Back On The Grid

I keep a paper calendar. I like the layout where you can see the whole month at one time, the kind that gives you two square inches dedicated to any one day. Every November, I’d buy my refill in person at Staples. Cashiers often assumed I was a teacher, asking if I had a discount card to apply towards my school marmy purchase. But I’m not. I’m just a papery and visual person, with a host of technical disabilities, and my paper calendar is my Mother Board (patent pending on just-thought-of new line of calendars for captains of domesticity; stay tuned, market).

For years, I’ve squeezed the lives of five people into these squares. Five, not six because my husband keeps his own fancy electronic calendar, entering meetings, accepting requests, all to fill in to a unified, color-coded guide to life on a given Tuesday. It’s intimidating and super professional and frankly, to me, otherworldly. But it seems to work for him as he is so regularly where he’s supposed to be. And whenever I spot a snag in one of my squares, I watch him consult his dense pastel blocks of life to see if he can actually do a pick up in the middle of that given Tuesday. In this way, it seems to work for me.

The closest I ever come to operating my day electronically and transitioning my calendaring to my phone is when I take a picture of the paper version, such that I can reference my life when out in the world and the…