I might be one of the few people left on the planet who likes desk calendars. You know, these things. I just like having it all there before me—no page flipping, nothing to tote. Each day represented by a nice 3" square. (If you can't fit all your reminders into a 3" square, write smaller, or better yet, simplify, simplify.)

They're probably not popular because they're an open book and anyone can see that you have a dentist appointment on the twelfth. (What word, twelfth...you have to type it slowly because your fingers CAN'T BELIEVE that's how it's spelled—try it.) But over-the-shoulder privacy concerns aside, desk calendars are the way to go.

But finding a good one is as hard as finding hens teeth, to use one of my grandmother's odd generational analogies. The only desk calendars I see are decked out in duckies and bunnies or some mawkish floral pattern. I...just...want...a plain one, please.

At the end of every month I crumple up another month of my life and toss it into my cool IKEA waste basket, which was even cooler before it acquired that mysterious brown sticky mass at the bottom. I just tossed June for an easy 2-pointer and missed. Maybe I should practice it more often.

But it occurred to me that I've been using desktop calendars since 1993, when I first started pushing papers around. It also occurred to me that I once used to save my "completed" months. Well, I looked and found a few from 1997. They were identical to my monthly discards of today. They invariably:

• are littered with phone numbers I can no longer identify. (The important ones are stored all nice and neat in my contact thingy, in case you think I'm Pigpen of the Office World.)
• are littered with doodles. Doodles happen whenever I'm on the phone.
• have at least one coffee stain. All coffee stains are drawn into something more interesting than a coffee stain.
• have at least one thing that I think merits saving, be it a phrase or a doodle.
• have at least one dire reminder of something or other, starred and arrowed to the point that it mars the appearance of the entire month.

In hindsight, the few things that I thought were worth saving were not. They have officially become basket fodder, many years too late. I'd say more about this, but there really isn't anything more to say about this and I've probably stretched it as it is. Happy 4th.

"Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately, it kills all its students."
- Hector Berlioz

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