Day Planning

It all started innocently enough I suppose, what with my first noticing a Facebook quest by a handful of my 2,372 friends who I don’t know looking for the preferred Day Planner.

FB is frequently the place where quests like this occur. People are sincere in their wanting to know which is the best canned tuna, for instance, and then they want to know the best ways to use that tuna, which leads, of course, to follow-up queries about the best mayonnaise, mustard and capers (non-pareil or capotes?). Purple onion, shallots or scallions? Celery or not? Parsley: curly or flat-leaf? The same goes for thousands of other things people didn’t used to talk so much about, especially not with people they didn’t know.

Let’s face it. If that kind of behavior was displayed in public places where alcohol wasn’t served those persons would be testing the softness of the walls of their new cells with their foreheads.

But to get back to the point, if there ever was one, I think the word “algorithm” figures into all of this. Someday I might look into that. Probably not, though.

In my lifetime I have owned several Day Planners, prior to which I owned several calendars, which served the same purpose but at one-third the cost. I don’t remember having a discussion about them with anybody before purchasing one, however. If any of my friends or co-workers held opinions about such things they didn’t offer to share them with me. I’d like to think it was because we had better things to talk about.

Without ever having given it a second thought I might have assumed—wrongly, I’ve since learned—that by now the Day Planner, like its older cousin the Telephone/Address book, had all but disappeared from the electronically enhanced lives most of us now lead. After all, email has given us good reason to no longer have to know physical addresses.

I have a friend who is a carrier for the USPS. He started out as a “mailman,” became a “postman” and then a “letter carrier” before being just a “carrier,” all within a 32-year span and without a single change in his pay grade. The “letter” part was dropped because the USPS doesn’t deliver letters anymore. That’s not entirely true. Every now and then a letter shows up at the post office and everybody gets pretty excited. The excitement passes after a supervisor conducts the mandatory screening for anthrax.

Speed-dial, or whatever it’s properly called, has allowed us to not have to remember a single phone number other than, perhaps, our own. “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” a song recorded by the Glenn Miller Orchestra eleven years before I was born, is the only telephone number I still remember, and it isn’t even real. Many people even have 9-1-1 as a contact on their cell phones, albeit one you must scroll down to find which, I’ve discovered through a series of scientifically designed time trials, takes 7.3 seconds longer than just dialing 9-1-1 and pressing “Send.”

And while we’re on the subject, why do we continue to say “dial”? When was the last time anybody actually “dialed” anything? I’m guessing it was on the same day somebody last stood up and walked to the television set to change the channel. And just to add to the weirdness, there is the completely contemporary phrase “butt-dial.” This is when you sit on your electronic device and inadvertently call somebody. In the name of responsible investigative journalism, I actually spent a couple of minutes playing around with this notion and concluded that it is impossible to dial anything with one’s derriere. I don’t understand why “butt-press” never caught on, but I do have my suspicions.

By the way, my multiple sources in Hollywood have confirmed that Harvey Weinstein’s last movie project before being outed as the country’s second-most disgusting creep, was a re-make of a 1966 Bob Hope-Elke Sommer comedy classic, retitled “Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Butt-Dial.”

THERE’S A WONDERFUL STORE IN Livingston, Montana, called Sax & Fryer that has a rotary telephone. When it rings, the bell-like, sustained ring provides a pleasantly nostalgic moment for people over fifty but scares the bejesus out of little children. That telephone is the last working model in North America and at last count seventy-nine museums from eleven countries had submitted sealed bids for its eventual ownership.

The store—which embodies the very idea of small-town quaint—sells stationery, art supplies, books, periodicals and sundries, as well as telephone/address books and calendars.

What the store doesn’t sell is an organizational tool that is commonly referred to as a WebAddress book. I had never heard of such a thing until I stumbled across one at a Big Box Office Supply outlet that also sells microwaveable popcorn, toilet paper and protective eyewear. Thumbing through its multiple blank pages with its multiple categories for Web-specific information (User Name, Password, Security Question and more) I felt suddenly envious, perhaps somewhat inadequate in my Web prowess, and I heard myself asking aloud to nobody in particular, “Are there people out there who actually need this?”

Each of the Web sites I visit with any degree of regularity is on my computer, bookmarked for easy reference. Dozens of other sites just make themselves known when, for instance, I go on a desperate midnight search for Colatura di Alici (aged Sicilian anchovy oil), Sardinian Bottarga (dried grey mullet roe) or to discover if France imports Kraft American Cheese Singles. For all of those sites where I need to supply specific information, I’ve made it easy on myself by using one User Name, one Password, and one Security Question: Me, 1zxcVbnm>, Marilyn Chambers. I have yet to be hacked (a term I find to be vulgar) and I have also saved the $16.79 that WebAddress books cost.

At this point in my life my only real obligation is to wake up. Actually, it’s less an obligation than a fervent hope. Either way, I don’t need to make a note of it in a Day Planner. It’ll either happen or it won’t.

But for the sake of this exercise I bought a pocket-sized At-A-Glance DayMinder. Actually, I bought it so that the clerk at the Big Box Office Supply place who heard me talking to myself wouldn’t scroll down to 9-1-1 on his cell phone to arrange my transportation to the State Home for the Aggressively Bewildered.

I’ve spent some time with the little book that cost $10.89. It has a metric conversion chart that reminds me that an acre is equal to 0.4047 hectare, a great conversation starter at wine tastings, and that an American dime bag in most of the world is 28.35 grams, which is a great conversation starter if you happen to run into Jeff Sessions at a cocktail party. There’s a list of Area Codes and a map of U.S. Time Zones, which I found oddly quaint but useless. And there’s a list of Important Dates, including the reminder that this year Cinco de Mayo is on May 5!

I personalized my DayMinder by writing in the birthdays of my immediate family including my own, which I hope is not a foreshadowing of anything, and I noted on the April 19 page that I have a doctor’s appointment. Oh, I’m getting my hair cut on Wednesday. Other than that, 2018 looks pretty open.

Tuna Salad

2, 5-oz. cans of solid white tuna in water, drained
½ cup celery, finely diced
2 Tbs. sliced scallion
1 Tbs. capers
1 Tbs. flat-leaf parsley
¼-½ cup mayonnaise (Best Foods)
1 tsp. lemon juice
2 tsp. Dijon mustard (Grey Poupon)
1 Tbs. extra virgin olive oil

Combine tuna, celery, scallion, capers and parsley. In a small bowl, combine remaining ingredients and add to the tuna-vegetable mix. Blend thoroughly to make a soft paste.
Serve over greens or on toasted bread.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska