Right In The Time-Hole

Time travel sucks.

Not sci-fi time travel, where you can step into a blue box and pop out anywhere you want. Or take a DeLorean up to 88 miles per hour. That stuff is awesome, and I want it. No, I’m talking about something much more mundane, but as evil as the worst Faustian bargain.

I’m talking about Daylight Saving Time.

For those of you who are unlucky enough to live outside of Arizona or Hawaii, we set our clocks back one hour. Normally, I refer to the autumn DST event as “the good one,” since it means I can sleep in an hour later.

However, in recent years, “the good one” has become decidedly less so. First, it’s been pushed back into November. Not much “summer sun” to save by then, let me tell you. And because of this, it is suddenly full dark by 5 in the afternoon, completely without warning. As someone who is susceptible to Seasonal Affective Disorder (depressed moods resulting from lack of sunlight exposure), this is especially annoying. In fact, one of my previous jobs had me arriving before sunrise and leaving after sunset during the dead of winter. I was not a happy camper.

But this time I discovered something even worse. My current work schedule has me getting up especially early (4am), and as a result going to bed uncomfortably early (9pm). I’m pretty annoyed by the crimp this puts in my evening plans. But thanks to DST, I no longer have any problems falling asleep by 9! After all, my body thinks it’s 10. And what does it think of 4-once-5-am? Well, it’s convinced that I’ve overslept, and keeps me waking up throughout the night awash in paranoia!

Daylight Saving Time is a stupid, archaic practice that has no real benefit in this modern world but to annoy people with an arbitrary shift of the clock, and I don’t like it. I would be just as happy if it ended. After all, noon, by definition, is when the sun is at its zenith. But I’m willing to negotiate, if you’d prefer to stay on DST. Or, why don’t we all just switch to a one-time-zone Universal Time?

Anything that ends the madness.