Ask a Morning Person

Dear Morning Person,

This early rising habit … is it so you can watch the sun rise? 

Justin D, San Francisco, CA

Dear Justin,

That’s a nice idea, but honestly, I can’t say that I do. It would be pretty hard to swing that, as the timing is a moving target and I need to keep my routine, well … routine. But once in a while I do luck out, such as this morning. (I wish I’d reached Inspiration Point just a couple minutes sooner, actually…)

Dear Morning Person,

My wife says I could become a morning person if I just “applied myself.” I say morning people are born, not made. What’s your take?

Brandon D, Portsmouth, NH

Dear Brandon,

Did you know that the average morning person’s hematocrit is more than 10% higher, her lactate threshold more than 5% higher, her IQ at least a dozen points higher, and her eyelids 15% thinner than those of a non-morning-person? No, of course that’s not true. Look, there’s no special talent for getting up early. Your wife is right … it’s possible some people take to rising early more easily than others, but anybody can do it.

Dear Morning Person,

Are you a caffeine addict or are you lying?

Alexa A, Isla Vista, CA

Dear Alexa,

That’s kind of a loaded question. First off, “addiction,” as the term is most commonly used, implies that the psychological or physical dependency is on something that produces adverse consequences. Being aware and alert, of course, is a good thing. Meanwhile, if I go without coffee I do miss it, in the sense of not having something I enjoy, but I don’t get a headache or anything. Where caffeine gets a bad rap, I think, is when people use it in place of sleep, in which case they build up a tolerance to it and need increasingly high doses, like you see with classic drug addiction. Myself, I have a big mug of coffee first thing in the morning and another in the early afternoon and that’s about it.

(Of course, I could be lying … whether to you, to myself, or both. And it must be said, coffee is, so often, the lynchpin of a morning person’s routine.)

Dear Morning Person,

Are all morning people as insufferably self-satisfied and annoying as you are?

Peter S, Golden, CO

Dear Peter,

No, I’m particularly bad. That being said, we morning persons probably just seem annoying to thin-skinned late-risers with chips on their shoulders. Like yourself, apparently.

Dear Morning Person,

I am fascinated by the very idea that anybody willingly gets up early on a regular basis. Is this like some pissing contest among you freaks? Do you, like, get together at Morning Person conventions and brag, share tips, etc.? And what’s the most extreme case of morning-person-ism you’ve encountered?

Tasha M, Port Townsend, WA

Dear Tasha,

If there’s a National Association of Morning Persons, I’m not aware of it. Look, we’re not like superheroes or anything and there’s no accreditation involved. Some people get up early on a regular basis, that’s all. As for as the most extreme case, my family did a house-swap with some Glaswegians some years back, and the window blind in the master bedroom was obviously brand new and installed for our benefit. The first time I tried to use it I pulled the whole thing down, because the anchor screws were only like half an inch long. I didn’t get around to buying proper molly bolts and reinstalling the blind until the end of our stay, meaning we were awake with the sun every morning for two weeks. That was brutal: Glasgow is so far north, civil twilight started at like 4:00 a.m. The fact that this family didn’t see the need for blinds or curtains demonstrates their commitment to early rising. (For the record, yes—both the husband and wife are total world-beaters.)

Dear Morning Person,

In a previous column, addressing the ubiquitous soul-crushing torpor suffered by many morning persons, especially us middle-aged ones, you called out caffeine as the single greatest coping mechanism available. That’s all well and good for you, but I can’t have coffee—my wife won’t let me. She says it’s “bad for you.” Any advice for me?

Clark H, Asheville, NC

Dear Clark,

It really sounds to me like your wife could be an honest-to-God sociopath. No scientific study has ever proven that coffee is a risk factor for any disease. In fact, efforts to link coffee with health problems invariably end up showing that it actually decreases the risk. As documented in this article by the Harvard School of Public Health, coffee consumption has been shown to lower the risk of cancer, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, depression, Parkinson’s disease, gallstones, and early death. (The only established health “risks” associated with coffee are insomnia and jitteriness, which are easy to avoid if you’re not an idiot.) Assuming you’ve already tried to reason with your wife and gotten nowhere, you should seriously consider leaving her. She sounds crazier than a pet raccoon and possibly evil.

Dear Morning Person,

I made a new year’s resolution to exercise in the mornings before work two to three days a week, and so far I am just not sticking to it. I’m sure you get this question a lot, but do you have any advice for people like me?

