Daylight savings time is a confusing time of year for everyone involved. Regardless of the fact that it's been happening all my life, the same questions arise every year: Are we moving forward an hour or back an hour? What do "forward" and "back" mean in this context? (Do I use the "up" or "down" button on my alarm clock?) Will I remember that I've set my clocks when I wake up, panicked, in the morning? Does this mean I'll get less sleep? Will there be more or less light?

And, most importantly: Who came up with this shit?

I don't need any of your help answering these questions. That's what all this is for.

All I mean to say is, for someone whose sense of time is almost entirely dependent on light, daylight savings time can be a traumatic experience. It isn't my sleep schedule that it's messing with (how many times have we been over the fact that I don't have one?) so much as it's mucking up what we shall call my "homework sense." There is a sense -- call it instinct, if you will -- that comes a few hours after sunset -- a sense that it is time to do homework. For me, this usually comes around nine, depending on the workload. Maybe some of you consider this unecessary, but when days are a constant movement from one activity to the next (school is 6:30am-5pm as far as preparation and transportation goes, then there's the added mess of piano and homework), free time floats in and can absorb you. Frequently, this "homework sense" is all that pulls me out of it. ("Free time" which here means "internet.")

(All of that was terribly convoluted. My precision in writing deteriorates by the hour. My love for the vices of the literary world are what make my writing overwhelming -- the dash, the semicolon, the parenthetical; a lot of times I feel like Zelda Fitzgerald in her letters to F. Scott, or worse, Emily Dickinson. Nothing, it seems, will rid me of this horrible affliction. But is it not proper that a writer should love her tools?)

This, of course, translates to "It's nearly ten, I haven't so much as looked in my bookbag, and I need a creative way to procrastinate."

But I like that it's still daylight when I drive home from school.