Permalinks behaving unexpectedly

I’m tying to create permalinks for the links on my main page (About-me and portfolio pages) http://a-panegyric.com/

Just to experiment, I changed permalink settings for these pages to be in the month-name format. However, when I click the actual links, they’re in this format:
http://a-panegyric.com/about-me/
http://a-panegyric.com/portfolio/

This is how I wanted them to be, but I’m not sure why they don’t show up in the month-name format when I asked it to.

Also, I read that having permalinks start with %postname% is not recommended. If so, are the above 2 link formats not optimal?

Thanks,
Kunal