Calendar Girl

But I really like the fact that we can just play with time in this way. "It's just coming up to 2am and when it hits 2am it will suddenly be 1am again" Brilliant, fuck physics, we can be when we want to be.

it's funny you should say that, because yesterday my son and i had a conversation about what is the "real" time, daylight savings or standard time. he insisted that whatever time it was at the time was the real time, but i meant what would the time be if we hadn't changed it--the original time, for lack of a better term. i think i prefer the "real" time. : )

There must be communities in the States which sit right on 'timeshift' lines - it's one o'clock for my right foot and up as far as the knee, but two o'clock for the rest of me'! You can kind of understand why people rioted when the government told them the calender had gone wrong and they were going to skip eleven days. True story - the first time I saw the initials 'GMT' it was on a picture of the moon landing and so for years I thought it meant 'general moon time'. I think we should all just stick to general moon time.

general moon time--that's great! i vote for that. : ) you're right about people straddling time zones. sometimes they live in one and work in another. then there are the places that don't "do" the time change. i think the state of indiana doesn't, and the navajo indian nation doesn't either. confusion!

I like the idea of General Moon Time, although is that General Moon as in "Recently Colonel Moon but got promoted" or more like "Moon Time in general, on average"? I have been proposing for several years now that we call it splits and go half an hour between real and daylight savings time, which I modestly call "Rick Time". All this fuss about saving energy, but think of how much you waste trying to figure out what time it is!!

mjrc, I have to say that although I know it suddenly seems darker in general, this is still one of my favorite times of the year. I have come to feel like it is time to rest, to crawl into bed or under a heavy wool blanket (assuming it's cold out), and hybernate. Curl up with a good book, or in your case, a good iPod full of music. A toasty fire, a glass of scotch? Now we're talking....

I live in one of the confusion zones - a jurisdiction that doesn't change - and I can tell you its just as big of a pain in the ass. For one thing, your whole cable TV schedule gets buggered by an hour and it takes weeks to get used to it. I can't count how many Gilmore Girls episodes I've missed because of the damned time change.

More importantly, daylight savings was invented for a reason... to maximize daylight! The too-early darkness you complained about last year: that happens here much earlier and it is super-effing depressing.

But it's one of those issues so contentious that you could start a knife fight in a church by mentioning it. Any suggestion that we try out this daylight savings business is always met by tiresome farmer-joe responses "you don't need to fiddle with your clock to get more sunlight. Just wake up a little earlier and go to bed a proper time and you'll have all the sunlight a decent person needs", yada yada yada.

Really, it's one of those grass-always-greener things. Daylight savings is a blessing; I'd love it if we had it.

I love this song.

I read your post from last year and remembered that I felt the same way. I think I'm in the same boat as you. I'm ok with it now, but still hate it.

wre--i suppose i adjust in time, it just takes me awhile. i wish it didn't come on so suddenly. that's what i don't like, the shock to my system. perhaps greater consumption of alcohol would help. : )

lyle--it's funny, i spend at least two weeks saying to myself, well, it's 5:00 now, but it's really 6:00, so i end up confusing myself even more. the only thing that helps is that the rest of "my world" has changed too. so if i had to suddenly reconfigure everything by myself, it would drive me crazy! and besides that, anything that results in the missing of gilmore girls episodes really ought to be outlawed. ;-)

serious question: are you far enough north that you get the "never gets all the way dark or light" effect like they do in alaska? or do you just get the true shit-end of the stick and get way less hours of light and more hours of total darkness?

andy--i re-read what i wrote last year, and i was really on a tear, wasn't i? maybe we both have s.a.d.--seasonal affective disorder--and we need to get those light boxes! : )

You asked "serious question: are you far enough north that you get the "never gets all the way dark or light" effect like they do in alaska? or do you just get the true shit-end of the stick and get way less hours of light and more hours of total darkness?"

The latter, I'm afraid. Way, way more hours of darkness during the winter. If you're confined to an office during the day, you can go all week without seeing the sun.

that would be very difficult for me, and that's coming from someone who can actually feel depressed when there is continuous sunshine. but to not experience the light at all would be really hard.

You should check out those lamps, mjrc. I know 2 people who use them (locally, not even in Canada) and I think they work. I can tell you that when I get up early and it's dark out, it makes a big difference when I turn on the (non-special) illumination beacons we call vanity lights in our bathroom. I'm off to a good start after that, although I can see all my blemishes very clearly.

i've heard they work. i recently attended a lecture that addressed the topic. i wish there was a way to try them out first, to see if they make a difference before investing in them.