It’s 5:51 am. It’s a holiday. No work. No school. I’ve been up for an hour.
My mind, despite a week of telling it otherwise, is still on Daylight Savings time.
Fuck Daylight Savings time.
I’m not some farmer with six kids I have to set to work milking the cows before school. Is that even why some idiot in the courthouse switched the time by an hour every summer? Who the fuck knows? The truth is out there, but I’m too mad and too tired to give a damn.
All I know is that it’s a week later and I’m still getting up at the same time. Productivity sucks whether it’s spring forward or fall back. It’s going to take me a month to get used to the new time. I’m going to walk around zoned for the rest of the day because I didn’t get enough sleep.
Scratch that. I’m going to walk around zoned all day anyway. I’ve been zoned since college when my roommate called me a ‘space cadet.’ I didn’t like my roommate. I’ve been zoned since I was a teenager and spent a whole summer reversing my days and nights so I could... Well, I’m not exactly sure why I did that. It just happened.
If there really are circadian rhythms, then I used to have a twenty-four and a half hour one. Once school let out for summer, I’d have flipped my days for nights within a month. In forty-eight days, I could have cycled back around to the beginning and would be getting up at a normal time. I don’t know why I didn’t. Back then, circadian was easy. I could stay up all night on a Friday and a Saturday, sleep all day and night Sunday, then head happily back to school on Monday. Okay, we’re being honest here. Calculus class, the first class of the morning, was always hard. I might have done better if I hadn’t dozed through so much of it. Still, sleep seemed so easy then.
Now, my inflexible old brain wants to go to bed within five minutes of the hour I went to bed the previous nights. Now, if I go to bed late, I seem to wake up early, meaning colossal fatigue for two or three days. That makes me follow the rules more closely. So right now, bedtime wants to be 8:30pm. I’ve been hungry for dinner at 5;30pm. Pretty soon, I’ll arrive at Denny’s at 3:45 in the afternoon and order dinner. Or I’ll fall asleep on the couch at 6:45 pm, then get up at 3:30 am and wander the halls of my assisted living and wonder why breakfast isn’t ready. My grandma did that. Sorry, Grandma.
Well, I’m not in an assisted living arrangement, not yet. But I do feel zoned out regarding time.
Every spring and every fall, I wonder how we’re still stuck in this outdated mode of switching time. Yeah, that hour that ancient politician reset aeons ago, that Daylight Savings, as if we’d be fooled into thinking we were saving anything, that time is fucking us all up and we should stop. We are not more productive because of Daylight Savings time. I like to remember the Native American’s view of Daylight Savings time: ‘Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket.’
Who’s in control of time in this state?
Not the fucking state of mind.
I mean Washington state. You know, the other Washington, the one that’s still reasonably sane. Who’s in control?
Hello, helloooo. We want our time unchanged. Hello? Is anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me.
Thank you for listening, jules