Tonight after dropping Lissy and Doug at the airport we went to Borders
Books to continue with my pointless search for the perfect 2005 engagement
calendar.  I only know they are called engagement calendars because that is
the label that is on all of them.  I would have otherwise called them datebooks.
Life has finally lead me to a place where it is necessary for me to have
an engagement calendar.  Working two jobs and taking classes has caused a
great deal of confusion for me temporally.  For instance, I can never remember
if I'm supposed to be teaching at any given time.  I have had to rely on
the tactic of just showing up at the school and hoping that someone tells me
I'm supposed to be teaching them.  I see many other people using engagement
calendars and they seem to be at the right place at the right time so maybe 
I will have to do it also.   My fear is that I will have this physical
manifestation of my schedule and I will forget to use it.  Or use it 
incorrectly maybe.  You would think that being a virgo and all that jazz
would make me unable to function without one.  But all these years, nay,
not a single engagement calendar has made its way into my life.  In college
I would write my schedule on a shred of paper and carry it around in my
pocket.  Its lifespan would be just long enough for me to memorize where I
needed to be that semester.  The other problem, besides not knowing where I'm
supposed to be, is knowing where I have been.  I think I've lost a lot of
money because I forget to fill out my time card each day and then when I finally
do, I have no recolection of anything I've done.  I try to piece the past
together with seemingly insignificant events: ok, I know it was a Thursday
because I didn't have tea that day... but did Student A show up or was it just
B and C?  So, back to Borders.  There was nothing there.  I didn't want the
Harry Potter engagement calendar and I didn't want the positive affirmations
engagement calendar and I didn't want the jogger's engagement calendar that had
a space to log how far you ran that morning.  At the same time, I didn't want
the plain old Week-at-a-glance engagement calendar.  I felt like it had to
be a celebratory piece of history, not a plain black book.  Eventually I
gave up on finding the right one and went to puruse the fiction section.  I
found a book entitled "How I Became Stupid".  It caught my attention right
away.  Maybe that's what I'm working towards.  I sat on the bench and began
reading the book when it hit me that Daniela, a new yet dear friend probably
moved away yesterday and it's possible I won't see her again for a long time.
I began to think about all the people who I love so much but forget to contact.
I wanted to crawl under the bench I was sitting on.  I wanted to crawl under and
curl up into a little ball and moan a little bit.  I thought "oh, but people 
might think I'm strange."  Then I remembered the look some seemingly normal
women had given me as I walked past them in the store a few minutes earlier.
"People already think you're weird," I told myself.  "You have nothing to lose.
Crawl under the bench, curl up into a little ball and moan."  I leaned over
the side of the bench to investigate what my moaning den would be like.  Under
the bench was a book entitled "September 11th, a Testimony".  There was no way
I wanted to share a space with that.   So I didn't crawl under the bench, I
didn't curl up into a little ball, and I didn't moan.  Instead I bought the
Becoming Stupid book, walked back to car with Eric, us pretending to be a
three-legged creature with two heads, and drove home.