Earlier today on Twitter, I was lamenting the fact that the 4th of July fell on a Wednesday this week. (Because OH MY GOD waking up this morning was SO HARD.) Twitter user Paul Gude (@sgnp) responded to my whining with this redesign of the Gregorian calendar. from the New York Neo-Futurists. Here are the basic rules:

1. Make every month exactly 28 days.
2. Every day falls on the same day of the week (e.g. The 1st is always Sunday; the 19th is always a Friday. Always.)
3. Add a 13th month (called, say, Trisember)
4. 28 times 13 is only 364 days, SO we will add one extra day at the beginning of the year. This will be New Year’s Day holiday. It has NO DAY OF THE WEEK. It just IS.
5. During Leap Years, we will suspend the calendar for New Years for 48, instead of 24, hours! This will be called Super New Year’s Day
6. No more current holidays! (Chris says “No more arguing about who deserves a holiday named for them, or calculations about Easter, or regional decisions about Rosh Hashanah”) The 26th of every month (always a Friday, btw) will be a national holiday. That is 13 national holidays!

I was just joking with Goldy last week about setting up a metric system of time-keeping, and this sounds pretty close to what I had in mind. Of course, this calendar would never happen. Let's set aside the first obvious roadblock, that the evangelicals would lose their shit over godless heathens doing away with Christmas holiday, and just consider the fact that this plan is a little too monotonous, even with the baked-in chaos of a day-less New Year's Day. As much as we complain about the faults and flaws in the Gregorian calendar (I will never get over paying as much for rent in February as I do for all the other months) I think the fact that holidays move around the week make them a little more special somehow. Sometimes your birthday is on a Saturday and those birthdays are often better than when your birthday falls on a Tuesday. It's not fair, except that it happens to everyone, so it is kind of fair.

Still, like Esperanto, this is an unabashedly utopian idea, and I find it strangely appealing. In a completely rational world, the calendar would definitely look something like this. Would that be a better world or not? Nobody knows for sure, but it's a lot of fun to think about.