the time change and why it blows

I love daylight savings time. Love it, love it, love it. What i don't love is the time change; I think DST should remain in effect all year long. According to Wikipedia, DST is "the practice of temporarily advancing clocks so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less." What I'm arguing for is the elimination of the "temporary" part, and by the end of this argument, I'm betting that most of you will agree with me. Here are the reasons why the time change blows:

1) Morning sucks: This one is basically an opinion, and I realize that not everyone will agree with this assessment, least of all "morning people", but I cannot stand the early part of the morning. Whether it's light or dark outside, I don't want to wake up and go to work... period. So it doesn't make sense, to me at least, for it to be light out when I get up. This serves as a nice segue to...

2) Free time in the sunlight is better than work time in the sunlight: Even morning people would probably agree that they'd rather have light in the afternoon when they get home. Getting up early when there's no light out might be depressing, but it's nowhere near as depressing as the fact that for a few months in the winter, everyone with a 9-5 job spends EVERY SINGLE HOUR OF DAYLIGHT either getting ready for work, commuting to/from work, or being at work. I'd rather have at least an hour or so of personal sunshine time when I get home rather than getting home after dark when you can't do... well, anything. Wanna do yard work on Wednesday? Tough shit, you're waiting 'til the weekend.

3) The spirit of fairness: At times, when on Standard Time, it gets dark around 5pm. Almost everybody in this country is awake at 5pm. The lazy college student who sleeps all day is awake, the crazy people who get up at 3am haven't gone to bed yet, the night shift people are getting ready for work, and everyone in between is also awake. Doesn't it make more sense, and isn't it more equitable to the population as a whole, to have light at this hour than it does to have light at 6 or 7am when not everyone is up yet?

4) Sleep pattern disruption: It's just an hour, so it shouldn't matter, right? Plus, everyone loves "fall back" when you get that extra hour to drink at the bar before last call, right? Right??? Wrong; studies have shown that the extra hour royally throws a wrench into your sleep schedule, even if you don't realize it. For example, the time change kills people. Using data from two years of Canadian traffic accident records (I know, they're Canadian, but still), Coren (1996) found that in the days following the shift to DST in the Spring, there was an increase in traffic accident rates of about 6.6 percent, which can partially be attributed to the loss of that one hour of sleep. Granted, there was also a decrease in fatalities during "fall back" due to the extra sleep, but it was statistically insignificant at 1.5%. If you eliminate the time change, you eliminate the sleep pattern disruption, and you save lives.

5) Clocks, clocks, clocks: The average household has a lot more clocks now than it did back when the time change came about. Sure, the clocks on your cable box, phone, and your computers update themselves, but all those other ones have to be adjusted manually. You either have to take time to do them all at once (which most people don't do), or risk being late or early for something throughout the few days that it takes you to update all your clocks. Minor annoyance, sure, but tell that to the guy with the 9am court date who showed up at 10am, or more importantly, the guy who missed South Park because he turned on his TV an hour late... tragedies, people.

Regardless of which time (Daylight Savings or Standard) you prefer, I think we can all agree that the time change itself is utterly pointless.

children

it may come as a bit of a shock to some of you, but i really don't care for little kids; they annoy the crap out of me. however, i understand that parents have to take their kids with them most of the time wherever they go. this does not bother me. what does bother me is when stupid parents let their kids do WHATEVER THEY WANT when they're out in public. hey lady, you might think it's cute to let your kid repeatedly run into me when i'm on the metro minding my own business, but i don't. it pisses me off, especially in the morning. i'm not bothering you, so why don't you try not bothering me? then to top it all off, they give you a nice steaming pile of attitude when you ask them politely to control their damn children. these aren't isolated incidents either, every time tourist season rolls around, i see countless parents in and around the city letting their little terrors run wild, getting all up in other people's business in the process. newsflash, not everyone thinks your kids are cute. if you want to let them run around and scream, the national mall is a good place for that; the metro, the museums, and especially restaurants and bars are not; respect your surroundings. i dunno what's happened to parents in america, but if i acted like that in public as a child, my mom would have flipped out.

while we're on the subject, can we talk about this ridiculous notion that some uber-parents have about media censorship? i can't go one week without seeing an editorial from some stupid parent about how inappropriate the music on the radio is, how violet video games are, how scandalous television is, and how vulgar movies are. here's an idea: try doing some actual parenting, and stop expecting the government to do it for you, lazy ass. if you don't like the music, change the station. if you don't like the video game violence, maybe actually read up on the game before you buy it for your kids. if you don't like the shows on tv, use the v-chip that's included with every cable box. if you don't like the movies, don't go. self-important parents don't have the right to dictate what we can and can't watch. it's a free country, stop trying to ruin it for everyone else who's over the age of 18.

also, parents: don't bring your kids to the bar. period. the next time some jackass tells me to stop cursing at 1:30am in a FREAKING BAR because his kids are there, i'm seriously going to kill him. it's a bar, idiot. it's no place for a child, and you should know what kind of behavior takes place there. the 40 other bar patrons shouldn't have to censor themselves because you're an irresponsible parent. shouldn't your kid be in bed by then anyway?