Whitney P, Casper, WY

Hi Whitney,

First off, I’m really impressed that you’re still working on your resolution this far into the year. Now, as far as tips and tricks, I’ll give you my three favorites.

1. Don’t try to wake up early only on those days you want to work out, and then sleep in on the other days, as you’ll be stuck between two habits and nothing will feel normal. If this workout routine is really important to you, try waking up early every morning, or at least most mornings. On the non-exercise days you could read a book, do some housekeeping, snuggle with your cat or dog, or start accepting more 8:00 a.m. EST (i.e., 6 a.m. your time) meeting invitations.
2. Set out all  your workout gear the night before, in a prominent place, so that if you wimp out and go back to sleep after your alarm, you’ll feel like a jackass later when you have to put away your stuff unused.
3. Ideally, find likeminded athletic morning persons to work out with. Standing them up would be embarrassing, and if they’re good friends they’d shame you mercilessly. I have three friends who regularly force me out of bed early on the weekends for “dawn patrol” bike rides, and this keeps me in the early bird habit for my solo weekday rides.

Dear Morning Person,

My husband really likes to unwind by curling up on the couch with me to watch a movie before bed. I enjoy this too, but by the time we’re done with dinner and the dishes, it’s usually at least 9pm and—being a morning person—I want to start getting ready for bed. I don’t want to be antisocial but I need my sleep. Any pointers here?

Angel L, Waco, TX

Dear Angel,

Ah, that’s a tricky divide … you sure don’t want your useful habit to mess up your marriage. I deal with this a bit myself. I have two suggestions. First, instead of a full-length feature film, you might try a comedy show (there seem to be an infinite number of them) that runs under half an hour. (When your husband begs you to watch a second one, relent.) Or, you could kill two birds with one stone and sleep while “watching” the movie. Good cinematic choices for this second option include Andrei Rublev, Last Year at Marienbad, Melancholia, 2001 – A Space Odyssey, and Remains of the Day.

Dear Morning Person,

Is it possible for a teenager to be a morning person? My kids are never out of bed before 9 or 10 during the summer and they’d probably sleep until noon if I let them. My friends say their teenagers are just the same and this is perfectly normal. In fact, a few years ago our school district pushed out the start of the school day by an hour based on recent studies about fundamental differences in teenagers’ circadian rhythms. So it seems impossible for them to do what you do, i.e. rise before dawn.

Charles D, Ross, CA

Dear Charles,

That’s all nonsense, and another sign that our youngsters are being needlessly coddled by well-meaning but maladroit parents. Haven’t you ever read Farmer Boy? Myself, I had a paper route as a kid and got up at quarter to six every morning to earn less than two dollars. Not only was it doable, but it was a hell of a lot easier then than it is for me now. These modern kids have really had their way with our modern parenting cohort, convincing us that permissiveness is good parenting. Don’t get me wrong, my own daughters sleep in late too, but I don’t kid myself that this is Mother Nature’s intent.

Dear Morning Person,

Be honest … don’t you look down your nose a bit at us non-morning-people, who waste the best part of the day sleeping?

Elisa B, Berkeley, CA

Dear Elisa,

If I were to look down on people with different habits, I’d have to first establish that they’re accomplishing less than I am, which is a pretty absurd assertion. So if non-morning-people are able to get everything done and still get to sleep in, I actually envy them!

It’s also a bit tricky to call these early morning hours “the best part of the day.” When I do my bike rides just before dawn, it’s cool and foggy whereas I’d much rather ride in the warm sun. That said, some aspects of my routine have kind of grown on me. For one thing, before I head out I’ll often get a few minutes of quality time with my cat, who is normally too twitchy to spend much time in my lap. Also, the regulars I see along my cycling route are amusing. There’s this one baby-faced guy in a neon green safety vest I always encounter along Wildcat Canyon Road, walking along the other side of the road toward me, and although I’ve greeted him with a slight chin nod and a quiet “Mornin’” many hundreds of times, he refuses to acknowledge my existence … he just continues on his way, wearing a contented Mona Lisa smile. There’s also the incredibly old woman, all bent over with a cane, I see walking, also on Wildcat, practically every time I ride. She’s gotta be in her nineties, making her way along the edge of the road. And then there are the middle-aged twins on their road bikes, grinding along slowly, never together, usually one a couple minutes behind the other, both looking grim and resolute, and never returning my greeting. I’ve seen these two along my route for more than twenty years and they’ve never been together. The closest I’ve seen was just last week, when they were neck and neck but one was riding all the way over on the wrong side of the road, as if refusing to be anywhere near her sister.

