Happy end of July, and welcome to “Can you believe it is already August?”
This is getting easier to come to grips with thanks to social media, where friends in some far flung American retail places have shared their surprise that Halloween candy is already on shelves.
And I’m over here still vainly fighting the annual “Don’t you refer to summer in the past tense!” battle.
August is one of those months that always seems a surprise. It is already here and how did that happen? Not every moth is so sneaky. January is discounted because it has that New Year thing attached to it. February, well, everyone is just so ready for January to be gone, we sort of welcome it. And when March rolls around most people are just allowing for the fact that the previous month is so much shorter. (That three-day weekend you don’t get is a long time. And isn’t it time we had a three-day weekend at the end of February to reset this goofy calendar, anyway?)
But April, well, April can sneak up on folks. Same for May, but it is also a relief, May is a continuation of an early summer for the blessed, or a relief from the tedium of a six-month long seasonal change that was undesirable seven months ago. Then people are too busy or relaxed or tired from their vacation or idling into their vacation to notice June or July so much. But then August, whoa.
Maybe we’re good at 1/3rd fractions. Or maybe the A months. No one will pipe up much about October, so it can’t be the vowels. November, that stretch run into the holidays it all becomes inevitable at some point. But someone in some boring middle place is going to create their own calendar one day. Thirty-some years of this will wear on someone and he’ll create his own and it’ll wind up on The Guardian’s website, laughed at until it is a trending topic and then we’ll see it and some of us will say, “You know … ”
This will happen in March, a product of being cooped up too much over excessive cold weather. No one would dream of changing it in July. Unless they come up with a way of fooling the weather into corresponding with pre-existing paradigms of favorite seasons. If you can do that, you’re really on to something.
Hey, it was 400 words on months or 600 words on the CNN debates or, as it should be properly labeled “Who wants a go at a potential cabinet seat?”
OK, it’d be fewer words. I can sum up what we’ve learned in these debates in just 19 words: Market opportunity. There aren’t 20 good speech and debate coaches working as political consultants in the entire country.
Hey, did you see the cool stuff happening on the front page? Check it out!
