DST: Dumb, Stupid (waste of) Time

I know, it’s immature. But I HATE the bizarre practice of setting and resetting clocks, of “Spring Forward!” and “Fall Back!” and this annoying ritual that was drummed up to suit retailers and professional sports and not, as legend has it, farmers.

I’m from Arizona, where we just said no to DST. Because we’re SMART like that.

I just don’t get it. Or, at least, I don’t get the bizarre compromise that is 6 months of it. (I also think DST is so generally poorly understood because it’s illogical and pointless).

When I first moved to the midwest from AZ I found the whole thing kind of quaint. Novel. Even adorable. Then it was odd, but not a big deal. Then it was “oh yeah, that” each time we shifted. In my wilder days I appreciated the extra hour at the bar. Another year it was one less hour before a deadline. It didn’t ever make sense, and was often kind of a bother, but seemed mostly harmless. Of course, even with automatically updating cell phones and computers students were still late to class, colleagues absent from meetings. Baristas not there to open up coffee shops that I needed to be open.*

But up until now, I didn’t have any major beef with Daylight Saving Time. I now have a baby. A baby that has sleep issues. Every improvement to his sleeping patterns has taken many, many sleepless nights in the pursuit of natural progression in combination with painstaking attempts at manipulation. Fine tuning the bedtime. Obsessive drilling of bedtime ritual. Endless sleep logs and calculations. Temperature controls. Light controls. Noise controls.

So, listen DST: I already have a baby that struggles to make it to his currently 6 pm bedtime. And wakes up at or before 5 am most mornings.

I just don’t think I can “Fall Back” this year. I just don’t know how I am going to cope.

 

*I used to wake up at 6 a.m., often earlier, ON PURPOSE. Because I wasn’t just a morning person, I was a fucking serious morning person. Sleeping in was a sin in my book and I hated to be in bed past 7 o’clock and the latest. Even if I closed the bar the night before. Idiotically, I thought this would help me cope with an early rising newborn. I did, in fact, have an early rising newborn. And I continue to have an early rising 8 month old. Each night we hope he will make it to 5 a.m. and he often doesn’t. But not getting any sleep the night before, waking up every hour, etc. made getting up before the light much more difficult. And knowing I wasn’t waking up to an espresso and a cigarette while sitting on a café patio but rather a hungry, needy, sobby, poopy tiny person (as delightful as that tiny person could be) quickly undid all of my own early-riser instincts and now I groan at having to wake up like the rest of the world.