I find these people charmingly bizarre and bizarrely charming. But I can’t look down at my nose at you for missing this because it’s pure blind luck that I have these people in my lives … I could not have engineered this situation, and for all I know the late morning or early afternoon randos are even more uplifting.

Dear Morning Person,

Will you always be a morning person?

Morgan B, New York, NY

Dear Morgan,

No. As soon as I reach retirement, I’m gonna start sleeping in!

A Morning Person is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask a Morning Person,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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Exploiting Our Children's Brains

Introduction

Some big news recently:  Snapchat (which is like Instagram but with a “this-message-will-explode-in-ten-seconds” kind of ephemerality to it) refused a $3 billion buyout from Facebook.  This, despite Snapchat never having made any money.  The reason, of course, is that this novel technology is worth far, far more than $3 billion simply because teens love it.  As we all now know, the world revolves around teens.  (They’ve known this for generations, of course, but we grownups—always a bit slow on the uptake—have only just realized it.)

I don’t have $3 billion to throw around and yet I’d like to personally benefit from the teens, and I’ll bet you would, too.  What do I envy most about the younger generation?  Frankly, it’s their sponge-like ability to memorize stuff.  In this post I substantiate this “sponge” claim, examine what realms of vicarious memory I stand to get the most out of, and provide some ideas as to how to exploit children’s agile young minds.

Are children’s brains overrated?

I’m no expert on child development or the human brain, but—this being just a blog—I don’t have to be.  I would characterize a child’s brain as a miracle of raw processing and storage power, but without a lick of sense.  It’s widely known that a very small child transplanted to a foreign land can easily learn the new language while keeping intact his native tongue.  This is impressive considering that young adults can spend four years majoring in a foreign language in college without attaining nearly the same fluency.  And yet, even my own kids—whom I refuse to believe are below average in intellect—will laugh at even my coarsest efforts at physical comedy.

Not all kids’ brains work the same, of course.  At the risk of over-generalizing, I’ll say that you could divide kids into two rough categories:  1) those who apply their razor-sharp intellects to the task of how to become cool, and 2) those (like my pre-teen daughter) who do pointless eggheaded things like memorizing a bazillion digits of Pi.  I’m glad my kid is the second kind, because for one thing, I don’t want her to get any dates, and for another, in being un-cool she can better relate to her father, who has never been cool and never will.  (As Anthony Bourdain has pointed out, “the essence of cool is not giving a [damn],” and parents bloody well better give a damn, and even if you used to be cool, like he was, “there is nothing cool about ‘used to be cool.’”)

So the best I can do is try to turn my daughters’ willingness to memorize vast troves of information into something I can tap into.  The problem is, kids don’t tend to memorize the kinds of information an adult might want quick access to.  They tend to memorize information that is useless.

Useless crap I memorized as a kid

One bit of information I wish my young self had committed to memory:  did I not bother trying to be cool because I realized that cool was probably an innate thing that I simply didn’t and couldn’t have, or did I not even register, until it was far, far too late, that there was even a such thing as cool?

No matter.  I applied my mind to memorizing all kinds of things, often without conscious effort.  For example, at age ten, my memory acquired all the lyrics to all the songs in Pink Floyd’s double-album “The Wall.”  Not only all the lyrics, but all the background noises and utterances (to the extent I could make them out).  All the tunes, the helicopter noises, the background TV snippets … probably terabytes worth of artifacts from that album.  Oh, and tons of other music as well, including music I didn’t even like.  To this day I’ll get songs from Styx’s “Kilroy Was Here” album stuck in my head.  It’s a curse, especially considering that there’s no room left in my brain to store new information.

That wasn’t all, of course.  Back in ’77, when I heard my brother Geoff listing off all the cast members of “Star Wars,” I naturally committed them to memory myself, no questions asked.  I’m not just talking about Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford.  I’m talking about Anthony Daniels (who played C3P0) and Kenny Baker (who played R2D2).  Never mind that these weren’t actors who went on to have actual careers, where it might have been useful to recognize their names.  (Kenny Baker went on to play a character called “Bruce Foreskin” in the direct-to-video “Boobs in the Wood,” and no, I did not make that up, and no, I have not watched it.)  Carrie Fisher probably doesn’t remember much about her roles in the “Star Wars” movies, having been an adult when she acted in them, but I remember a ridiculous number of her lines (“Get this big walking carpet out of my way,” “Fine … if money is what you want, then money is what you’ll get,” “You came over in that thing?  You’re braver than I thought,” etc.).

