That Evening Sun

Although it didn’t become official until just today, I’ve been living on Daylight Saving Time for the past week. It was the right thing for me to do, to get a running start on this most difficult to the time-shifts: the hour that we lose always seems to come out of sleep-time. 

Of course the difficulty of this was that no other clocks agreed with the ones in the house that I set by myself. The clocks on my computer, iPhone and iPad all take care of themselves, and diligently announce the hour, on the hour, except that for me the hour was wrong. “It’s three o'clock,” the Lady inside my Computer would say to me. “No, it’s four,” I would reply.

In the mornings it was great because I was always an hour ahead of the game. It didn’t become bothersome until Dinnertime for Pussyquats rolled along. 
First, the Internal Time of the Pussyquats (always malleable at other times, I’ve found) had not changed; so when I was putting out their food and calling “Dinnertime! Dinnertime! It’s Dinner Time for Pussyquats!” instead of the usual parade into the kitchen I was met with sleepy expressions. 

Much worse than that, however, was turning on the television expecting the five o’clock news, and instead finding myself stranded in Katie Couric land. Yeeek!

Oh, how I sometimes long for the days when Afternoon TV belonged to Us Kids. Before the Oprahs and the Katies and the Judge Judys took over the afternoons, this was where local TV stations would strip great old shows from TV’s past. This was where I finally got to see all of Star Trek (and by that I mean the original series — the only Star Trek worth watching) and where I got to visit old friends like The Addams Family and The Munsters and Gilligan  and Batman again. 

It’s all Phil Donahue’s fault. He’s the one who opened the door to let all those sickening, smarmy Orpahs and Katie Courics through. Oh, they’re so caring and sympathetic — that is, when it suits their own egos — someone bring me a bucket. Women like to put men down for what they call their “male ego,” and yet they flock to watch shows named after the most egotistical people in the universe.

Anyway… suddenly finding myself tuned in to Katie Couric was like being in a Horror Movie. I couldn’t turn the set off fast enough.

In the evenings I missed a couple of things on TCM that I would have liked to watch, because they came on too late for me. Suddenly, I was finding myself in the bedtime land of my neighbors who typically roll up the sidewalks out in front of their places while the night is still extremely young. Seriously, their houses are all dark at nine o’clock. I wasn’t quite that bad, but I found myself heading for bed around 11:30, because it had already become my 12:30.

One of my Facebook friends shared a MEME kidding that the hour we lose came out of the hour that she would normally spend at the gym. But honestly, instead of forcing us to lose sleep over it, why shouldn’t the hour that we lose come out of other parts of the day? Or other days of the week, for that matter? What if daylight savings time began at noon on a Monday? Then, instead of losing an hour of sleep, we’d lose an hour at work and be that much closer to getting home. This would make at least one Monday a year something to look forward to, rather than dread. It would make the day we go onto Daylight Savings time into something much more like a holiday… which is what it should be.

— Freder.

www.ducksoup.me