It’s time, once again, to complain about Daylight Savings Time. And that’s because I just lost an hour of sleep. It has evaporated into the mists of time, never to be recovered, not even when the government pretends to give it back to me in November.
In preparation for this annual trauma I turned to the internet for help. First I read that anger and anxiety are closely connected. ‘That’s stupid,’ I thought, and clicked angrily and anxiously away without saving the link.
Then I read this brief history of DST, which didn’t really help me at all, and confirmed what I’ve come to know about humanity in general–that it, humanity, is enduringly and irrationally optimistic. Let’s organize the hours, says personkind to itself, because we are awesome and not incompetent or evil at all. Whereas I, being pessimistic and critical, think that there must be some correlation between whole societies being unable to decide what time it is through the 1800s and all the warfare suffered in the 1900s. You may think it was religion, politics, nationalism, communism, fascism, and statism, but nobody ever looks at the clocks, do they. The timing, cough, looks pretty fishy to me.
Then I turned to this piece, about how to prepare yourself and your child for DST. What a gem. Truly. I’ll sum up for you, since you’re too tired to click the link. In order to be ready for the horror, you should
First, “Make sure you child is well rested in general.” Which would have meant planning ahead like you’re God or someone.
Second, “Shift the child’s bedtime schedule a week before” so as to feel no effects of the time change, because apparently you really are divine, or at least endowed with super human powers, like, um, like, um, like someone endowed with superhuman powers. And also, you have nothing whatever to do but prepare your child for the looming trauma of feeling off kilter for weeks and weeks and weeks.
“Be verbal about what’s really going on“–which used to be called ‘talking’ but that expression has apparently become a passé. Instead of talking to your child, you can ‘be verbal.’ Because when you don’t get enough sleep, language itself is destroyed forever.
“Lead by example.” As in, go to bed earlier yourself. Why don’t you get right on that. I’m sure you’re already going to bed at a decent time, so just make it one hour earlier for a whole week leading up to the apocalypse. Oops! Too late! You’re reading this important advice After The Time Change.
“Make sure there’s a consistent routine in place.” Just go make sure. Go on. Just go do that.
“Involve them in activities to take the edge off.” These involve, so sayeth the article, a relaxing bath, not for you, for the child, and listening to beach or bird sounds. You can see that the wheels are really starting to come off here, and reality is setting in, and the poor writer just has to get the piece up, and is essentially grasping at straws, because No One Knows How To Make It Better. No one.
“Treat it like a teachable moment.” We did just already have Get Verbal. But you’re so tired you’re not going to notice that this is exactly the same one as that other one, because you haven’t slept and you’re not ever going to sleep. That’s just the way it is.
“Consider blackout curtains.” This should have been the first one. This is the only one that should have been on the list. Just this single one.
“Hit the snooze on bedtime.” That’s right, the nineth way to cope with daylight savings is to just give up. It doesn’t matter when the kid goes to be bed. Nothing matters.
“Remember that everyone figures it out eventually.” It’s ok, just add this failure to all the other failures. It’s fine. And don’t stop to think that, if this is true, there was no point in this article even existing.
Furthermore, and of course, no one mentions that the clocks change on a Sunday. Because all the governments of the world hate God and hate Christians. Or maybe I’m thinking of Satan. Too tired to remember which.
But you should still go to church. Because first of all, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” Romans 5:6
And second of all, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” Ecclesiastes 3:11
See, you don’t need ten ways to cope. You can just go to church in the stupor of broken sleep, whether anxious or angry or tired or cheerful. And you can just sit in the pew, mashed up against all the other people who don’t have their lives together. Because it really doesn’t matter what the clock says. It matters that God holds all the times in his hand, and you yourself, and that no human destruction of your routine and the hours of your day can change his unchangeable grace.
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