Goodbye Hideous Planners

I bought a new planner today. It was more momentous than it may seem. For the last three years, I’ve purchased the same brand of day planner, all with the same font and format week after week after week after week after week after week. I’ve probably traced and embellished the cursive words at the top of each week’s page, “Plan Ahead,” over a hundred times. Flipping through it, I see I’ve made sharp, angry doodles throughout. I have not filled these planners with good things. I’ve filled them with stressful to-do lists, looming events, and mundane tasks. I make a small box next to each task and X it out once it is accomplished. Big things, like “DEFEND THESIS PROPOSAL,” has a ridiculously large box next to it, with about 8 X’s scratched deeply into its surface.
But it’s not just the contents of these horrible, little books that get to me. It’s the font and format itself. For three years, I’ve associated the horrific day-to-day tasks of a beleaguered graduate student with this repulsive, grey font. For three years, I’ve flipped to a new week, hoping it would be less busy, less stressful, less wickedly horrendous, only to see those bland letters defiantly staring back at me.
So you might be thinking to yourself, why in the world would you keep buying the same kind of planner? You’ll see near the end of each little book, I have written, “Go buy new planner.” Whenever something isn’t accomplished that day, I cross it out (instead of an X) and write it again the next day. You’ll see “Go buy new planner” written a dozen times in each of these books. So part of the problem is that by the time I actually get to the store, (I’m not even kidding) these are the only kind left. Besides, they’re cheap. And I usually enjoy the satisfaction of cheap things. I didn’t anticipate that they would get under my skin as much as they do. And it’s almost like fate intervened. These little planners haunt me.
But this year. 2011. This is the year I finish the atrocity of my graduate program. This is the year I will emerge from the rubble in my brain. If I’ve got any left, I’ll stop neglecting friendships.
So, I went to SO many stores. And all I saw were those hideous planners. As I’d pick one up and check its innards, I would recoil and throw it back like it was a giant spider in a dirty diaper. –Pause for this image to sink in.-- And after SO many stores, I found it. It was reasonably priced. It was blue. Sky blue. It had tabs for each month. And on the inside? Oh, it warmed my own innards to see light images of an azure sky, turquoise water, and a glimmering beach on each page. It is perfect. There was no line at Wal-Mart. A sign, I’m sure. I took it home and copied this week’s to-do into it. Instead of my old bookmark (a worn envelope with more angry-looking squiggle-weapons sketched on it), I tied a crisp, clean, white ribbon to its spirals and marked my page.
I never said this would be interesting, but this year will be a better year for me. Yes, I still have unspeakable, flaming hoops of academia to jump through, but I can go to my little beach each time I schedule a meeting.