Too dark too soon

While I greatly enjoy this time of the year of cold and coziness, the whole getting dark super early thing is not the business. Who really wants to be commuting to work in the dark, and then heading home also in the dark? If they ever manage to get rid of daylight savings time, I hope they keep the set time to be whichever provides the most sunlight hours towards the end of the day during the winter months.

Because when it’s dark outside but it’s only 5:00 PM, I feel weird eating dinner at my normal 7:00 PM hour. We’ve evolved to equate darkness with sleepy time, so it’s disconcerting to be two hours into darkness only to then start making supper. If they ever manage to make permanently below-ground living a thing with artificial sun technology, I hope they keep a consistent sunrise and sunset hour.

Perhaps I should move to somewhere on the equator. Word on the street is $100,000 USD can buy a Thailand residency visa.

You how when you buy a brand new car you tend to be super careful about it? Agonizing over the perfectly harmless parking space, and worrying about the slightest hint of dust laying on top of the painted surface. This motivation to keep something perfect - is it rooted in evolution, I wonder? Did caveman get traumatized from a lightning strike destroying their once intact cave facade?

What we do know is that nothing keeps perfect forever. After the first rock chip on the hood, or the first scrape from another parked car, we tend to relax into not caring much about the car anymore. The solution then is to buy used cars instead of new. Second-hand vehicles already come pre-blemished! Who cares if I chipped the wheel on a curb - there’s already existing rashes.

What you don’t want to do though is to fall into a trap of making a used car “perfect” again. That scratched interior panel because the previous owner hauled something carelessly? Leave it be. Even if a replacement panel is only a hundred bucks or so.

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Find the tree lining.

Magical sunrise

As someone who tends to wake up rather early in the morning, I for one am looking forward to daylight savings time ending this Sunday. Right now when I get out of bed at 6AM, the sky doesn’t even begin to get brighter until an hour later. I resort to turning on the desk lamp so my body would know it’s actually time to wake, rather than it’s still the middle of the night. Turning the clock backwards one hour will sync up perfectly with my sleep schedule, with the sky beginning to turn lighter just as I end my slumber.

And then obviously I hope they never institute daylight savings time again, because jumping forwards one hour in March is always a tiring experience, like giving ourselves artificial jet-lag for no bloody good reason.

That said, it is something special to awake before official sunrise time; looking outwards through the window and seeing the sky do its magical transition from absolute darkness to intense bright. The mightiest object in our solar system creating the biggest shift change to planet is at once awe-inspiring and meditative. The sunrise phenomenon puts things into perspective, of just how tiny and powerless we are against the might of nature, unending for billions of years. So perhaps that small annoyance that’s been bothering me suddenly doesn’t seem to bad after all.

I am lucky to have a bedroom window that faces east, so I get to watch the sunrise and enjoy its delightful light shift every single day. It’s something I’ll miss when I move out at the end of this week, to a spot where the windows faces west, but it’s on the ground floor so it isn’t high enough to see the sky without a crane of the neck.

I shall relish these moments while I still can.

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Empty autumn campus days.

California: vote YES on prop 7

I’m convinced daylight savings time is one of the worst inventions of man. In the immortal words of John Oliver, how is this still a thing?

Indeed every time the clock switches to or from daylight savings, I automatically rant about it on this blog, and heck yeah I will keep doing so until the powers at be get rid of it entirely. In California there’s a ballot measure up for a vote tomorrow allowing the legislature to either enact DST year round, or return to standard time, all the time. I’m fully ready to end friendships if I find out people did not vote ‘YES’ on proposition 7.

It is said that “fall back” - turning the clock back to standard time during Autumn - is physically easier to deal with than "spring forward” in March. The extra hour gained can be used productively, contrast to an hour lost in Spring inducing the equivalent of jet lag. From the experiences of yesterday however I would say that is not totally accurate.

Due to daylight savings time ending, this past Sunday was the longest day of the year if you count by hours - 25 of them. While most people implements the one hour into additional sleep time on Sunday morning, I elected to keep schedule as if the clock hasn’t changed, figuring it would be an antidote to whatever weirdness that typically manifests. Sadly, it wasn’t all that effective.

Yesterday I woke up at 7am (8am DST equivalent as I usually do) to go running, and for the rest of the day time felt like it was going super slowly. I went about my schedule as usual but every time I glanced at the clock it was much earlier in the day than what my body sensed in should be. It was so confused with the time discrepancy that at around 2pm I hit a wall: I was tired even though I’ve been doing the exact same tasks as the Sunday prior.

Can people be more productive with that one extra hour? It’s certainly possible, but for a regimented person like me, that one hour does more to discombobulate than assist. Next time - assuming DST is still on the books - I think I shall acquiesce to the new clock immediately instead of fighting to stay on the old one for one more day.

Though it wasn’t completely bad: I got the bonus hour of sleep today because I went to bed last night still in accords with daylight savings time. Preserving that hour for the day you have to go to work is much sweeter than a Sunday morning where you can choose to sleep in anyways.

Like the brush-strokes of an artist.