When I was a kid I liked February best. My birthday is on March 1, and February always did me the favor of being a little shorter so I didn’t have to wait so long. Now I like February because, usually, it has 28 days, which is a nice, even four weeks—no straggler days. Very tidy. I don’t know why all months don’t do that.

I’m told our calendar is based on the Moon, but I don’t see it. Moon phases occur randomly in the month and I always have to look them up to know what’s what. It’s not like the full Moon always happens on the third Wednesday.

This August we’ll get 8/8/8, which is nice. That’ll only happen for four more years, ending on 12/12/12, unless George Bush is still president, in which case who knows what fundamental laws will be changed. Two years ago we had 2/4/6 and before that, 1/2/3. Those were the days.

I like order—something my mom thinks is hilarious. I just read an interesting article which briefly referred to the Mayan calendar, which is pretty organized. The Mayans actually used more than one calendar, but only one was interesting. Actually, to me, it was the whole interesting part of the story because I don’t even remember what the rest of the article was about.

Anyway, their calendar goes kind of like this: Twenty days is a “month.” Twenty Tuns (years) is a Katun. Twenty of those is a Baktun. It’s like a metric system calendar. It plays out to a 26,000 year Great Cycle. The good news with this system is you only need to buy one calendar. The bad news is it won’t fit on a nail. Good news, you can probably get one with 520,000 months of hot Mayan pin-up girls or cute cats or sailboats or pictures of Tuscany. No extra shopping for you at the end of each regular year, and stores don’t get stuck with a bunch of 2007 Britney Spears calendars. Bad news, according to the Mayans: when this calendar runs out, so does mankind. On the Winter Solstice, our year 2012. It’s unfortunate, but you have to admit it’s a tidy system.

According to my old-school Gregorian calendar (yes, it has Tuscan houses on it) tomorrow is a New Moon. I haven’t even figured out where to put the old one.