Daylight saving is kicking my ass
It really is. I’m exhausted today. It sucks to have jet lag without actually jetting somewhere.
My parents visited this weekend and we were up earlier than usual on Sunday because my father decided to take a shower at the crack of dawn — to beat the rush, you know — and the noise woke up my son, whose room is next to the bathroom. Everyone had already lost an hour of sleep because of daylight saving, and then my son was up, earlier than he should have been, and then we all were. And the weather was beautiful and we were outside a lot with my son playing baseball, and by the end of yesterday I was wiped out. We didn’t do anything strenuous. Not sure what to blame, but springing the clock forward an hour didn’t help things.
Last night I slept terribly — I was too warm and opened a window, and then I was vaguely cold in the middle of the night, but not enough to wake or shut the window. Then I had a strange dream: Patrick Ewing was at a Bruce Springsteen concert and he told me — I was there with him — that he was surprised to discover that the horn section was made up of black musicians. Patrick Ewing approved and was enjoying the music. Yes, Patrick Ewing. Then somehow the guy on stage was not a famous musician any longer but was my father. He stopped playing the song because his Blackberry vibrated with an e-mail message and he had to check it. That’s all I remembered this morning when I woke up more tired than I had been when I went to sleep.
On top of that, I was reminded this morning that WordPress (at least the edition we run When Falls the Coliseum on) does not automatically adjust for daylight saving, so our scheduled posts have been appearing at odd times and I’ve been trying to straighten that out.
And I couldn’t find my wallet before I left for work. I left it in my wife’s car, which we used over the weekend, and she leaves for work earlier than I do. I only barely had enough gas to get to work and think/hope I’ll make it to a station on the way home and put a couple of dollars in the tank, which is all I can afford since I don’t have my wallet and have to pay with some quarters I have in the car. Maybe this isn’t daylight saving’s fault. But maybe it is.
Why do we have to change the clocks twice a year? It seems like more trouble than it’s worth.
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You know, here’s the thing: If you’d set your alarm to wake you up an hour earlier than usual, you’d say to yourself, “well, I got up an hour earlier than usual” rather than “I feel like I got up an hour earlier, but it wasn’t really, it was the right time, but darker…”
And you wouldn’t be as tired because you wouldn’t have this government-induced, one-hour-only jetlag.
I think DST sucks.
Plus, there was just a report somewhere suggesting that DST actually caused us to use 10% -more- energy than we normally would.
Stuff like that.
wa wa wa. It does sound like something is kicking your ass… but leave the time change out of it.
I love the fact that it didn’t get dark until 7pm tonight. And was thrilled it was still dark out when 6am rolled around so my son didn’t start yelling “It’s sunny, It’s sunny. Take me out of the crib.” I actually slept later than normal.
Amy, haven’t you heard about studies linking DST to increased car accidents, etc.? The time change does have consequences.
Yeah… there was an article in the NYT this morning: http://tinyurl.com/cf4srs — But this time change is no different than most of my normal nights… one kid is sick in the middle of the night and the other has a nightmare. My wake-up time is always changing and my sleep is constantly disrupted.