sci-Fi Channel.""
Next, I left the house and was struck by all the green in my peripheral vision. Everybody was wearing green, and stores were festooned with green decorations. ""Huh,"" I said to myself again. ""I wonder why everybody seems so keen on green today.""
Then I picked up a copy of The Onion, which contained a St. Patrick's Day bar guide. ""Huh,"" I said to myself once more. ""I wonder why they have a—oh, I get it.""
Yes, friends, it's true: I had no clue that Friday was St. Patrick's Day.
This was a source of great disquietude, as this was not the first time I had forgotten about a holiday. As a male, of course, I am expected to forget birthdays and anniversaries, forcing me to ask my faceless neighbor Wilson how to smooth things out. But proper holidays? How can I forget when they are?
I point my first finger of blame at calendars. I have three daily calendars, all given to me by separate people as Christmas presents. Theoretically, then, I should have three daily reminders of holidays.
However, I've forgotten to tell you about a curious little quirk of mine. I never tear the previous day's sheet off like I'm supposed to, so I never see the holiday reminders. All of my calendars have a daily theme; there's a word-of-the-day one, a Shakespeare-quote-of-the-day one and a French-phrase-of-the-day one. Am I supposed to tear off the day's tidbit of information and just throw it away when the day is done?
If I did that, I just know there would be a situation in which I'd have to say, ""We'll have to vacuum the living room floor"" in French, and I wouldn't have a handy calendar page to tell me how. By just flipping to the new sheet every day instead of disposing of the previous days, I'll always know that the correct phrase is, ""Il faudra passer l'aspirateur dans le salon.""
Another problem is holidays that do not have set dates. It's easy to remember what date Christmas falls on (Dec. 25), or Halloween (Oct. 31) or the Fourth of July (Feb. 12). But what about holidays like Memorial Day, which is observed on the last Monday of May? That means I have to look at a calendar for the entire month of May to figure out when it is, and as I've expressed already, my calendars only do one day at a time.
Or what about Easter? It was easy to figure out as a kid, because your school usually scheduled spring break around it. Apparently, this is not the case in college, as I spent the entirety of my spring break looking for my Easter basket, and it turns out Easter isn't for another month.
I looked into it and discovered there's a formula that goes into determining when Easter Sunday is, and it involves a whole lot of algebra. Personally, I think if the Pope doesn't know when Easter is without consulting his TI-83 calculator, there is an inherent problem with this system.
So if I pass you on the street on some random holiday and don't give you the appropriate season's greeting, I absolve myself of all guilt. We can once again place the blame squarely on that arch-foe of mankind: algebra.
E-mail Justin Zyduck at morrisonbass@yahoo.com and tell him when the hell Flag Day is.
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