Today is
the first day of Daylight Saving for us here in New Zealand. It seems (she says
grumpily) to start earlier every year, and end later. I always struggle with it
for two reasons.
1) I
struggle with understanding the concept of time moving ‘forward’. I see time as
a linear thing, like a railway line, and to me the clock hands are moved
‘forward’ or ‘backward’ depending on where you are standing. If you’re at a
railway station and the train is about to arrive there, it will seem to be
coming towards you and hence going ‘forward’. But if it’s leaving the station,
it will seem to be going ‘backwards’ away from you, even though it’s moving
‘forward’ according to the people in the next station. So if the time on a
clock is like that, then whether or not a clock can be said to be ‘put forward’
depends on whether the relevant time you want to adjust it to has passed or
not. So when they say ‘put your clocks forward’, I always get confused as to
whether that means we adjust a clock from ten to eleven pm, or vice versa.
This time,
someone in my aspie group gathering yesterday actually explained it to me quite
simply – “Forward is clockwise, backwards is anti-clockwise.” And then someone
else in a Facebook group put up a clock graphic that similarly explained it.
However, I suspect these are only really useful for those of my generation who
grew up with ‘proper’ clocks, not the younger generations more used to digital ones.
So I’m wondering if there are others out there just as confused by this notion
of time going ‘forwards’ and ‘backwards’.
2) My
second problem with Daylight Savings is more profound, and harder to fix. Put
bluntly, I am not a Morning Person. Since childhood, I’ve struggled with
getting myself out of bed and on time for school, then work, then the demands
of motherhood, study, or just appearing to face the world at a ‘normal’ time. People
like me (and we’re not all on the spectrum by any means), when faced with
someone all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at five or six am, crack open one
bleary eye and scowl, thinking “what the (expletive-deleted) are you being so (expletive-deleted) cheerful about, in the
middle of the (expletive-deleted) night?!!” Never mind it may be dawn or near
it, it still feels like the middle of the night to us. And getting us up and
going at any decent hour of the morning (and let’s make this plain, anything
before seven is indecent to us) is a
major effort.
And then
you want us to actually get up even earlier?!!? Are the Powers That Be
totally crazy?!!? Other people rave about having an ‘extra’ hour to do
things in the evening. So what, we ask? We ‘Night Owls’ have never had any
trouble staying up late, so all that means to us is that it’s still hot and
fairly light when we’re trying to get to sleep, and we have enough trouble with
that already. Alarm clocks jar us awake when it seems we’ve only just fallen
asleep, the sun never seems to move from the sky, TV programs start when we’re
not ready to watch them yet, and mealtimes roll around before we’re actually
hungry.
So I loathe
Daylight Saving – it doesn’t ‘save’ me anything – and I never really do manage
to get my bio-rhythms to fit, or they’re finally just starting to, and then we
have to change back again. It’s a perennial problem for me, and one I’ve never
been able to really solve.
Does anyone
else have this problem, or know what I mean? Or am I the only one totally
grumpy and out of sorts with it?
