Thar Shaddin

There's going to be a Jasonday, right?

Chiming in late here . . . The current Chinese week structure came around with Christian missionaries, and the naming system is remarkably bland. Literal translations: Monday=Week One, Tuesday=Week Two, etc, etc, Saturday=Week Six, Sunday=Week Sun, or Week Heaven.

Japanese is much more eloquent with what they got from the Western Devils, and they assigned elemental branches to the days of the week: Monday=Moon Day, Tuesday=Fire Day, Wednesday=Water Day, Thursday=Wood Day, Friday=Gold Day, Saturday=Earth Day, Sunday=Sun Day.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because I was thinking about the idea of conflicting calendars. The Chinese lunar calendar is still used for traditional holidays, naturally, even though it's not used in most official contexts. However, I have a 20-something Chinese friend who is from a farming village. She's now a modern, American university educated professional, but has faced a few serious speed bumps in her adult life because of the fact that her farming family ONLY uses the lunar calendar. Her birth is recorded on the wrong date, and because of this her birth certificate, passport, and school records register conflicting dates. Her mom initially reported her birth as "the ninth day of the tenth month," which is her lunar calendar birthday. Years later, a government worker who was trying to rectify the problem, traced the date back incorrectly, and now she has three officially recorded dates of birth.

True story.