I thought ActiveRain and its members were some of the most forwarding thinking people, using all this wonderful technology to set themselves apart from the competition.

To be better than average.

To go where no one had gone before.

[Insert your own favorite cliché here.)

So as the second quarter winds down -- and I'm guilty myself, but you don't yet know what I'm guilty of -- I wonder why our members say things like:

1. "This year's not going like I thought it would. I hope next year is better."
2. "This month has been dreary. I can't wait for next month to get here."
3. "It's only Wednesday, but the week is already a bummer. Hurry up and get here, next week."
4. "I'm sure glad it's time for lunch because this morning was rough. I should just skip this afternoon and go straight to tomorrow."

The one that comes closest to my subject here is #4. Read them again and see if you can determine why. I'll wait for you....

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Back? Okay, let's talk about this thing that is 6,000 years old yet seems to run our lives, especially if we let it.

It's that darn calendar, especially the Gregorian calendar, which is the de facto standard throughout the world for civil purposes. Imagine that. The United States, North Korea, Iran, and Israel all use the same calendar for civil purposes. Now if we can all agree on that, why can we not agree on other things? Ah, but I digress....

According to Wikipedia, "A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial, or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months, and years. The name given to each day is known as a date. Periods in a calendar (such as years and months) are usually, though not necessarily, synchronized with the cycles of some astronomical phenomenon, such as the cycle of the sun or the moon. Many civilizations and societies have devised a calendar, usually derived from other calendars on which they model their systems, suited to their particular needs."

Now we're getting somewhere.

Here are some more tidbits from ActiveRain which we'll be able to use to serve our purposes:

1. "Calendars can include computerized systems, which can be set to remind the user of upcoming events and appointments."
2. "Calendar is also used to denote a list of particular set of planned events."
3. "The simplest calendar system just counts time periods from a reference date."

Several web sites have told me that the 365-day calendar is about 6,000 years old, but the one at indiastudychannel.com was the best:

"The earliest Egyptian calendar was based on the moon's cycles, but later the Egyptians realized that the "Dog Star" in Canis Major, which is now called Sirius, rose next to the sun every 365 days, about when the annual inundation of the Nile began. Based on this knowledge, they devised a 365-day calendar that seems to have begun in 4236 B.C., the earliest recorded year in history."