Spring Forward, Fall Back - Part 2

Daylight savings, after not meaning much at all to you for the first 18 years of your life, can become more of an issue, real or imagined, around the time you dip your toe into the murky stream of adulthood.

You’ve a bit more control of your own life and schedule, and the twice a year clock manipulation becomes part of that.

Of course, when you’re 18, and away from home for the first time, it takes the form of:

A) Dude! We fall back this weekend!
B) Uh, we tend to fall every weekend.

A) I said “fall back” not fall down.
B) Oh. So what’s the big deal?

A) An extra hour of partying!
B) Yeah, like we party to some kind of schedule…

End of discussion.

So it SOUNDS like a big, cool deal, but in reality – it amounts to nothing.
This does not, however, keep 1000’s of youth from using it as an excuse to throw a party, every fall.
Cuz a THEME for a party makes it just a bit more fun, for some reason, than a party thrown for no stated reason.

A couple years later, you’re old enough to go to bars. Then, and perhaps ONLY then, does falling back actually become an issue of note.

See, because the bars really DO demand you party on some kind of schedule, and 1am becoming your 2nd midnight of the evening means an extra hour of bar time.
Finally, FINALLY falling back MEANS… something.
Sort of.

IF you decide to go out that night.

Sidenote: I worked in a bar for awhile, after college. Falling back meant listening to an extra hour of drunk karoake performances, while getting in an extra hour of total immersion in clouds of cigarette smoke. Oh, and an extra $6, before taxes.
Jivin’.

But once you settle down in a life a bit, falling back and springing forward goes back to meaning… nothing, when you get right down to it.
At least, nothing after you’ve changed your smoke alarm batteries and corrected the time on all the clocks in your house, that is.

Unless you have kids.

Then it’s a topic of conversation amongst parents, how to handle the time change, should you start adjusting bedtimes for the big one hour of sleep a few days in advance, or not?
I’m guilty of this too, even though, when you get right down to it –

IT’S ONE FREAKIN’ HOUR.

And the extra time you feel you’re getting in the morning, you’re going to want to give back by 7pm that evening, when you realize it’s not actually the little nipper’s bedtime anymore, even though it really, REALLY feels like it should be, to you.


Really? It’s only 7:05? REALLY????
Damn.

And a couple mornings later, everything’s shifted back to the clock schedule you were used to before last Sunday morning, and life moves on, unchanged.

So to sum up: Thanks, New Zealand Bug Boy, for… a whole lot of not much.


The “likes to use his imagination” part of me wishes for more.

Springing forward should mean that it’s 2am all the sudden, and there’s a gap in your life that you can’t fill in.
Whatever you’re talking about at 1am… well forget about it, it’s 2am now, and your life moved an hour forward without you.

Perhaps best illustrated in some edgy indy movie where a dozen people’s lives intersect in that missing hour, and we spend the entire movie piecing it together.

“How’d I end up in Jail with half my goatee shaved off, wearing a clown outfit? Last thing I remember it was a few minutes before 1am, and…. Uh oh.”

Meanwhile, across town, a clown wakes up naked in his car, with a woman’s bowling ball next to him on the passenger seat…


Falling back should have some youthful rom-com / coming of age feel to it.

An extra hour to win the girl, fix the problem, fall in love with your spouse all over again, come to some life decisions…whatever. You wake up the next morning somehow better and more self actualized for the extra hour you were given, optimistic about the future and the person sitting across from you drinking diner coffee.
An upbeat but unmemorable modern rock song begins to play as the camera pans out of the diner, showing a fresh, clean day starting, before it fades to black and credits roll.

Not realistic, probably. Hard to pull off in real life, year after year.

Except for maybe the diner coffee.

Spring Forward, Fall Back - do the hokey pokey and you shake it all about...

So, it happened.

This past Sunday morning, early.
All the Sudden, with little fanfare, the earth reversed it’s rotation, and we all went back in time one hour.

What’s that? The earth didn’t actually reverse it’s rotation? It’s just an arbitrary executive decision that decrees we move our clocks backwards once a year, and then forward six months later?
(Or should that be …our clocks forward once a year, and then backwards six months later? Chicken, or egg?)

Seriously? What’s next, mis-matched sock day every Wednesday, for the entire free world? No meat on Fridays depending on ones’ religious affiliation?

Oh, wait. We already did the no meat thing….The only good that came of THAT was the invention of the Fish Fry.


Decided to spend two minutes researching the origin and logic of DST.

Kinda interesting, actually.


(DST) is the practice of temporarily advancing clocks during the summertime so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn.[7] Modern DST was first proposed in 1895 by George Vernon Hudson.[8] Many countries have used it since then; details vary by location and change occasionally.
The practice has been both praised and criticized.[7] Adding daylight to afternoons benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours,[9] but causes problems for farming, evening entertainment and other occupations tied to the sun.[10][


George Vernon Hudson was a shift worker in New Zealand, and liked collecting bugs after work, so figured if there was more daylight hours AFTER he got off – more bug collecting!

And in the time before electricity, you could save a lot on candles and coal if you didn’t waste any sunlight by, say, sleeping or other frivolous activity.

Anyhow, it's kind of a big deal, every year. Set those clocks forward, change that smoke alarm battery, set those clocks back, change that smoke alarm battery....

Sidenote - my smoke alarm batteries last YEARS. Just sayin'...

(Another sidenote – when they DO start to fail, it’s always at 3am. When we wake up because of some irritating beeping noise that we then have to track down, so we can remove the battery, and hope to remember to install a new one, whenever we get around to buying some…..)

I've been thinking about it the last little bit, and have to say - whatever.

As a child, it had little meaning to me. We weren't allowed to watch TV on sunday mornings, not there was anything on in the days of pre-cable anyhow. Not like we were at risk of missing our favorite show at 8am on a Sunday morning…

Springing forward meant that you noticed the folks who forgot to do so, when they walked into church 45 minutes after services began.
Nothing else really to it.
You woke up, you ate breakfast, you spent the day, you went to bed - remarkably similar to every other sunday.

Falling backward - same thing, only no parade of the embarrassed at mass.

As a teenager - really, same deal. Maybe you felt a bit more rushed on sunday morning, when we sprang forward. falling backward had no consequences.


It became a bigger deal (good or bad), or in some cases a handy excuse, at the onset of adulthood.

More on that next time, as this is very long already, and I fear I’ve already lost half of you…..