Saturday, March 10, 2018

Saving What Now?

Tonight we lose another hour of our lives, sacrificed on the altar of “more daylight” in the form of Daylight Savings Time.

This has never made any sense at all to me.

It seems to me that we have the same amount of daylight regardless of how it is measured, and that there is altogether too much of the stuff anyway.  Daylight is when you go to work.  Daylight is when noisy people insist on making noise at you.  Daylight needs to be drained, not saved.  We need more night, where it is quiet and there is time to reflect.

But the world is run by morning people who got up earlier than the rest of us and monopolized all the good stuff, and they think this gives them the right to tell everyone else what to do.  So we have Daylight Savings Time and work starts shortly after sunrise and everything grinds to a halt once the moon rises, at least officially.

I don’t get it, but there you go.

As far as I am concerned the only useful function that Daylight Savings Time serves is that it reminds us that the clock is an arbitrary way to measure time, one that can be set however one prefers with equal validity and thus being yelled at for coming home after curfew is a bit odd.  That made a lot more sense to me as a teenager than as a parent of teenagers, but there you have it.

Not everyone participates in this mass delusion, of course.  A couple of summers ago when we went to the Grand Canyon we had to take into account the fact that Arizona does not bother with all of this nonsense, though many of the Reservations do.  So it was a bit of a nuisance trying to figure out precisely what time we were expected to arrive where, as Utah – where we were driving down to the Grand Canyon from – does uniformly observe Daylight Savings Time and I had no idea how much if any of the Grand Canyon or the road to it was located in any Reservation.

It used to bother me that not everyone took part, but now I think those places are onto something and that we should take them as a model.

Of course here in Wisconsin it is expected that all my clocks will be an hour ahead of themselves tomorrow and my sleep schedule will be similarly compromised.  It’s been years since I kept a regular enough schedule for that to matter – probably high school, now that I think about it – but still.  It is a bother, and the world is full enough of bothers as it is.

So this may be from an hour into the past or the future or whatever it all works out to be.

Greetings, time travelers! 

5 comments:

LucyInDisguise said...

[full-on-snark&sarcasm-mode]

Okay, wait just one goddamn minute there, cowperson!

As one of those early risers I must take exception to paragraph #4, sentence #1 to wit:

I do not “run” the world. I do not monopolize anything, let alone the “good stuff” (not even this bucket of hot wings in front of me), nor do I think I have any “right to tell everyone else what to do”. In point of fact, everybody else seems to take great pleasure in telling me what to do. And where to go. And where to stuff ‘it’ if I don’t like ‘it’. Which I don’t. Whatever ’it’ may be

Quite the contrary. If I could work my will, everyone who goes around with “Merry Christmas” on their lips … oops, wrong rant … If I could work my will, they’d take this leap one-half hour into the future and just LEAVE IT.

(There. Who said I wasn’t open to compromise?)

AND, by the way, I actually missed going to the South Rim of the Grand Water Erosion precisely because I couldn’t figure out the whole Daylight Saving Time male bovine excrement*. (NO! No soft peddling today of all days! They stole another hour of sleep from me today!) Bullshit. Daylight Saving Time Bullshit.

And speaking of straight up, unadulterated bullshit, check out the first sentence on this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_United_States

That’s ti? For fuck’s sake, people, my day starts at 2:00 AM. I’m trying really hard to go to sleep in the ‘evenings’. Hello? Works so much better when it’s DARK? Clue???

And one more thing: George and Willie can take their bloody ideas and go pound sand.
https://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst/history.html

[/full-on-snark&sarcasm-mode]

Minor editorial note. It is, actually, “Saving”, not “Savings”.

And yes — I actually walked my OCD ass all the way over there just to irritate you.

Because I noticed that you wrote this last night, then went to bed. Then, you had the unmitigated gall to blackmail me into spending a significant portion of my Sunday Morning After Losing An Hour Of Sleep writing this, carefully proofreading this, researching sources, providing relevant links to immaterial material, and editing it to be certain that the whole point of this rant is entirely, completely, and unquestionably ambiguous. That’s why.

Yes, you did.

Did too!

And I’ll buy witnesses who are willing to perjure themselves to prove it.

So there. ::raspberry::

Lucy

* Give me a little break here - I was 17, and there’s a very high probability that I was drunk at the time.

LucyInDisguise said...

Proofreading fail.

Although "ti" gets a much better giggle that "it".

Also, I may (as biologically impossible as it certainly is) be pregnant.

Seems like I missed a period.

::groans::

Lucy

David said...

Groan indeed. :)

I had no idea I had that much power! I will have to be more careful to use it only for good, unless I am in need of amusement of course. ::return raspberry::

Well, if the morning people aren't running the world then who is? Because it sure as hell isn't the night people. I tend to see morning people in much the same way as Sooners - people who jumped the gun and established their power and wealth before the good people of the world were even awake, and now they run things their way. High school? Began at 7:40am. Work? 8am. "Early to bed, early to rise" and all that jazz.

If you're a morning person not running the world, you need to talk to your AM brethren! They've left you behind!

Join the Dark Side. We have cookies. And it really is dark! :)

You know, I thought about whether it was Savings or Saving, and then decided I liked my way better even if it was wrong so I left it there without doing any research on the matter. And now, now I will still leave it there. Because I can! Mwahahaha!

So few victories in this world...

I actually stayed up late to wait up for each and every one of the teenagers under my roof to return to being under my roof from their various social engagements, and then this morning arrived fast and hard, yes it did. So you can rest easy - you have been avenged, by my own hand.

LucyInDisguise said...

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
   Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
   And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son
   The face that bites, the hands that catch!
Beware the Fliping bird, and shun
   The frumious Bandersnatch!”

’Tis the Puppet Masters
Who divide the players’ day & night
Dancing forever to songs they’ll never hear!
still mimsy were the borogoves …

They shall fight with vorpal sword in hand
forever the manxome foe they fear.
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
the Daylight Saving Time is here.

“And hast thou slain the Monstrosity¿?”
Nay, forever shall the mome raths outgrabe.
“O frackinglus day! Callooh! Callay!”
He choked and chortled in his shame.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
   Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

And that ↑ was considerably more work than it is worth.

(You have no conception of how loud a spell checker can scream ‘till you do something like this … Lewis Carroll would have never made it past “toves”, which my spell checker insists should be “moves”, and I doff my Chateau d'If to the aforementioned author with appropriate apologies suspended in the cake.)

I shall now exit, stage left, ana go galumphing back tho sleep be deprived and ye be now thoroughly deranged.

Lucy

David said...

Dew knot trussed yore spelt Czech her two ketch olive yore miss steaks oar yew Mae bee inn four sum Dis sap point meant.

I'm just impressed that you managed to get the upside down question mark through Blogger's comment feature!

Sleep well, and don't let the Jabberwocks bite!