I didn’t learn a bazillion digits of Pi because, though I didn’t know what cool was, I knew what a dork was and felt I’d already presented several of the risk factors.  Peers were more judgmental back then, I think.  In contrast, my daughters boldly pursue whatever they like.  (Paradoxically, this probably makes them cooler than I was.  It’s complicated.)

Can kids be ordered to memorize things?

It’s tempting to say that kids cannot be ordered to memorize things.  For example, I have been trying to teach my kids a set of “family best practices,” like saying “thank you” after a meal, but they almost never comply.  I think this is an authority issue.  After dining at friends’ houses, my daughters do remember to say thank you (unless their hosts are lying to me).

Teachers do seem to have enough authority to command kids to memorize stuff.  I still have bits of dialogue rattling around in my head from junior high French class, when I was made to memorize my side of several rote conversations.  These snippets pop up almost whenever I choose what to eat—“Je voudrai avoir un bifteck frites … et une salade, bien entendu!”—and whenever I’m running late—“Zut!  Il est déjà cinq heures!”—with this last utterance continuing to cause me much confusion, every time, because “cinq heures” is 5:00 a.m., and surely these French kids weren’t waiting for a bus at 5 a.m., so why did our textbook say that?  Perhaps the most egregiously useless thing a teacher made me memorize was the entire list of prepositions in the English language, in alphabetical order.  That list survived in my memory for at least a decade; probably I removed it through sheer will.

(Not that I memorized everything I was assigned.  I refused to learn the many parts and functions of the female reproductive system in Health class.  My reasoning was that I don’t even possess any of these organs, though truth be told I was only a little better at learning off the male parts.  I did, however, remember the single most important lesson from Health class, which we kids summarized as “Remember the rule:  protect your tool,” along with like a dozen cruder variations.)

Likewise, my kids are given all kinds of things to memorize for school, and they dutifully comply.  They haven’t yet learned to instantly forget everything five minutes after the test.  For example, my younger daughter was commanded to memorize a really, really awful rap song about the parts of speech, and as she practiced it, my older daughter chimed in, still remembering the song from when she had to memorize it three years before.  (This is why I didn’t let my kids see my own, child-inappropriate “parts of speech” rap:  for fear that they’d instantly memorize it, start singing it on the playground, and get us in trouble.)

A few nights ago my older daughter announced that she had most of the Periodic Table of the Elements memorized; this came on the heels of her little sister memorizing, for school, a poem about an exploding turkey.  Of course my younger daughter had gotten a really late start on her homework and had to memorize three stanzas of the poem in like five minutes, and though she was totally panicked (in fact, perhaps because she was totally panicked) she pulled it off.  This pair of memorization episodes is what got me thinking that I really need to capitalize on this childish parlor trick.  If kids can memorize this much stuff with no greater a carrot than decent grades or their own whims, then I—the holder of dessert and video privileges—should be able to get in on this action.

What should we make our kids memorize?

Oddly enough, even though I curse myself daily for my inability to shunt things into memory like I used to, it wasn’t easy to come up with something for my kids to memorize for my benefit.  The most obvious things adults struggle to remember are passwords, but for obvious reasons I don’t want to entrust my kids with those.  I could assign my kids memorization tasks like remembering the birthdays of my dozen nieces and nephews, but I’ve decided not to, for a couple reasons.  First, since there is a tangible consequence of a failure of memory here (these are kids, after all), I don’t want to take the risk.  Second, it really does seem that the most amazing feats of memory involve pieces of information that are linked:  a poem, a song, or a list. 

I thought about assigning one of my kids to memorize the table of civil twilight start and end times for this area, because those tell me how early in the morning or how late in the evening I can go for bike rides on any given day.  It would be so handy to be able to yell across the house, “Hey Alexa, what time is civil twilight tomorrow morning?  And when are you going to practice your piano?”  The problem is, the civil twilight table comprises 730 data points.  Sure, I could have Alexa memorize the start and end times for the first day of each month, and the average “drift” for that month, to be able calculate this information for any given date, but it’s a non-linear thing and would end up being more of a math problem than a memorization stunt.  Besides, I have a handy printed chart for this, just like I have my nieces’ and nephews’ birthdays in my computer calendar.

