Is today 3/18/08 or 18/3/08? Irrelevantly, it’s clear that it’s March 18. But what about two weeks ago, when it was 3/4/08 or 4/3/08? March 4 or April 3? It seems that everyone in the world other than Americans use the day-month-year format, and after filling out enough visa entry forms in this part of the world and reading enough British-English influenced writing here, I started adopting that method of date-writing and made myself feel very internationally savvy in the process.
The only problem is that I haven’t really thrown off my 21 other years of living in the US. It’s not a problem after the twelfth of the month, but after a period when I consciously used the day-month-year format, I’ve started transitioning back and forth without any consistent logic. From the first to the twelfth of the month, I can no longer abbreviate months with numbers and am stuck writing out the name of the month for every date that I write. Additionally, it now takes me about a minute to comprehend any printed date I read, as it no longer comes naturally to read it as month-day-year anymore but also doesn’t seem completely normal to read it as day-month-year either.
Luckily for filling out forms, my birthday has always been easily interchangeable as 9/9/85.