Out Of Phase

Like the brains of dogs, and certainly cats, the human brain is a fragile organ, susceptible to damage and pernicious meddling. Conditioned to respond to a recurrent situation, the brain re-wires its behavior to handle the repeated and expected situation. Consider the adopted pet, having changed households, now displaying inexplicable and irksome behavior towards its new owners. Ring a bell, Puddles salivates. Stimulus, response.

It seems that a small part of my own brain has been perverted from its previous programming in new ways both inconvenient and devious. Like an "abductee", wandering around Terra Firma after the rumored anal probe, I scratch my head and wonder aloud, "How did I get here?" Or more accurately, "What day is it?"

Give me your hand, walk with me.

The pre-Colombian Mayans didn't use the wheel, but they measured the length of the solar year to a far higher precision than the Europeans who formulated the Gregorian calendar. Curiously, the über-precise Mayans preferred a whole number, 365, to the precise value they measured, and built their elaborate calendars around that figure, eschewing leap days. Even with that small error, and given a (long) life time, by the time you were eighty years old, spring would arrive just a few weeks earlier (by the calendar), than it had when you were a Mayan child, playing in the mud.

The word month is a cognate to the word Moon, meaning they have a common, or related origin. In a climate without appreciable seasons, or if the Moon figured more prominently in your mythology than did the sun, it might seem reasonable to mark the passage of time by the phases of our satellite. The observant and diligent shaman, however, might eventually eventually discover four other ways to define the Moon's orbit: the sidereal month, relative to the stars; the tropical month, relative to the vernal equinox; the anomalistic month, relative to the Moon's position nearest to (or farthest from) the Earth; and the draconic month, relative to the ecliptic plane. The lengths of these five periods vary by as much as two days.

Every great thinker wrestles with the issues of incorporating new information into the body of "knowledge" he already possesses. Aristotle, later Ptolemy, played with a mental model of spheres, each moving a particular celestial object relative to the other objects, with the Earth in the center. The periodicity of the Moon has no direct numerical relation to the annual revolution of the Sun, and it must have made the great thinkers, trying to correlate the two, crazy.

I can easily imagine a Lunar Interpretive Committee arguing the merits of the different months around a campfire, weighing common sense against spiritual belief, much like certain discussions around the firehouse dinner table. In the end, apparently, some wise figurehead threw out the whole notion of a month's duration being, in any way, tied to the Moon. Subsequently, we inherited a year of twelve months, of varying duration, correlated to the signs of the Zodiac. Call it executive prerogative.
The seven day week, depending upon whom you ask, came from the average weight of a baby camel, the number of fingers on the hand of a convicted pirate, or the alcoholic content of early beers. Actually, seven is a hallowed number, derived, by most accounts, from the number of naked-eye, visible stellar objects in the night sky: Moon - Monday; Mars - Tuesday; Mercury - Wednesday; Jupiter - Thursday; Venus - Friday; Saturn - Saturday; Sun - Sunday. The length of the week in the western world has been solidly established for at least two millenia, perhaps much longer.

As to the reprogramming of my neural equipment, I'd lived forty years, happily measuring my days with the accepted and understood year, month and week, negotiated oh so long ago. When I was hired by my Department, the damage began. We use an eight day rotation of shifts, working two twenty-four hour shifts (plus the occasional overtime) in that time. Our days off comprise a "two-off" and a "four-off", meaning a two and a four-day period between shifts.

We ask a bread-and-butter question of some of our patients, to assess their level of orientation: "What day is it?" It's a mediocre question, often irrelevant to the changeless world of an extended care facility, where one day blends into the next. I often must perform some mental calculations of my own, before I can process the answer. Curiously, I have no problem remembering how many days until I work next, but I seldom know what day of the week it is.

The biggest effect arises as the real world moves out of phase with my eight-day week. Take for instance, weekends. The odds of a real-world weekend completely lining up with my time off are 50%. If I include Friday or Monday as part of the weekend, the probability drops to 25%. I'm not complaining; I have abundant unstructured time off from work, but it can be difficult to coordinate weekend activities with friends and loved ones.

Particularly troubling is the complication created by my kids living out of state. Initially, I was overjoyed with the schedule when I was hired, and the prospect of all the time it would allow me to spend with them during the week. After they moved to California, repeatedly negotiating which weekend the kids are coming up each month became a huge pain in the ass. Three quarters of the year's three-day weekends necessitate a trade or a day off to maximize visitation. I have a very limited pool of possible trade partners, and I try to reserve those trades for the months without an open weekend.

Conversely, it's nice to go do something during the week, without the weekend crowds. Movies, museums, trails are much less crowded on a Tuesday. I have a lot of flexibility in my week for dentist or doctor appointments. I have to go to bed on time just eight days a months, but every work day is both a Monday and a Friday.

What day is it today?