Explain Daylight Saving Time, Mr. Franklin

Mr. Franklin, you've done some crazy stuff, like those "fresh air baths" you insisted were so good for you when all you wanted to do really was stand in front of your front window naked.

And we all know about tying keys to kite strings and trying to catch electricity and who chases lightning in the hopes of getting struck??

But March 10, what you started with the setting of our clocks one hour FORWARD? You just couldn't get your naked self to the window fast enough so now, at 2 a.m., you've got us paying the price. That's just ... wrong. Selfish. We love our sleep. And on a weekend night especially. But now it's Saturday night and I'm so tired it's going to feel more like being unconscious than falling asleep, but first I have to knowingly set my clock ahead for something you've anointed as Daylight Saving Time? I'm supposed to have sweet dreams knowing I'm getting robbed?

As you get older, sleep doesn't just feel more like a cryogenic chamber. It becomes the time when free radicals within my system are being tamed;  I can feel my body restoring and repairing and replenishing. Sleep becomes my Oil of Olay.

And Benjamin has taken from me what I need more of, nature's Juvaderm. Time spent suspended in no activity is what I need to produce collagen -- the dermal filler and structural protein that plumps and smooths my creases and cracks. This is a serious matter. Beautiful, deep, restorative sleep -- and I'll be getting one less hour of it now.

For more salt in the wounds, I just found out tonight that a state can CHOOSE to participate or not in DST. Whaaaat? Yes, Arizona and Hawaii have just said no thanks. I feel like the day I found out I could have said no to the medical residents at our teaching hospital in that matter of an extra cervical check  (read able to check "saw ripe cervix of woman about to give birth" off their list of Things To Do To Graduate) when I was ready to deliver my babies.

I had no idea I could just say no.

We can say no to a lot of things, I keep finding out.

Why don't we say no? We have electricity now, we don't have to worry about a shortage on candle wax, Mr. Franklin -- and people don't quit plowing the fields because it's gotten dark out. Dark sky? Flip the switch on your John Deere tractor and keep on working. 

I'm with Arizona, no more messing with nature. Time is made the way it's made and our bodies have adjusted to it. All these tricks to fool ourselves and find extra light in our day, it doesn't change the amount of hours we have: 24.

I'm going to say no. On the outside, I'll go along with the rest of you because I have to, but the inside me is  saying no to Daylight Saving Time.

So many headaches come from it. Especially the biggest one, even bigger than losing an hour of age defying beauty sleep -- and it's this, a sound like fingernails on a chalk board: hearing Daylight SavingS Time. Said with an s after saving. Listening to that -- instead of Daylight Saving no S Time, over a hundred times today, is going to be hard to take.

Especially on one less hour of sleep the night before.

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