Times changes give us a chance to reset
This week, in a rare display of bipartisanship, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to pass a bill directed at solving one of the most pressing and egregious issues of our time. I’ll give you three guesses what that issue is, and the first three don’t count if you guess climate change, voting rights or Russian sanctions.
No, the issue that united senators of all political stripes is Daylight Saving Time.
If lawmakers have their way, this whole springing forward and falling back twice a year thing will become a quaint relic of the past. Something we will tell our grandchildren about as we sit on the porch in the evening while the sun waits to set until we’re good and ready for it to set.
Maybe you missed the big news because you slept through it. Or maybe you’re like the rest of us — awake in name only and stumbling about in a mental fog wondering why caffeine seems to have stopped working. No one makes it through the week following the start of daylight saving time without feeling its effects. Except for my cats. According to them, the time to feed them is always whatever time it is at that moment, no matter what the clock says.
Enter The Sunshine Protection Act. From its name you might think the bill is weather related and limits the number of gray and rainy days each American
receives. Or maybe it conjures images of a potential catastrophic event that threatens to obliterate our sun and requires the deployment of Space Force. It is neither. If the bill becomes law, starting in 2023 daylight saving time will become permanent.
Complaining about the time change and its effects is our God-given right. I’m as much in favor of mindlessly pandering to voters as the next person, but allowing politicians to get involved with sun-related issues is never a good idea. It’s not staring-directly-at-asolar-eclipse-without-eye-protection dumb, but it’s close.
This November is potentially the last time we will set our clocks back and get an extra hour of sleep. Unless, that is, you have cats. Of course, it will
also be the last time we get to complain about how early it gets dark. Although we will fill that void by complaining about how late it gets light. Maybe you don’t think darker mornings are a big deal, but when you realize that all the participants in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade are carrying flashlights, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
But there are more troubling aspects to this bill than confusion over what to complain about and when. The biannual time changes provide me with two opportunities each year to adjust my clocks to their proper setting. After each time change, my clocks are set to the correct time. But, for some unknown reason, all my clocks slowly creep forward so that, by the next time change, they are all three to five minutes fast. This phenomenon only occurs with my personal clocks: the one on my car’s dashboard, my watch, and my alarm clock radio (yes, I still use an actual alarm clock. It’s on my nightstand next to the telephone that plugs into the wall and my VCR instruction manual). All the other clocks in our house run like, you know, clockwork.
Without these twice-a-year cues to adjust my clocks to their proper setting, I will be perpetually moving forward at a faster rate than everyone else.
Eventually I will be so far into the future that I will need to preface everything I say with “spoiler alert.” Please don’t bother pointing out that this problem could be solved by me simply looking at other clocks or adjusting my own as needed because I’m too busy planning how I’ll spend the money when I win all the Powerball lotteries.
If and when we move to permanent daylight saving time, we all lose an hour (or in my case, 55-57 minutes) forever. Where does it go, and is there a way to get it back? At this time of year I could really use that lost time to figure out what to wear. I know I shouldn’t wear white before Memorial Day, but is it OK to put my boots away before then or will doing so incur the wrath of the snow gods? And are shorts and a T-shirt mandatory when the temperatures top 50 degrees, or is it still permissible to wear long pants and a jacket? Now that I think about it, I’m not sure an hour is enough time to solve these dilemmas.
I may be old-fashioned (see reference to contents of my nightstand above), but I take comfort in knowing that, as long as we have time changes, I’ll always have a chance to reset. And that, no matter what the clock says, it’s always time to feed my cats.