We didn’t have to check our horoscopes to know we’d been dealt a double whammy.
As if watching our neighborhoods turn into flotillas wasn’t bad enough, last week we learned that we can mildew and feel sleep deprived all at the same time.
What a concept…follow a month that bore rain of Biblical proportions with an arbitrary edict that triggers the short-circuiting of our circadian rhythm – a physiological process that even fungi adhere to. Admittedly, I’ve lived in California waaaaay too long to be reckless in messing with my own biorhythms.
I don’t know about you, folks, but I want my hour back.
While nobody’s exactly sure why we maintain this federal law – Daylight Saving Time or DST to its closest friends – the vast majority of our country “springs forward and falls back” each year. Or “falls forward and springs back” if you happen to live in the southern hemisphere.
Talk about confusing. But if you think you’ve got it bad – be thankful you’ve not been living in Indiana.
Until this year a large portion of Indiana, a small Midwestern state that’s in two time zones to begin with, steadfastly held to a wildly complex method of keeping time.
More than 80 percent of the Hoosier state’s counties are located in the Eastern Time zone. In an admirable show of feistiness, legislators met years ago and defied federal law by declaring that Indiana’s eastern counties would remain on Standard Time all year – except for a couple of counties near Ohio and Kentucky that inexplicably converted to Daylight Time. And – follow me closely here – two counties in the northwest corner of Indiana (near Chicago) and the southwestern tip of the state, which are in the Central Time Zone, used Standard and Daylight Saving Time.
This glitch must’ve made things pretty tricky when inviting people over for dinner. Better to resolve early in life to avoid contact with folks in other counties and be done with it, because it’s stuff like this that’d eventually wear me down and cause me to hide a few gin bottles under the bed.
Indiana finally threw in the towel and converted to DST this year, but in Pulaski County there seems to be some disagreement about which time zone they belong to in the first place. They “resolved” the problem by installing two clocks in businesses and government buildings – one for CDT and the other EDT.
Time zones get even crazier for people living in a handful of other random places on the globe where time sectors are separated by 30 minutes.
Say you decide to move to Goose Bay, Canada and your favorite cousin lives a few miles away in St. Johns, Newfoundland, and you’d like to get together for a couple of pops and some nachos. (Now I realize this is purely hypothetical because whoever heard of nachos in Newfoundland?)
You grab your cell and say, “Yo – Raymond! Let’s get together – how does 6:30 sound?” And Raymond, who’s always been hard to get along with, anyway, responds,
“So, is that 6:30 your time or my time? Because if it’s your time, you really mean 7. But if you mean 7, then I’ll see you at 6:30.”
And you reply,
“Huh?”
Thus you leave Raymond to his lonely life of watching reruns of Laverne & Shirley while you go find some new friends who actually know what time it is.
So stay strong as you hit that snooze button and slurp down one more cup of coffee because scientists say we’ve almost reached the point this season when our bodies will stop fighting the change and adjust.
And if you happen to stumble across some poor soul who hails from Indiana, be gentle.
Gale Hammond is a 22-year Morgan Hill resident. Reach her at Ga*********@ao*.com.
