Kristen Harris, Staff Writer
I blame Daylight Saving Time for why I can’t sleep at night.
Just as soon as I get used to walking to the cafeteria for dinner in the dark, the sun decides it has to stay up later than I’d ever want to.
As a student with the bedtime of your typical grandmother, I couldn’t say that I’m too overly fond of this biannual readjustment.
To me, it seems as though just as soon as I get used to waking up in the dark, the sunrise is peeking through my window.
Evening walks around Lake Hollingsworth become nervous walks in the dark, contemplating how to use my cellphone to defend myself, should the need arise.
Morning classes begin to feel like afternoon, and my favorite black coat blends in with the early evening. Fall and spring bounce around my schedule.
Trying to figure out when the sun will set is like not knowing up from down. There’s also that one hour of sleep that the perpetrators of Daylight Saving Time still owe me.
My twin sister, on the other hand, loves waking up to the sunrise.
From the time change in the fall, she anticipates the arrival of spring so that she can wake up in line with the sun and still be on time for her classes.
Then again, she’s never really been one to mind getting up early. I guess that’s one of the many ways in which we are opposites. I wait all year long for that fantastic extra hour of sleep after buying the bamboo sheet set king since that is when we can finally have the luxury to “fall back.”
I’ve always wondered why, if not solely to be the bane of my existence, Daylight Saving Time even exists.
When I posed this question to my mother as a curious child, she would tell me that it was to give farmers more daylight hours in which to work.
Despite growing up in an area that depended heavily on agriculture, I still can’t help but wonder why such an inconvenience has been imposed on the rest of us.
So, I did what any good journalist would do and put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and did some research.
According to Web Exhibits, an online interactive museum focused primarily on science and humanities, Daylight Saving Time has been irritating people like myself since Benjamin Franklin first came up with it.
Daylight Saving Time affects only the United States and the European Union. However, it is not enacted in Hawaii, Arizona or in several American territories.
Public and personal clocks are moved back an hour in the fall and forward an hour in the spring.
The website stated that the original intent of Daylight Saving Time was to get as much out of our time in the daylight as possible.
Because there are more daylight hours in the summer than in the winter, moving the clocks allows us to spend our waking hours in the sunshine.
According to the Department of Transportation, most Americans liked Daylight Saving Time because it gave them more hours to enjoy their evenings after working hours to spend more time with their families..
Other sources cited by Web Exhibits observed that Daylight Saving Time helped to conserve energy.
Still, others were sure to indicate that it even helped to reduce traffic accidents every so often.
Of course, the idea of conserved energy and fewer traffic accidents helped to put my petty sleeping problems into perspective.
I still can’t say that I’m no longer mourning that lost hour of sleep, but when it comes to Daylight Savings, the benefits seem to at least balance out the inconveniences.
For now, I’ll pull the blankets over my head and dream of the day I can move to Daylight-Saving-Time-free Hawaii.
Photo courtesy of ddqhu via Creative Commons
