Daylight Shavings

"Daylight Savings Time" confuses me. The following seems obvious, but let me remind myself and everybody else who's listening: shifting a man-made system of measurement does not actually produce any more sunlight in a day.

What it actually attempts to do is shift everybody's daily schedule backward by one hour. Here in Maine, this means that twilight descends somewhere around 3:30 in the afternoon, but the sunrise corresponds more closely to when most diurnal people are waking up.

Daylight savings time was first explained to me when I was a child; my mother said simply: "We get an extra hour of sleep." She meant that night we would get an extra hour of sleep, but I didn't know that. I thought that meant we got an extra hour of sleep every night from then on.

Daylight savings time actually shaves an hour of daylight out of my schedule. I can't sleep most nights, including this one, until very very late. By the time I wake up, sunrise is at least four hours in the rearview mirror already. So the hour that's tacked on to the beginning of the day? I never see it.

I hereby declare temporal war on the diurnal people of my time zone! Nocturnal people, unite to reclaim one of our few hours of sunlight!