Ode to Eastern

By Ezra

I love Eastern Standard Time. Love it. Back in the day*, I always forced myself to begin posting by 9am, now that same ethic lets me sleep till twelve. Back in the day, I had to get up fairly early on weekends to write, now, I can wait till the early afternoon and still beat my old hour. Back in the day, there was little incentive to post after 4pm, everyone save my Pacific Timers had already left work. Now? You folks don't leave till I do. It's really beautiful. Tears to my eye and so forth.

Nevertheless, time zones haven't made much sense to me, so I looked into them a bit. Apparently, we all used to grunt and tell time by the Sun God, a method that got fairly confusing with the introduction of railroads and telecommunications and whatnot, because time differed not only across vast distances, but from town to town. So a bunch of eager bean counters decided to impose an imperial cartography scheme upon the indigenous village folk, who calmly accepted their fate. Thus, time zones were born, tagged to meridians of longitude that are multiples of 15. Nice solution, though in practice it ends up looking really weird and etch-a-sketchy.

• Back in the day refers to four days ago, when I lived in California.