I finally got my inspiration after joining a work-related conference call.  This was a high-attendance bi-weekly training thing where a roll call is required, so operators field each incoming call, asking for each attendee’s name, with spelling.  As often happens, the operator had difficulty with my name, even though I spelled it out:  “Dana—that’s Delta Alpha November Alpha.”  She said, “What?  Bana?”  I think this is because I have a girl’s name.  Perhaps she thought it was more plausible that there was a word she didn’t know, belta, and a name she hadn’t heard before, Bana, than that a man could possibly go by “Dana.”  It seems like I go through this issue almost every time I join this conference call.  Maybe the operators are screwing with me.

Anyway, my own struggles notwithstanding, the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet (aka NATO phonetic alphabet), is a very handy thing to know for spelling things out over the phone.  For one thing, it’s faster than thinking up words on the fly.  For another, it’s less ambiguous (e.g., if I said “D as in dog,” the operator might think I said “B as in bog”).  And most of all, the NATO phonetic alphabet gives your speech an air of military authority—it sounds official.  What seems cooler to you:  “A as in apple, L as in lion, B as in boy, E as in elephant, R as in rabbit, T as in tennis,” or “Alpha—Lima—Bravo—Echo—Romeo—Tango”?

Naturally, you’ve already spotted the flaws with this scheme:  it’s not such a lot to memorize, and I’ve apparently already memorized it anyway.  It’s not like I’m going to pause my phone conversation to yell across the house, “Hey Lindsay, what’s the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet word for Y as in, uh, yellow?”  So this memorization task falls short of my dream of using my kids as portable voice-activated almanacs.  On the other hand, having any influence at all over what my kids memorize is a nice win as a parent, particularly as they reach their tween and teen years.  Getting them to memorize something slightly useful, for their own edification, is enough for me.

Getting them to do it

I mentioned above how teachers, in commanding children, seem to have more authority than I do.  I also alluded earlier to powers of persuasion I myself might have due to my control over dessert and videos.  Gosh, that was sloppy blogging.  In fact I would never bribe my kids with dessert or videos because that would set a dangerous precedent.  Any intelligent kid would realize, Hey, I could do this cool thing I’m already inclined to do, but since this thing would also please my parent, I should hold out for some kind of reward!  (Believe me, my kids have tried this, but I always refuse, telling them “I will not negotiate with terrorists.”)

So instead, I talked to my wife, in my younger daughter Lindsay’s presence, about how cool the NATO phonetic alphabet is, and then I threw Lindsay a bone by mentioning the game Battleship, which (like many children) she unaccountably enjoys (despite its being completely pointless).  When I was a kid, the play console was very spare and we called out simple letter and number coordinates (e.g., “G-4!”).  Now the console looks all badass, with pictures of military technology like targeting systems, and simulated rivets, etc., and the x-axis is labeled with Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc. instead of A, B, and C.  So the kids call out “Bravo-7!” instead of just “B-7!”  I told Lindsay this was probably to help prevent confusion, such as B not being confused for D.  (This probably has less to do with it than the modern hardcore military aura the game tries to create.)  Then I asked her how many of the letter names she could remember.

By afternoon, she and Alexa were talking about this phonetic alphabet, and though I never made good on my plan to print out the list and leave it lying around, I didn’t need to.  At dinner the next night I asked Lindsay how much of the phonetic alphabet she could recite.  I figured that after Oscar, which is where Battleship leaves off, she’d fizzle out, but she didn’t.  She needed hints on about ten of the letters, but she eventually got them.  Then Alexa rattled off the entire list like an old pro.  Mission accomplished!

Daylight Saving Time

Introduction

I believe that the switch this past weekend to Daylight Saving Time makes an intrinsically interesting blog topic. My wife disagrees and (after hearing a number of interesting comments about DST) asked me to please never bring up the subject again. At first this caused me to second-guess my original idea, but then I remembered that many women will happily spend hours discussing shoes or makeup or equal rights or whatever, and that interests will vary wildly from one person to the next. Maybe somebody out there is interested in how man measures time.

This post will examine the difficulty of the switch to DST; how to make the switch fun; whether or not we should even have DST; when we should have it; and (for the ladies) what lipstick shade is best for that brief period between the end of civil twilight and the beginning of night. (For loads of good background info on DST, check out this web site.)

