Well, February might be the shortest month of the year, but it always feels like the longest. And it might not surprise you to find that it is the most disliked month of the year, according to a Gallup poll.

February is still far enough away from spring and still solidly winter to make it the least popular of all of our calendar’s 12 months. But that doesn’t bother February. It still shows up every year with no intention of changing its tune.

And nothing good ever happened in February. There are few historic moments that grace mankind’s timeline in these 28 or 29 days. If it weren’t for President’s Day, Valentine’s Day and Mardi Gras it would have no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Truth be told, February was the very last month to be added to the Roman calendar in the time before Christ, when calendars were constantly tinkered with in pursuit of scientific perfection. The first Roman calendar had just 10 months, which I’m not a fan of. We’d all get old too quickly.

Like many civilizations, the Romans transitioned away from a lunar calendar to one that better reflected the seasons: a solar calendar and just around the time of the founding of Rome in 753 B.C.

And here’s the crazy thing: in the winter, the Romans had no months. They just went through winter without calling those months any name at all. Those roughly 60 winter days were just winter days– literally days without a month.

As you can see, winter has been disliked by humanity for many eons now. For awhile, winter days weren’t dignified with a name.

Lucky for February, the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius, reformed the calendar significantly, assigning the roughly 60 monthless days to two new months — January and February. Things were getting better for keeping time, but it still wasn’t perfect.

It was Julius Ceaser that finally got things right. He traveled to Egypt and saw the genius of that country’s 365 day calendar. And he called on a council back home to fix the calendar once and for all, and that’s when they came up with the one we’re using now. They decided the calendar would combine the Roman month names, the fixed length of the Egyptian calendar and the 365™ days known by Greek astronomy.

Consider it done.

But, you haven’t heard the best part. What Ceaser did was just extend the present year everyone was living in by two months just to get everything synced up right. It was literally called “The Year Of Confusion” by Romans.

Can you imagine?

Well, yes, I’m sure you can. It wouldn’t be the first time a government came in and screwed everything up, including what age you are at any given time.

From there, they changed the names of a few months to honor their leaders, specifically July and August to commemorate Julius and Augustus. Thankfully, none of our politicians have decided to follow in their footsteps or we might now have months like Clintonus or Trumply.

All should have been well with our calendar, but Pope Gregory Xlll decided to get in on the action at some point. The leap years had screwed up the arrival of Easter and so he had 10 days cut off the year to sync up better with that important Christian holiday.

But no one liked his calendar. Only a few countries adopted it at the time. The American colonies didn’t adopt it until 1752 and neither did the British Empire which must have made it hard for anyone to know what day it truly was in the world. As long as people didn’t have their Sunday’s messed with, no one seemed to mind.

Today, the Gregorian calendar is accepted as an international standard, but several countries have not adopted it, including Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iran, Nepal and Saudi Arabia. What day it is there, I do not know.

Seeing as I’ve shown you how arbitrary time really is, I’d like to propose adding another Saturday to the week. Or at the very least, adding another month or two to the year, so we won’t hit 40 quite as quickly.

I’d be happy with either option.

And let’s not even get started on what time it is. Back in the early days of America, there were once 100 local times with a variance of three hours.

In the 1800s, when the world tried to agree on exactly what time it is everywhere, several countries, like France, refused to reset their clocks. I honestly don’t know how people used to keep things straight in the world.

So we can find one thing to be grateful for in February, can we not? It’s one thing the whole world can agree on.