This whole daylight saving bit is weird.

Please note that it’s not “daylight savingS” as so many are wont to say. Yesterday is not some sort of special bank wherein daylight is stored.

Anyway. This whole daylight saving bit is weird, but it’s nice. It’s nice to sleep in and fool yourself heartily that way. It’s nice to wake up in the morning and not feel like one of life’s lost children because the entire world is in the throes of pitch-black darkness– at 7 am. It’s nice to look at the clock and say, “wow! It’s only 9:20 am and I still have most of a full day ahead of me.”

Even if it’s still just silly trickery.

I do feel a little sorry for people who can’t seem to either commit to or understand the simple “Spring Forward– Fall Back” mnemonic– that is, before I laugh at the stories I hear regarding DST screwups. I remember a guy from high school who was two hours late to his job opening up his place of employ because he “sprang back” if you will. His wake up call was his boss, I believe, politely inquiring as to where the hell he was.

Oops.

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One of the things I’ve been leisurely doing today, topsy turvy day that it is, is spending some time geeking out on Wikipedia. Through a “rabbit hole” search — my own coinage for a search that makes you want to click on a word and transports you to another page, and then another and another, etc.– I found a great quote by Will Rogers: “A humorist entertains, and a lecturer annoys!”

To be honest, I didn’t know that Will Rogers was all kinds of awesome until Wikipedia enlightened me. I mean, I had heard of him mostly from older people and from Jimmy Smits when he used to do those plugs for the Will Rogers Foundation (one of Mr. Rogers’s kids died of diphtheria, so I guess it was a posthumous altruistic endeavor). He was a cowboy, a social commentator, an admired figure, and a symbol of an America that seems to be slipping out of our grasp every day a little more: a polite yet outspoken America.

By polite, however, I don’t mean stupid. You are allowed to disagree and to hold opposing viewpoints in polite company, you know: you’re just not allowed to resort to childish appeals to emotions to hide the fact that you don’t really have a valid point.

Then again, in our day and age we are allowed and even feel entitled to whine, bitch, debase, moan, and otherwise wax emotional and run ragged with anything and everything in our minds– even if we do not have a valid point. Initially people flock to those outpourings of vitriol because– well, because anyone who’s ever had emotions can identify with the wounded, right?

But I don’t think that people care about those moues and those displays of emotion after a while. Or if they do, it’s because of this delicious little *emotion* only a German word could ever describe (because German is the language of horrible things that sound like pastries, don’t you know):

It’s called Schadenfreude.

30 Oct This entry was published on October 30, 2006 at 9:40 am and is filed under Soapboxing. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.