There is a disturbance in the time/space continuum. In my bedroom.
Every Star Trek geek just perked up their ears.
So here’s the deal. Esteban and I both share a massive thing about being on time. If it is possible that we will not be on time, we both start to show signs of physical stress. We break into a sweat. I get an upset stomach. Esteban starts to get angry at whoever caused the lateness (usually himself). This fear of being late also transferred to a fear of oversleeping. Our answer to that was to set the alarm clock in our bedroom several minutes ahead. Then, once we got adept at doing the math automatically in our head, we set it further ahead. And then further. As the years passed, we had settled in the neighborhood of forty-seven minutes ahead of the actual time.
So, in effect, there was bedroom time and there was the real time in the rest of the house.
When Esteban gave me a fancy sunrise alarm clock for my birthday, I set it to the same forty-seven minute surplus. Because while the time in our bedroom may have been off, at least the two clocks agreed with each other.
This was a great arrangement for a time. I had my alarm clock, which went off My God Kill Me Now early, with its gradual light, and then birds chirping and then a final Eee Eee EEE EEE EEE that could raise the dead. And because Esteban sleeps more soundly than your average corpse, his alarm went off at the sane 6:45. Or, in the real world, 5:55, give or take a few minutes. This was helpful in several ways because I no longer had to remember to interrupt my morning routine to go and wake him up (a task akin to rousing a hell beast) and he no longer had to worry that I would forget (something I did more times than I care to admit).
So all was well and good until the stupid Daylight Saving change. Yes, you thought you only had to endure my ranting about Daylight Saving Time twice a year. But you were wrong.
When the change happened (‘the change’, as if it were menopause for clocks), I dutifully altered my alarm clock, undoubtedly grinding my teeth as I did so. However, Esteban, not connecting with the new time shift and Bedroom Time, moved his alarm clock ahead. Or something. We’re not really certain what happened, actually, but now his clock was almost two hours ahead, which resulted in his alarm going off four in the morning one day. For a point of reference, Esteban’s alarm clock is across the room, because he knows that if it were on his bedside table, he would smash it. When the alarm went off several hours earlier than necessary, it was, as you might imagine, not well received by the slumbering grizzly bear that is Esteban.
His residual annoyance at the 4 am wake-up call probably drove him to his rash move of setting his alarm to be the actual time. Not the actual Bedroom Time. The actual Real World Time.
I do not know what to make of this. I am shocked and dismayed every time I look at his clock (which is prominently displayed and is hard to ignore), thinking that while the clock says it is 10:42 pm, it is not even 10 pm, so I am not up past my bedtime, but wait, really it IS 10:42 pm and almost 11 pm and my GOD, I totally have to fall asleep now because otherwise I will be that groggy achey tired all day tomorrow!
It is like Daylight Saving Day every single day. Madness! While I agree that having a bedroom that is almost but not quite in the Eastern Time Zone, while the rest of our house adheres to CST, is not entirely functional, it has simply been that way since 1992. It’s a tradition. It’s the status quo, standard operating procedure, and business as usual. We do not like change. It makes us start using the royal ‘we’.
I lobbied that Esteban should change his clock back to Bedroom Time. However, he apparently is pleased with this change of events. He was tired of the mental gymnastics it took to register the numbers on the clock, remind oneself that it was not really that time, and then subtract forty minutes. He likes that the clock matches the clocks in the rest of the house, nay, the entirety of the Central Time Zone. This certainty, this absolute hard-core accuracy is very appealing. He mumbled something about living with right-brained creative types and then exclaimed ‘I’m taking back the night!’ and then chuckled because sometimes he finds himself very funny.
We are not amused.
