Circle calendar and mental maps

I am often frustrated by the fast approach of deadlines and birthdays and holidays. I plan excursions that I want to take "within the next few months" or I make loose plans to see friends "soon." What inevitably happens is that I am rushed to finish projects or buy gifts, and those excursions or dinner plans never happen. I think the reason is that I tend to compress my experience of time in the present and immediate future, while expanding time that is more than a few weeks away. One might say to me, "Steve, get a freakin' calendar!" But, I have never been able to look at a square calendar of one month and perceive time in a uniform manner. I began to think about the year as having a circular shape and what a calendar in that form might look like. For ideas I began searching google and had very little luck. Finally I came across the Chaise DVD Magazine and a circle calendar project by the artist David Tinapple. What follows is the email exchange I had with him.

David,

I saw the short video of your circular calendar on chaise magazine 's
site. I have been thinking about creating one for a long time and
haven't spent any time designing it. I thought it would be useful for
me to have a different perspective on the length of the year and the
actual tine I have from month to month. My perception is always skewed
toward different parts of the year being longer than others.

In short, I would love the template page you used to create the
calendar, or some basic instructions about what kind of an arc to
create with the circles.

Hi Steve,

Here is the calendar PDF I made. Seems like a long time ago now. I was
interested in the different "mental maps" of time people make. I
always saw the year as a circle, with summer at the top, winter down
below, and I move counter clockwise around. I asked people, and it
seems most think of the movement as clockwise... So I made a circular
representation that could go either way, and one that used a single
sheet of paper copied multiple times. There are registration points on
the sheet where you match up and pin to a wall.

I did this one by hand in Illustrator, but recently I have been
working on a different one, still circular, but I'm using the
"Processing.org" programming language to generate PDF's.

Cheers,

-David

David,
Interesting. Mine goes counter clockwise with Spring on top and March
and April in the apex position. I am left handed. But as I said, it
seems more like an ellipse than a circle where Spring and Fall are
compressed. Christmas occupies the "West" and Mid July, the "East." As
I go through the cycle, time is magnified and thus extended for the
week that I 'occupy' that space. The speed of the motion through the year is not
consistent. The year is bisected by a horizontal plane and floats on a 30
degree angle with Spring again occupying the high end of the angle. As
I think about it, the cycle has zero relationship to the linear
progression I envision about my lifespan. It doesn't unroll or
move in any direction. It is a stationary and I move around it, on
it, through it.

Thanks for the idea. I just had a great time thinking about that.

-Steve

Steve,
Your mental map is really interesting. I am right handed, and move
counter clockwise, but I too experience it as my movement around a
stationary "track" of the year. North South East West are for me
Summer, Winter, Spring Fall respectively. And now that I think of it
there is some time compression in the spring fall.

I have seen a few people use my circle.pdf for almost a year, and the
results are visually amazing. They report too that it is refreshing to
finally see a whole year unfold like that... makes some patterns
apparent and makes the progression of time visible in some interesting
way.

I sometimes think of it like analog -vs- digital watch faces. They are
two very different forms of representation, analogical -vs- digital.
Digital needs to be read, deciphered, decoded. The marks on a digital
watch have no intrinsic meaning... its a code. And also a digital
watch shows only what time it is now. An analog watch face moves
"analogous" to the time being measured. An analog clock might take
some learning, but the time is not encoded, its a trace (like vinyl
-vs- CD). Looking at an analog watch I find that what I see is not
what time it is "now", and rarely is that what I care about. More what
I am looking for is the angle between now and when I need to be
somewhere. Somehow I know how big an angle I need to get from place A
to B.

Nice to think about this again. Makes me want to keep going with it.

Thanks for your description of your mental map.

-David

Synopsis of _Twenty Seventh City_

I'm reading a really good book right now. _The Twenty Seventh City_, by Jonathan Franzen. He writes a lot for the New Yorker and his most famous book is probably _The Corrections_. Pardon me if you are familiar with him. Anyway, it is a complicated multi-plot story of St. Louis in the 1980s ( I know, whoopee, right?). This 35 year old indian woman is named Police chief of the city because she has done such incredible work in Bombay. But actually, she is the head of a secret cabal of self proclaimed neo-socialists who use psychological torture, kidnapping, terrorism, and murder to hoard political power and upset the balance of privilege vs. exploitation in the region. The goal of the psychological torture, in which they f*ck with people's lives and families, is to catalyze what they call "The State" in which a person, usually high powered municipal leaders, its so distressed, that they become susceptible to the influence of the Police Chief. It doesn't hurt that she is a brilliant political strategist and that everyone loves her.

Fine art of aging

Heard a Nick Lowe interview last night on the radio show _To the best of our Knowledge_ from Wisconsin Public Radio. The show was called: "the fine art of aging"

http://www.wpr.org/book/070930a.html