Or Maybe He’ll Just Go to the Tanning Salon
Going back to Standard Time is hell on us nightowls. For six months or so, everything is as it should be. The sun comes up sometime after I’m done with it being dark, and doesn’t go down again until after I’ve had the right number of UV rays to keep me tan and happy.
Then the last Saturday in October comes, and things go horribly wrong.
I can deal with the time from the end of June, when the days get slowly shorter naturally, and of their own accord. My rhythms, the results of thousands of years spent in non-tropical climes, are evolved for changing seasons. I think of it the way the garbage disposal would consider its existence, if it had a sense of self: it wouldn’t like it, but does what it’s designed to do. All my pasty ancestors knew that colder weather means shorter days, and they coped with it. So do I.
But this Standard Time switch is a more recent invention. My forebears didn’t have to learn to like it, and I refuse to. For no good reason, I gain an hour of sunlight — while I’m sleeping — and lose an hour of it — when I’m just getting ready for fun stuff.
That, in a word, sucks.
[georgehamilton] No sunlight means no tan, and no tan means no happy. [/georgehamilton]
The adjustment takes a few days, which is why I had nothing to say on Monday. Instead of blogging or trying to figure out how to make some money in this crazy market, I woke up at 8:30, looked at the diminished sun in the skylights, and thought it’ll all be gone in eight hours.
It’s easier for morning people, of course. Even accidental morning people like my wife. She doesn’t want to be at work at 7:30, but if she has to, damnit, she doesn’t want to drive there in the dark. For her, losing Daylight Savings was something that should’ve happened a couple weeks ago. “But what about me?
“Now I have to grill dinner in the dark!”
To compensate, I went around the house turning on every light, and twisting all the dimmers up to Completely Non-Dimmed. Even in rooms I wasn’t going to use. When night came (early), anyway, I sat there in my over-illuminated living room, squinting at my book, muttering “it still isn’t bright enough.”
Of course it wasn’t. GE will never replace Old Sol.
The good news is, I’ll be cranky for a week or two, which should lead to some interesting blogging.
I’m the other way around. I spend this week luxuriating in the extra hour of sleep–and the first month after the accursed ‘daylight time’ starts wandering around in a good simulation of trans-Atlantic jet lag…
I’m actually a morning person, in the sense that I’m usually up by 7:30 even when I don’t need to be, but still think DST should be “regular” time. While it’s a bit harder to wake up in the morning when it’s dark, I really don’t need a lot of sunlight to brew coffee, shower, and such. I’d much rather have the light at the end of the day when the time is my own.
Exactly wrong
Stephen gets it exactly wrong here, much as I hate to say it: Going back to Standard Time is hell…
I used to be a hardcore night owl, up til 2:30 and awake at the crack of 9. For a music industry heavy, that was a perfectly cromulent schedule.
But then I moved to a new town and got a job that starts at 8:45 with a 90 minute commute. Add to that the hour I spend in the morning doing yoga, and I’m up at 5 effing 30 in the morning these days. I gotta tell ya, Standard Time is a Godsend for a displaced night owl.
My problems will begin in six months, when 5:30 comes an hour earlier, requiring me to push my bedtime up to some idiot hour like 9 PM. You want cranky? You’ll see cranky then.
By the way Stephen, legumes supposedly help your body adjust to a new circadian rhythm. It seems to work for me, so I’d recommend cooking up a huge pot of bean chili or black eyed peas and greens and chowing on that until Mr. Crankypants is happy again.
The mountains don’t help either. Anywhere else in the country has an extra hour, hour and a half of sunlight. But the sun hits that mountain range and then poof. Gone. No leisurely sunsets, no light poking out above the range.
It’s just night.
I stil recall a cartoon from the political page of the Sacramento Bee. Must have been around 1975.
Three frame cartoon. Caricature of R. M. Nixon. It was a political statement on the newly enacted expanded DST.
First frame showed Nixon, holding a blanket. He says (to the best of my dusty grey matter,
this is why cali is better than co (though the politics suck)
it’s all about western exposure!!!!
cali the sun comes up in like 3 seconds… black as night, then intense sunlight.. but the sunsets last forever…
co… sunrise takes forever but the lights go out at 3pm…
but co has less hippies (or at least they don’t control state gov and there are enough cowboys to keep them in line)
Have you ever considered relocating to Arizona or Indiana?
They don’t do daylight savings time. Of course, that means standard time all year round, but you don’t get the semi-annual jolt.
Downside: confusing as hell for those of in one of the other states when we’re trying to figure out when we can call our friends and family in IN or AZ.
Oh, and if you live on the western end of your time zone, you get almost one full hour more of sunlight at the end of the day (and one hour less at the beginning) compared to the eastern end of the time zone.
And Jaybird is right about mountains, but tall buildings have the same effect.
Went to Chicago a few days in April (from Kansas) and stayed downtown. It was a bit weird how it got dark so much earlier. (There’s also a difference in latitude, but that effect would be minimal.)
Hawaii doesn’t have DST either, but they have so much daylight they don’t need to save. I miss it.