There was a Time

Before I had children, I had no idea why people complained so much about Daylight Savings Time. Once a year, you’d get an extra hour of sleep, and, twice a year, the existential satisfaction of successfully resetting all your clocks. Many millennia have passed since those childless days*. I now know that all DST really does is make children into hellions and parents into zombies. Worse, due to the “helpfulness” of technology, I’m now largely deprived of the small comfort competent clock maintenance. Most clocks reset themselves and I fear that we humans will soon lose the skill all together. It’ll go the way of reading paper maps, cursive penmanship, checkbook balancing, and being able to tell a real conservative from a fake one. The future is grim, folks.

This is all by way of saying: I AM TIRED. These little people I created—who two days ago were 100% convinced that the pace of time was completely controlled by their relative degrees of enjoyment or boredom, fullness or hunger—now, NOW these kids have internal clocks that are so precise that NASA could use them to plan shuttle launches (which they do not do anymore). They are now up at the crack of dawn, lifting my eyelids to stare into my horrified pupils and inform me that it is Time To Get Up. I tried to point to my alarm clock to prove to them that it was NOT in fact Time To Get Up, but this was a sophomoric mistake on my part. One, I had forgotten that these children to do not actually acknowledge clocks as an authority on anything unless it suits them. Two, I hadn’t actually reset this clock. Probably because I forgot how. Despite their precise inner clocks telling them that 7 AM is about the time they would have awoken had DST not ended and getting up had ever been important to them before this point, they also seem keenly aware—as are we all—that something is WRONG. They exhibit this highly attenuated sense of cosmic wrongness in the following ways: crankiness, increased emotional volatility, fisticuffs with one another, and random middle-of-the-night check-ins to confirm that night still exists. Basically, they’re still themselves only worse. And we parents are also still ourselves, only worse.

It is misery, I tell you, and the only justification I have ever heard for this insanity known as DST is that it is good for the economy and that it was Benjamin Franklin’s idea to save on candles. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t noticed any change in my candle consumption before or after DST. It’s almost as if that part of the reason isn’t relevant anymore or something. And there are plenty of reasons outside of cranky children and parents to believe that DST is bad for us. Apparently, there is a 25% increase in heart attacks after the switch, a 17% increase in car accidents, 65% increase in work absence and tardiness, and a staggering 1000% increase in disillusionment with allowing the US government to be in charge of anything, let alone time. That government made a bad call this year though as we have an election day a mere 72 hours after we were thrown into this semi-annual apocalypse. There’s really no telling who these GPS-using, typing, online-banking, clueless-clock-setters will vote for. Probably whomever their kids picked out at 2 AM. Fine. We’ll vote for whoever you want. JUST GO BACK TO SLEEP.

Just imagine where that will leave us.

*This is an approximation based on how much I have aged over that period of time.