BETWEEN THE LINES: START OF NEW YEAR CREATES THE NEED FOR MORE CALENDARS

* Between appointments, birthdays and holidays, it seems I need more and more calendars every year.

Sure it's a new millennium and a new century, but I think there is reason enough to celebrate simply because it's a new year. Forget that the Y2K bug ever existed. (PLEASE!)

I made it through 1999 with relatively few scrapes, bruises and apparent damage. The year wasn't always good, nor was it completely horrible and terrible. I managed to make it through another 12 months and lived to tell about the experience.

One of the things I like best about the new year is that it means getting a new calendar. It's a fresh start on a clean page, and I need as many of those fresh starts as I can possibly get.

Nearly ever year I receive a wall calendar as a Christmas present. Sometimes they show scenic vistas or beautiful gardens, other times they are filled with quotations or expressions and artwork as you flip through the months of the year.

And, of course, there is the UPS calendar that I receive every year from my father. This year he passed them out like parting gifts as the family left on Christmas Day, but I had to ask for an extra one over the weekend.

It seems that with every passing year I find more things to fill up my time and my days, which means I need more calendars around the house and office to keep track of all those appointments and activities.

I have a calendar in the bedroom and one in the kitchen, and I probably need one hanging in the bathroom just to be certain I don't miss anything. There's a desk calendar for my appointments and events at work, and another showing four months at a glance. (And the really horrible thing is that I need all these calendars and I'm not all that busy.)

All these calendars are supposed to help me mark the passage of time, but inevitably there is something I'll miss. Maybe it will be a birthday I'll forget sometime in 2000, although I try to mark them on each calendar just in case. Or maybe it will be an appointment that I'll have to cancel because something more urgent comes up -- or worse yet I'll forget it altogether.

The calendar is there to remind me of my obligations and help me better organize my time. Somehow, though, I think it's a wasted effort. In college I used to mark up a day-timer with classes, study sessions and assignments due. I had the calendar so full of activities that I nearly had to schedule time for a break. In the years since, I've been rebelling against such a strict schedule.

Even the newsroom is struggling to collectively share a wall calendar listing newsworthy events. This venture should certainly prove to be a challenge since each reporter keeps some sort of calendar system of their own to help them remember meetings, events and press conferences. Trying to get us all to list those events on a single calendar isn't going to be an easy task, but it might show us a thing or two about organization and teamwork.

Who knows, maybe we'll like it so much that we decide to scrap our old systems in favor of a new, collective one. But what would I do with all my calendars then?

Laura Johnston is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.