Nerd Pride Radio

Three questions of a very different nature, but all are about Calendars.

One is simple: what sort of online Calendar do you use? If it's Gmail, do you use it in concert with other people's Gmail calendar, and how does that work? If it's not gmail, then what? Do you have any security concerns related to splashing what amounts to vast data about your life into the internet via this calendar?

The second one is: what sort of calendar do you visualize in your mind when you are thinking about the passage of time? And if you do not visualize one, how do you know what date or time it is?

The final one is: do you find that the cycles of time have any psychological effect on you? Anniversary effects of trauma are well-discussed, but what about other kinds of events that aren't necessarily trauma, but were important enough to have lingering effects, positive or negative or otherwise? Do you experience these relative to the places in time when they actually happened, or do certain dates in the year have a significance? As you get old, the thing is, your mental calendar becomes chock full of meaningful events and histories that require a certain amount of processing and reprocessing. Every week there is something - this is my grandpa's birthday, and I remember when ... this is when cousin Joe died back in 94, which reminds us of cousin Jim because... this is when I first graduated from my school... this is the same day we went to prom and got into the car accident... and so on it goes, but after many years there is nothing insignificant about your calendar. I find it... oppressive. I am tired of remembering things - and universe, this is NOT an excuse to be cute and send the dementias. No. But I wish I could forget about things as easily as other people do.

I use Outlook to manage my calendar. I have access to it on my laptop while I'm working, and on my phone and tablet when I'm away from the laptop. I've considered using Apple's family calendar so my wife, kids and I could put stuff on there that we all want to know about (daughter's work schedule, ortho appointments, band concerts, etc.). But that requires enabling iCloud on my laptop, and that has caused issues in the past where work-related emails/appointments/etc. get mixed up with personal emails/appointments/etc., and the acceptance of a meeting invite sent to my work email ends up being sent from a personal email address that causes people to say WTF??? So for that sort of stuff, my wife just uses an erasable white board calendar on the side of the refrigerator that gets updated at the beginning of each month.

For the calendar-in-the-mind, I'm pretty simple: I just visualize an Outlook calendar, where you can look at a year, a month, a week, or a day, zooming in and out as necessary.

As for your final question, perhaps I'm strange, but I don't track many things like that. I know my kids' and wife's birthdays, and our anniversary. I have reminders on my Outlook calendar for my parents and siblings' birthdays; I can tell you when those birthdays are, but I don't associate their birthdays with those dates to a large degree, so if I didn't have the reminders, I would completely forget about sending them a card or calling them. With very rare exceptions, I don't remember dates of deaths and therefore have few bad associations about those sort of things. I do remember my one grandfather's date of death, because it was exactly 4 weeks to the day before my youngest son was born. And we had three miscarriages (all between child #2 and child #3), and we used to do something a little special on those "birthdays", but that's about it.

Everyone has a gmail account. Therefore, we use the Google calendar for everything. Even if gmail isn't your primary email, you still have it. We have everything on there, from Scouts to school meetings to doctor appointments to my roll20 gaming. Everyone has access to it from any device. My wife and I both made it a full screen widget for our phones.

I just wish everyone would get on board with color-coding, but at least it's all there.

I want a calendar mobile app that also functions like a diary for daily notes, and is searchable. Can Gmail Google calendar do this for me?

Excellent. I am going to create a glorious multifunctional monster.