What Time Is It?

Well, in this house at least, it's VST (Vern Standard Time), all year round.

Let me explain. I don't change my clocks, ever, and haven't done so for several years now. I live in the Eastern time zone, so I'm on permanent daylight time (EDT, which is UTC -4 for you time zone geeks out there). The time change I ignore just took place on the first Sunday in November, when everyone around me moved their clocks back an hour. As for the time change in March, I'm already there, happy to have the rest of society rejoin me.

How do I accomplish this? I'm a closed-caption editor who's not paid by the hour, and even though my shifts are fairly consistent time-wise, I have a lot of leeway. It doesn't matter which specific hours I work, as long as I complete whatever is assigned to me that day. How many hours that takes and which hours I work are irrelevant. So, the major obstacle for most people—your employer adjusts their clocks and you've no choice but to fall in line—doesn't apply to me.

Another useful strategy involves tricking my computers. Their clocks automatically go back an hour on the first Sunday in November, so what do I do? Why, I manually move them forward an hour and change the time zone to AST (Atlantic Standard Time) until March. It's like moving to Halifax for the winter. My computer doesn't know the difference and recognizes both the time and time zone I've chosen as entirely valid.

With respect to appointments and day-to-day affairs, I've trained myself to add an hour. As an aid, I put the time in quotes when I enter it into my daybook (yes, I still use pen and paper, which I'm sure makes the process easier). So, if I see an appointment with Dr. Smith listed on Monday at "2:00," I know it's really at 3:00.

Why do I go to all this trouble? Simply put, I'm getting older and have several niggling health problems, sleep disorders included. Changing the time (and by extension, fiddling with your body clock) twice a year causes problems even for young, healthy people. For someone like me, it wreaks havoc. When I was a boy, the time change made a little more sense, as we were on EST for six months and EDT for the remaining six. But in recent years, the ratio has become approximately 35/65 EST to EDT, leaving some of us wondering why we should bother with EST at all.

And here in Ontario, at least, I'm not alone. In 2020, Ottawa West-Nepean MPP Jeremy Roberts tabled a private member's bill called The Time Amendment Act, and it passed with unanimous support. Once in force, it will do exactly what I'm doing: life will be lived in permanent VST. Er, I mean permanent EDT. The catch lies in that "once in force" bit, as the bill is contingent on both Québec and New York following suit. Understandable, of course, as Ontario alone adopting VST would cause economic chaos for us and our nearest neighbours. But momentum is shifting: In Québec, Premier François Legault has expressed openness to the idea, and numerous pundits advocate for a switch to permanent daylight time.

Now, some chronobiology experts insist that switching to permanent standard time is "the wiser and healthier choice." As a night owl, I disagree. I don't care how dark it is at 8:00 a.m. in the winter because I'm asleep then. I value my light in the evening, and in my cozy VST bubble it never gets dark earlier than 5:30 p.m. Regardless, it matters not whether we switch to permanent EST or permanent EDT; the bigger issue I think we all can agree on is that it's high time for a switch to permanent something.

I hope to one day retire VST because it'll just be called EDT, every single day of the year, by the good people of Ontario, Québec and New York.

Time Passages

(Those of a certain age will note the Al Stewart reference. The rest of you, just carry on.)

Last week, my local newspaper reprinted a profile of Barack Obama first published in 1990, when he was at Harvard. I spotted "19 years ago" in the headline and did a double-take: surely 1990 can't be ... then I did the math. Yep, 19 years. So why does 1990 seem to me like it came and went sometime last week?

I can only conclude that middle age plays tricks with one's sense of time, or more accurately the passing of time. For me, the span between, say, 1970 and 1975 is huge, with so much happening so fast. I can rhyme off the changes I went through from one year to the next and cite parallel developments in music, politics, and sports. Conversely, I perceive anything from about 1988 onward as a monolithic chunk. If you want to know what has changed post-1988 and how quickly and dramatically, ask a 30-year-old; I can't see it at all. Even my most vivid episodes seem of a piece, thus blurring the distinction between one year and the next.

In a related development, at some point in my forties I awoke one morning and realized that this was no longer the era in which I grew up. Society had changed beyond recognition, and the values I held dear were quaint, archaic reminders of a gentler, more innocent age. (It's akin to that chill you get when you stroll past a TV set from your childhood in a museum.)

Anyway, my friend S. and I believe the world went mad around 1988, thus rendering subsequent events incomprehensible or insignificant. Example: why do most of today's rock singers—and by using the word "rock" I date myself—sound like whiny ten-year-olds? How could such an egregious faux pas have come to be trendy? There is but one explanation, kids: the world has gone mad.

My favourite year? 1971. Check out those chart-toppers and sock it to me!