Sunday, November 04, 2012

A Stitch In Time

If you've read Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle In Time," you're probably familiar with the concept of a tesseract. It's a time travel device, described by otherworldly Mrs. Whatsit as a way to travel in time, rather than space, a "wrinkle" rather than a flat plane. I happily embraced this theory as I grew up, wondering when I might encounter such a neat trick. It is only now that it occurs to me that I have been tripping over these anomalies for most of my life in the form of Daylight Savings Time.
Spring Forward. Fall Back. As someone who spends his life tied to a system of clocks and bells, I am innately suspicious of any process that suggests that we would somehow wake up one morning with "an extra hour of sleep." Let's start with the time it takes me to wander about my house, searching out the various appliances and machines that require resetting. Those minutes are definitely coming off the bottom line. I'm pleased and happy to have a room full of computers at my school that can remember this switch for me, but the bell system and clocks there usually take a day or two to catch up to the vagaries of this government boondoggle. In another six months, I'll be back to wandering around my house and school, checking to see if all of those built-in chronometers have caught up to the arbitrary shift.
I suppose this is a confession of sorts: I can't relax and enjoy my "extra hour of sleep" because I'm too concerned about keeping track of the time I'm losing on the other side. This is no gift for me. I'm far too concerned with the minutiae of minutes. Is it really worth having those extra hours to have those extra hours to collect insects after your factory shift is over? 
Maybe you'd like to have the time you spent reading this blog back. You'll have to wait until April for that.

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