Calendars
(page-a-day for 2020): Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff; Church Signs; Turn Your
Smile Upside Down; Shakespearean Insults. Andrews McMeel. $15.99 each.
Inspiration comes in many forms, and it seems as if most of them can be
incorporated into calendars. The page-a-day format lends itself particularly
well to the notion of giving yourself a little pick-me-up daily and then
keeping it at the front of your mind (by keeping it at the front of your desk
or kitchen counter) for 24 hours, then turning to yet another little nugget of
wisdom. Certain inspirational calendars are perennials, turning up year after
year and being just as appealing in, say, 2020, as in any other year. The
specifics shown change, of course, but the basic nature of each calendar, the
way each of them offers something upbeat to make daily life a bit easier or
more pleasant or more worth thinking about, remains the same. The result is that
there is something very comforting about the everyday homespun thinking of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and the short
and often amusing offerings in Church
Signs. The advice in Don’t Sweat the
Small Stuff is always on the serious side and takes a bit of time to read
and absorb. For instance, “When you stop sweating the small stuff about money,
everyone benefits. You’ll feel better, and, what’s more, you’ll probably make
more money, too. Any success we enjoy is despite our worry, not because of it!
Worry and excessive stress are distractions that keep us from our dreams and
from our greatest potential. So as we discover ways to worry less, to ‘not
sweat it,’ we ignite that capacity within us.” That is a fair amount to read
for a single day’s entry, and is typical of what this calendar offers: nothing
epigrammatic, just life advice that takes some time to absorb and is worth
glancing at repeatedly during the day to provoke additional thought on whatever
that day’s topic may be. Another example: “Learning to be satisfied doesn’t
mean you can’t, don’t, or shouldn’t ever want more than you have, only that
your happiness isn’t contingent on it. You can learn to be happy with what you
have by becoming more present-moment-oriented, by not focusing so much on what you
want.” The commentary in Don’t Sweat the
Small Stuff has continuity – each day’s words, although complete in
themselves, also tie into the words of previous and/or following days – so the
self-help aspect of this calendar builds throughout the year, encouraging
ongoing thinking about who you are, what you have, and where you are going.
In contrast, Church Signs is
as pithy as would be expected for actual church-sign sayings that are meant to
be read and absorbed quickly by drivers zipping past places of worship in their
cars. Grabbing attention for spiritual and philosophical thoughts – not all of
them directly religious – requires figuring out what to say in a few words that
will have value and will stay with passersby. Of course, keeping the calendar
nearby means you have plenty of time to read and re-read each day’s entry, but
these “little sayings to help you on your way” (the calendar’s subtitle) are
still meant to be absorbed quickly, then considered at more length when you
have time and inclination. The spiritual connotations are sometimes overt here:
“No amount of darkness can hide a spark of light.” And they are sometimes
definitely worth thinking about: “God doesn’t give you patience, only the
opportunity to practice it.” But some of the sayings are quite secular: “An
open mind does not always require an open mouth,” and “Every storm runs out of
rain eventually,” and “Love is making somebody else’s problem your problem.” A
few of the Church Signs entries are
to-the-point versions of the sorts of comments to be found in Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: “You can
have few possessions and still have immeasurable wealth,” and “May the best of
your today be the worst of your tomorrows.” But most of the items in Church Signs are designed more for
uplift than for traditional self-help: “Freedom is not the right to do as we
please, but the opportunity to do what is right.” Not everyone will necessarily
find every entry in Church Signs
congenial – or every page of any other page-a-day calendar, for that matter –
but one of the nice things about these calendar designs is that there is always
something new on the next page, and if you do not care for one entry, you may well
find that you like the next one a great deal.
Of course, if you find the whole notion of uplift in calendars such as Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and Church Signs unappealing, then you
probably need an anti-inspirational
page-a-day calendar. Oh yes, there are those around, too. Just as epigrammatic
as Church Signs but considerably more
devilish, Turn Your Smile Upside Down
is packed with cynicism and negative thinking. “Your fortune cookie is empty.
And stale.” So says one entry here – think about it (or, maybe, don’t). “Before
you judge me, try walking a mile in my shoes so I can be a mile away from you,”
says one page, in a negative spin on the notion of understanding people by
putting yourself in their place. “Your workouts aren’t working,” says one bit
of discouragement, and “If you succeed, it is only because others have failed
more spectacularly,” says another. The relentlessly downbeat – if wry and
sarcastic – nature of Turn Your Smile
Upside Down continues through the entire year. “Life is just endless
anxiety occasionally interrupted by moments of forgetting to have anxiety,” one
page states, while another offers a heaping helping of self-doubt: “Has anyone
ever really been happy to see you?” As for relationship advice, here that comes
in statements such as, “A good partner is someone who hates the same things as
you.” True, a little of this goes a long way, and some of it will be a definite
turnoff because of the periodic use of four-letter words. But as with the
positive-thinking calendars, this negative-thinking one provides just a single
thought (or admonition or criticism) each day, which makes its occasional
misfires more bearable. Besides, if you hate what you read in Turn Your Smile Upside Down, you are
simply fitting the mood of the whole calendar.
There is a certain amount of creativity in Turn Your Smile Upside Down, to be sure, but for really creative
negativism, there is absolutely no substitute for the Bard of Avon, as is
abundantly clear in the 2020 version of Shakespearean
Insults. Shakespeare was not above writing some really nasty things (and
some really profane ones, too: there is even a book called Filthy Shakespeare). It is worth learning or refreshing your memory
of Shakespearean English to get the full flavor of the entries in Shakespearean Insults, because in his
bid to appeal both to the gentry and to the many lower-class people who
attended his plays instead of the nearby bear-baiting and similar entertainments,
Shakespeare came up time and again with perfect putdowns. There is the famous
one spoken by Hamlet after the prince accidentally kills Polonius, thinking and
hoping that he has killed King Claudius: “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool,
farewell. I took thee for thy better.” There is the description of one
character by another in The Taming of the
Shrew: “A whoreson, beetle-headed, flap-eared knave!” There is the wish
from Henry VI, Part 2: “Mischance and
sorrow go along with you!” There is a comment from Titus Andronicus that would never make it onto a church sign: “If
there be devils, would I were a devil/ To live and burn in everlasting fire,/
So I might have your company in hell,/ But to torment you with my bitter
tongue!” A bit of knowledge of Elizabethan vocabulary helps in conveying the
full flavor of some of the comments here, such as, from Twelfth Night, “An ass-head and a coxcomb, and a knave,/ a
thin-faced knave, a gull!” But others are every bit as clear in the 21st
century as in the 16th and 17th, such as, from Troilus and Cressida: “He has not so
much brain as ear wax.” Shakespeare anticipated so much that some of the words
in Shakespearean Insults could well
appear in Turn Your Smile Upside Down,
such as these from As You Like It:
“Let’s meet as little as we can.” But on the whole, Shakespearean Insults offers far better language, far meatier thoughts,
and far more piercing negative comments than anything to be found in
modern-English attempts at snarky humor. The point, though, is that if you do
choose to add a little of the snide and sarcastic to your day throughout 2020,
you have a number of different ways to do so, whether your tastes run to the
language of today or to those of 400-plus years ago.
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