PLEASE STOP COMPLAINING ABOUT THE TIME CHANGES!!!

As I was lying in bed waiting to see the clock on my phone turn from 1:59AM to 3AM on March 9th, an event I always get a kick out of, I started thinking about how there are many people out there who complain all year about the two time changes this country experiences; we “fall back” and “spring ahead.”

This is what people act like in the Fall!

And then it hit me—I am so sick of the whiners complaining about those two tiny time changes! It’s enough already!

I get it—you want more daylight later in the day. I like that, as well. But how about the poor people who have to get up at the crack of dawn to get to work, get their kids to school, or just have somewhere they have to be, such as perhaps medical appointments? Do the naysayers not care at all that the early birds would prefer to have more daylight in the mornings??? Let’s all spare a thought for them!

And also think about the people who live in those crazy Arctic Circle places, including parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Canada, where it’s continuously dark for half the year and then bright light out for the other half!  We all need to adjust to conditions we may not be fans of, and an hour of daylight on one end of the day or the other is not a major hardship.

A visual about the little inconvenience of life that people complain about.

So get over it already! If you really do suffer from seasonal affective disorder (SAD,) get yourself a sun lamp. (If you don’t know, SAD is a type of depression that is linked to reduced exposure to sunlight.) I had one friend who said she had it and could not wait for the summers to roll around, so she could sit in the sun for long periods of time. And she looked like a piece of leather by the time she was forty!

I try to appreciate all four seasons—they each bring something new to appreciate. And I do get a bit of a kick out of having to change the (manual) clocks twice a year. It’s just a little inconvenience for every single person in America, (not counting Hawaii and, very crazily, Arizona,) to have to deal with for a few minutes. I actually feel like it brings us all together for a little bit, reminding each other to do it, and of the time change for brunch that Sunday morning.

Growing up in Brooklyn, I usually liked it when we turned the clocks back in the Fall; it was cozy that way, especially on Sunday evenings when the family was all together. I loved that. (Except for this scary-yet-amusing tale when I was just fourteen: itsnotaboutme.tv/news/holiday-happy-halloween-2022.)

This looks so simple, but I think it’s a complicated effort to demonstrate “springing ahead.”

And then I came out to L.A. alone one summer when I was an older teenager, and decided to stay, which was a major move for a young, sheltered, scaredy-cat such as myself. And then I noticed that I started getting a tad depressed when it got dark so early in my beautiful, sunny new home. But guess what? I bucked-up and got over it! Which is what I suggest you all do now, and every season!

I have to end with one funny thing:

Being that my mother was a high school English teacher, and my father was a Speech professor and Chairman, literature and poems were basics in our house. So, of course, I knew this one by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bed In Summer, very early on:

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

It is so apropos of what I’m talking about, but the funny thing about it is that when I was about four or five, I thought the word “grown-up,” (which is one of my favorites now,) was actually “groan of,” and I thought it meant that people’s feet were so upset by the time change that they were actually groaning! Which is what so many of you are doing currently about the time changes!