Our current calendar system gives me headaches that induce nightmares.
While writing the payment cycle methods for Tallymark, dealing with different number of days in different months was unbelievably annoying, which led me to a question that most people never ask: “Why can’t we have the same amount of days in every month? Who decided how many days are in each month? Where did this all come from?”
The calendar is messy. Months and years can begin on any day of the week, the number of days in each month is inconsistent, holidays can be either linked to a specific day of the year or specific day of the week somewhere in the year, and a random day is inserted once every four years.
The calendar is, in fact, a culmination of various historical cultures and religions in one element of society that we depend on daily.
Our current calendar is known as the Gregorian calendar, which came as a reform to the Julian calendar. Sources all of the Internet have all sorts of trouble agreeing on the origin, development, and process in which we have a current days, weeks, months, and years. It seems like an absolute mess ranging from Jewish to Roman culture, influenced in part by lunar calendars.
Much of history is like this. Many of the things that exist today don’t have the clean, elegant, and flawless history that is romanticized in textbooks or depicted in museums. The fact that the very system we use in attempt to keep track and organize events of the past is messy itself reveals much about humanity.
When the mess is embraced, life is allowed to grow. It won’t ever go as planned or completely according to structure, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you just have to roll with the punches, play it by ear, and fly by the seat of your pants. Enjoy the process, not just the result.
Anyways, since I can’t change the calendar, a couple if else statements will have to do.
