Daylight Savings
Each November in high school, waking up in the dark at 6:30 became harder. The sun would start to give back what it had taken in a sunrise later in the morning. Every day, I snoozed my alarm as long as possible, bargaining away my coffee and oatmeal for a few more minutes of sleep in the freezing dark. Then I rushed through getting ready and blithely ran all three red lights on the way to school. But in the last minute of my drive, brilliant pink and orange would overflow the bare trees and brown fields.
We don’t like November because it’s in a weird liminal space: after fall crispness and leaves like fireworks but before we can really justify wearing cute hats and mittens. It’s the awkward gap between pumpkin spice and peppermint.
But I love November. It reminds me how stunning it is to experience change. November forces us to wake up in the dark, but that means we can witness the sunrise. And the night comes early, but as it comes it surprises us with a sunset in the middle of the afternoon. November confronts us with the wonder of transition — from green to gray, from dark to light, and back again.
-Miriam Cohen, BF ’20
When daylight savings rolls around, I feel just a little vindicated. Not only due to my love for the citizen-farmer ideal of changing clocks to get all that early sunlight on the pasture, but also to my own pretty loose grip on time. When my cross-country coach used to tell us that we were slow on our workout times, we would turn to him and ask the all-important question: “Coach, what is time?” He would usually retort that he needed a sundial to time us.
People often ask me what the time is, since they see I wear a watch. They are making a big assumption that my watch actually functions. I am not sure when it started, but over time my watch has steadily become more and more inaccurate. Currently, the time it gives is roughly 26–28 minutes fast. If I am feeling charitable when someone asks me the time, I will retreat to the atrophied reptilian part of my brain and do some arithmetic. When I check the time, I go through the stages of how wrong my watch has become. I tell myself it is four minutes fast (I originally set it so that I would be early), but in the back of my head I think it is 14 minutes fast, even though I know it is around 27 minutes fast. Time is relative. And since I have not done real math since I came to Yale, it always helps to remind myself how numbers work.
-Luke Chang, BR ’18
The worst thing about Daylight Savings is that it killed Henry the Hippo. If you don’t know who he is, he’s Fiona’s father and the second most famous hippo in the state of Ohio — maybe even the world. Henry the Hippo died at age 36, one year over the median life expectancy of male hippos. It may seem normal that Henry died, and crazy to think that Daylight Savings killed him — but it’s not. Daylight Savings killed Henry the Hippo. We swear to God. Henry the Hippo, father of six, lost hundreds of pounds over the course of his health decline. “The blood work from Henry’s last exam gave us some hope that he was on the mend, but his appetite never returned, and his condition declined rapidly. His care team of vets worked tirelessly to keep him comfortable and to help him fight this illness. Nothing — antibiotics, favorite foods, extra TLC — seemed to turn his condition around,” said Christina Gorsuch, Cincinnati Zoo’s Curator of Mammals, in the press release announcing Henry the Hippo’s death. The only explanation is that Daylight Savings put him over the edge.
Henry is survived by his mate, Bibi, and his beloved daughter, Fiona, who was born six weeks premature on January 24.
-Fiona Drenttel, BF ’20, and Hannah Offer, JE ’19