Making the switch

The first day of Pacific Daylight Time, Sunday, wasn’t too bad. It was a rainy day and my family followed the example of our oven’s “Sabbath Mode” and didn’t engage in any real activity all day. The exception was me running around changing all the clocks, watches, and time settings on various electronic devices. It’s crucial to update every single one, because during the transition, every timekeeping device is already suspect. If two timekeeping devices differ, more trust is lost.

This isn’t really fair. Logic dictates you should simply believe the clock that shows the later time. But then, logic isn’t always available in my household, especially when people are groggy. I get a lot of “What time is it really?” I also get a lot of “What time should it feel like?” I can relate: it should feel an hour earlier than it (officially) is, but instead time just feels off. Last night, 10 p.m. should have felt like 9, but instead felt like 11. This morning, 7 a.m. should have felt like 6, but actually felt like 5.

All told, I changed the time on some two dozen devices in my home. I adjusted ten or so clocks (including the ones in appliances); two cameras; three phones; two cell phones; two bike computers; four watches; the thermostat. I thought I was done but now realize I didn’t get my wife’s MP3 player; the car clock; the answering machine; the drip irrigation system; the outdoor lighting system. Other exceptions will surface.

Today, Monday, was rough. Everybody at home was dazed this morning, our routine a shambles. At work, an 11:00 a.m. conference call threw people into a tailspin because the recurring appointment had been set up in the e-mail/calendar program by somebody in the Arizona time zone, where DST is not observed. For those outside Arizona, the call automatically jumped forward by an hour on our electronic calendars. For example, in San Francisco, Pacific Standard Time switched to Pacific Daylight Time so the call was bumped to noon; even past iterations of the call show up in our calendar software as having been at noon. To the person who set up the call, everything seemed normal, but we had to decide whether to move the call or not. After a dozen instant messages among colleagues across three time zones, we compromised on rescheduling today’s call for 11:30 a.m. PDT. We do this little dance twice a year.

The guy in the taco truck was also a bit off his game (whether for DST reasons or not). The gal ahead of me in line ordered a burrito and he said, “Hot or spicy?” She paused. “Excuse me?” she asked. “Sauce: hot or spicy?” he repeated. She must have had her coffee because she deftly slipped between the horns of the dilemma by saying, “Mild.” Only then did he grasp his goof.

Making the change fun

Before I go around changing clocks I like to be reassured that the time change actually happened. I could look at a PC for that, but would rather not. My brother, a software developer, once got burned by a commercial calendar program he wrote, because Windows 95 (which had just come out) adjusted to DST automatically, whereas previous Windows versions had not. This meant that my brother’s software, which adjusted automatically to DST, messed up all the Windows 95 users through an unforeseen “dueling automated DST adjustment” scenario.

My first biannual DST operation is to update all three of our cordless phones to the authoritatively correct time, all at once, with the touch of a button. In the video below, watch the time on the phone very closely:

Did you catch that? The time on the phone at the beginning of the movie is 7:47 a.m. Three seconds in, you hear the phone ring because I dialed my home number from my cell phone. A few seconds later, the Caller ID digits are received from the phone company switch and you see “Dana cell” appear on the screen. At the same moment, the time changes from 7:47 to 8:48 a.m. Voilà! All three phones are now on PDT, because a timestamp is sent along with the Caller ID digits. As a quasi-techno-nerd obsessed with efficiency, I get a real kick out of this. (Alas, Motorola didn’t get it exactly right; the handsets don’t sync up the base station answering machine clock like they should, which is why I always forget to adjust it.)

Even if your phone doesn’t have the Caller ID feature, you can have fun with the time change by using it as an excuse to synch up your wristwatch with the atomic clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technologies in Boulder, Colorado. Just put your watch about a minute ahead, stop it with the second hand pointing straight up at 12, and then dial (303) 499-7111 from a speaker phone. Wait for the narrator to say, “At the tone, [x] hours, [y] minutes, coordinated universal time,” and then—just after the tock sound skips second 59—push the crown in so your second hand starts up in perfect time with the tock sound. Observe:

Now, whenever you get into an argument about whose watch is more accurate, you can say, “Hey, my watch is synched up—to the second—with the atomic clock!” (Note that this can have much the same effect as an American tourist in France telling the locals, “You’d all be speaking German if it wasn’t for America and our kickass military!” In other words, you shouldn’t give the atomic clock spiel to anybody who doesn’t already hate you.)

