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Hastening Of Nighttime
What I love (and by love I mean hate) is when you (and by you I mean I) start acting all prescient about common reality like the weather. For example like last week, in early December, it was crazy warm, or perfect really, daytime temps in the 60s and 70s, and I remarked, yeah boy, better enjoy these outdoors because next week it will probably be cold enough to pee an icicle. Well, it is now next week and cold enough to get your tongue stuck on a flagpole. Stupid dumb.

You know, the highs are not so bad but the 5 day shows lows every night in the upper teens and twenties and that to me is less than desirable. Added to this is this--sunrise at 7:19 and sunset at 4:46 (EST). I mean is that technically even a full day? I would say no by the reasoning that less than half the 24 hour period is lighted. We tend to associate day with light and therefore it would make better sense to me if we just called these less than half-lit days what they really are--nights. We could still use the word "day" to refer to, for example, number of days in a year and other general time classifications that make day the more natural word to use, and that less than 12 hour part of the night would still be daytime but the 24 hour parcel of time itself must I think, for these winter months, be called night.

I mean why can't we work on this a little? We have already tried to rearrange time with the farce of Daylight Savings Time, which quite obviously saves not one minute of time but rather just shifts the numbers on the clock so that we have nighttime arriving sooner, according to our man made time pieces. If it were me I would call it Hastening of Nighttime. Perhaps there is too much of the foreboding in that but isn't "Daylight Savings Time" a bit too cheerful and optimistic considering what it really means? DST is to me, even as it happens in Autumn, the "really really" end of summer and much of the fun that summer includes.

You know, when you're a kid the end of summer is the end of August because that or the beginning of September is when you start school again and nothing harshes the mellow of and puts an end to summer like school. But as you get older and become a so-called adult there is nothing quite so handy as the school year to delineate for you the seasons and your subsequent moods and so you roam the deserts of depression, unsure of yourself, woefully inadequate to the tasks at hand, until one day you wake up, realize that the day is actually a night, that your mood if ill is as much for any reason that way because you had things fundamentally mixed up.

You're straight now though. You can roll with it. All night long, until spring, when days again become days.
- jimlouis 12-06-2006 7:01 pm [link]