My dear sweet mother-in-law sends us a calendar from Wales every Christmas. I always look forward to them because I enjoy scenic landscapes and trying to guess how the Welsh words printed on the calendar are pronounced. My husband enjoys them because occasionally there will be a month with a picture of somewhere he’s been and he can point to it and say something like “it’s really nowhere near as nice as that in real life”. I don’t fully understand how castles and fields full of sheep could ever be construed as not nice, but I generally take his word for it. 

ANYWAY. 

So, there is one small problem with the Welsh calendars Mum sends us: they’re printed in the British style, where the weeks start on Monday and end on Sunday. I suppose it’s not the calendars that are the problem as much as my brain, because OH MY LORD, I CANNOT GRASP THIS CONCEPT. You would think, especially many months into the year, I’d be able to make that mental adjustment and hold onto it, but you would be wrong. So wrong.

The calendar gets me at least once a month. I’ll think I’m on top of things, I’ll be so proud that I looked at the calendar and, gasp, PLANNED AHEAD, even…and then I’ll realize that no, I’m a day off AGAIN, because I don’t actually look at the names of the days on the calendar, I just look at the…I don’t know, spaces, I guess? I CAN read, I swear. It’s just that my brain memorizes shapes and patterns way more easily than it absorbs actual alphanumeric data, so if I’m looking for Friday on the calendar my brain will always look at the second to last square on the calendar grid. Except on a British calendar, that’s Saturday, not Friday. Can you see how that might become an issue? 

The latest casualty to fall to my inability to visually process the British calendar is the vacation we’re leaving for next week. It’s not a big trip, just a long weekend in Maine, but it’s something I’ve been super looking forward to because work sucks and life is meaningless and I really like eating lobster while listening to the ocean. Mark booked the hotel, wrote the vacation on the calendar and drew a line through all the days we’d be gone, so that we had the visual reminder. I then did the admin stuff I needed to do: I booked the time off work and I booked a reservation for boarding Keppo. I did my stuff with the understanding that we were leaving for Maine on Wednesday 9/13, because the big thing that said “MAINE” on the calendar was written in the 4th block of the calendar grid. The one smack in the middle of the week. You know, Hump Day. WEDNESDAY. 

You are smart and I’m very predictable, so I’m sure you can see where this is going. 

Mark and I were texting today about some other stuff that needed to happen next week before our trip, mostly that I had to reschedule a chiropractor appointment and I did it for Tuesday next week rather than my normal Wednesday, because, YAY, we’d be on our way to Maine Wednesday! That was all fine and good, no problems. Then this afternoon Mark texts me again saying that something I had said earlier kept niggling him for some reason and he finally figured out what it was: it was that I said we were leaving for Maine on Wednesday when, in fact, our trip starts Thursday. I was like “no no, it’s written on the calendar for Wednesday, I swear! I booked the dog in for Wednesday! I took Wednesday off! We’re going to Maine on WEDNESDAY!”

Then I went out to the kitchen and looked at the calendar. There, in blue marker, were big block letters: M A I N E, written across the 4th block of next week. The middle day. WHICH ON A BRITISH CALENDAR IS FUCKING THURSDAY. 

I hate being wrong. Even more than being wrong, I hate an already too-short vacation being shortened by a whole entire day because I read the godsdamned calendar wrong. I feel like I’ve been cheated out of a day of staring at the ocean for hours and I’ll tell you what, I blame the British on a very deep and personal level. 

I also hate that I think I need to ask my mother-in-law to check if the calendars she’s sending us are Dumb American compatible going forward.