If that’s not fun, I don’t know what fun is (and really, maybe I don’t, despite posing as an authority on the subject). But take heart, there is another benefit to this adjustment period: if you wish you had the stamina to stay up later, or that you had an easier time sleeping in on the weekends, this time change should help for awhile.

Should we have DST?

There are plenty of opponents of DST, such as End Daylight Saving Time and Mothers Against Daylight Savings Time, but you have my permission to ignore them because they’re all silly. Anybody who questions the need for DST should explain to us why we should desire a 4:46 a.m. sunrise, which is when it would happen in mid-June were it not for DST. (That holds for the Bay Area. The farther north you go, the more absurdly early this sunrise would be; my brother in Bellingham, Washington would have a 4:06 a.m. sunrise without DST. You can create a handy sunrise/sunset chart for your own area by visiting this cool website).

I’m a lifelong morning person but even I have no use for such an early sunrise. Other than a few certifiable whackos, and people with really weird schedules (e.g., the West Coast financial industry folks who have to be to work before the markets open on the East Coast), nobody gets up this early. And yet the latest sunset that DST gives us—8:35 p.m. in the Bay Area—seems completely reasonable. On the longest day of the year the sun still sets before my younger daughter’s bedtime.

Somebody will want to speak up about the farmers. But why? How big a subset of the workforce are they, really? And if they were to hold out in silent revolt and stick to standard time year-round, I doubt anybody would care. Perhaps they already are ignoring DST.

When should DST begin and end each year?

This is a much more complicated question. Today, the sun rose at 7:22 a.m. in Berkeley. That’s pretty dang late when you’re trying to get your kids up at 7:15. It also means there’s no chance of a morning workout unless you want to drive to the gym in the dark or ride the indoor trainer (which most of us here are pretty sick of by now, this having been a cold and wet winter). On the other hand, the sun didn’t set until 7:15 p.m. this evening, and I’m sure people like that. Though I will miss the morning light, this change does make a short evening bike ride more feasible.

Those Americans who do international business will probably be really confused for the next couple of weeks because the time shift between us and the rest of the Western world just changed by an hour, and will change back to normal on March 28. (For example, on Saturday London was eight hours ahead of San Francisco; today, it’s only seven hours ahead.) I suppose the U.S. should feel embarrassed that when we switched to the longer DST period, no other country followed suit: one more example of our fall from grace as a world power. (England was particularly wise to ignore our precedent. Their term for DST is “Summer Time,” and if they’d adopted our new schedule they’d be on Summer Time during the winter.)

The reason the American government gave for extending DST was energy savings. It’s not obvious to me that anybody has studied this closely enough; it’s also not obvious to me that this is the most important rationale. I’ve read that DST curbs violent crime, since violent criminals aren’t morning persons. (I’m paraphrasing here.) That makes sense and seems pretty important. Naturally, I wish government policy was aimed squarely at what would most benefit me and my bike riding schedule, but that’s not going to happen until one of my kids takes power. In the meantime I guess I’ll accept whatever the government gives me. What else can I do?

This year, Russia is doing something new: in the fall, they won’t switch back to Standard Time. That is, they’ll stay on DST forever (or until their next major political upheaval). In a televised announcement of the change, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev declared, “I believe this will be interesting.” In describing the past difficulty of switching the clocks forward and back every spring and fall, Medvedev (or at least his translator) said, “I won’t even mention cows and other animals who don’t understand why milkers come at a different time because of the time change.” How true that is. Good luck with that, Russia!

One thing is for certain: here in the U.S., we can say goodbye to that handy “spring forward, fall back” mnemonic, since the time has already changed and its not even spring yet. “Winter forward, fall back” isn’t nearly as memorable and doesn’t even make sense.

Lipstick shade

During the day the most flattering lip tone will be one shade darker than your natural lip color. Between civil twilight but before dark you can get away with two shades darker. After dark you can pull off a more saturated hue. To test shades, apply lipstick or gloss to one lip. If that color is just a shade or deeper than your bare lip, then you’ve found your daytime shade; go one darker right at sunset. But even though DST has begun, it’s not yet spring, so err on the conservative side, especially if your suntan is gone.

Many women wrongly believe they can’t wear red lipstick before dark. The secret to choosing the right red lip color is breaking the day into temporal zones as described above. Deep plum, chocolate or red is fabulous in the wan winter gloaming, and then you can shift to a wine shade after dark.

dana albert blog