Published: March 11, 2008 11:55 pm            

John Cannon: Body still on standard time: 3/12/08

As I walked the three blocks to my car after leaving the office Monday evening, I glanced at my watch.

“Wow, it’s 7:30,” I said to myself. “I had no idea it was that late.”

(I’m not sure recounts of conversations inside your head require quotation marks, but I put them in just in case.)

The reason the time surprised me is because as far as my body was concerned it was only 6:30. While I had carefully moved the clocks in the house an hour forward before going to bed Saturday night, my body had yet to “spring forward.” It was still stuck in standard time searching for that hour we lost.

It didn’t take me long to notice the time difference. When I awoke Sunday morning, the clock said 7:30. I am by nature an early riser, something I attribute to my childhood days on the farm. When I was in college, my friends constantly griped about 8 a.m. classes, but I didn’t. Regardless of what was on my agenda for the day, I knew I was going to be up by 8 so I might as well take a class then.

I recently arrived a few minutes late for a meeting that started at 8:30 a.m.

“Oversleep?” a friend asked as I took my seat next to her.

“Nope,” I said. “I just tried to do too much before getting here.”

I did not tell her that before sitting down for that meeting, I had already done my 30 minutes in the pool at the Ashland Area YMCA, run home for breakfast, picked up food for River Cities Harvest at Kroger’s and Gattiland, delivered it to the Community Kitchen and returned the pizza containers to Gattiland.

If I was guilty of oversleeping, it’s because I should have risen at 5:30 a.m. instead of 5:45.

On any other morning but Sunday, it would have bugged me to sleep until 7:30, but I had plenty of time to shower, shave, dress, eat breakfast and even do a quick review of my Sunday school lesson and still get to church in time for the 9 a.m. service.

I again noticed the time change that night. While I don’t spend a lot of time watching television, I got hooked into watching back-to-back episodes of “Law & Order,” my all-time favorite TV drama. By the time the second episode had ended, it was 11 p.m.

For me, staying up to 11 p.m. is as rare as sleeping until 7:30 a.m. With rare exceptions, Jay Leno and David Letterman are celebrities I know about but rarely have seen.

If Poor Richard — a.k.a. Benjamin Franklin — were right and “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise,” it seems like I should be a lot richer, healthier and smarter, but I think Poor Richard was pulling our leg when he penned this adage. Besides what would someone who had “Poor” as part of his name know about being wealthy?

But I was able to stay up until 11 p.m. Sunday because my body said it was only 10 p.m., the time I usually retire for the night.

I admit that rising at 5:45 a.m. Monday when my body was telling me it was really 4:45 was not easy, but once I was in the pool at the Y, it didn’t feel much different than any other day.

At work, I am not a clock-watcher. Maybe that’s because I have never worked regular hours. I work until either (a) I have completed what needs to be done for that day, or (b) I’m too tired to go on. My wife is used to me coming home at odd hours, but on Mondays, when I get home makes little difference to her. That’s because she teaches a class at Ashland Community and Technical College on Monday evenings, and usually doesn’t get home until 9:30 or 10. Thus, I knew I would be responsible for preparing my own dinner Monday.

That’s another thing: Here it was 7:30 and I wasn’t even hungry. That’s because my stomach thought it was only 6:30 p.m.

I know that this adjustment period will be temporary, and by the end of this week, my body will have joined the clocks on daily savings time.

And as for that missing hour, well, we will get it back when we return to standard time in November. Until then, we can legitimately claim that we are an hour short of having enough time to do all the things that need to be done.

JOHN CANNON can be reached at jcannon@dailyindependent.com or at (606) 326-2649.

        

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