Spring forward

 I turned the clock forward this morning not long after the Little Cat did her usual meowing, myurping "OMFG I AM SO HUNGRY!!!" dance on my pillow, the sixty-fourth time in my life that change has occurred.

I've always lived with the time change, one hour in the spring, another in the fall, part of the cycle of the year like the solstices and equinoxes. I don't really even think about it, or, at least I hadn't until recently. It was just something you did twice a year.

But apparently the time change is now a Thing. Twice a year now I run across messages from friends and acquaintances complaining about the time change as if it was the biannual equivalent of flying across eleven time zones. The news feed always seems to cough up a piece about how many people die or are maimed each year by the time shift.

This is all relatively recent; as short a time as a decade ago I don't recall seeing this bellyaching about the clock or, if I did, it was treated like a sort of flat-Earth crankism.

Now?

The Oregon state Senate passed a bill requiring the state to remain on daylight savings time year-round.

We're not alone; apparently something like a fifth of the U.S. states have one of these "permanent DST" bills as state law. Doesn't matter if the feds don't concur, mind, you. But there's federal legislation, too, so who knows?

Here's the weird part about all this.

Humans have been doing this time-change thing since before the Paleolithic. It's call "sunrise", and it's because humans are predominantly diurnal and our activity is largely confined to the daylight hours. Mostly because our night vision sucks, but for whatever the reasons we tend to become active in the light and retreat into somnolence in the dark.

But that change occurs two or three minutes a day over the course of the year. To try and do that now that we're slaves to the mechanical clock? 

Unpossible.

So, instead, we do it all in a jump twice a year, so that "sunrise" will match roughly with the old liturgical hour of Lauds and "six a.m." with Prime and Vespers with "the lighting of the lamps".

I'm not sure whether it's me, or just peculiarity of fussing about something that is a practical accommodation to human behavior that predates the relentless ticking of the clocks, that seems so weird.