What time is it? It’s fry sauce o’ clock.

Raise your hand if you’re confused as all get out.

Perhaps you’re thinking “I’m confused — why is she asking me if I’m confused?” To that, I will respond with three simple words: Daylight. Saving. Time.

Or maybe it should be standard time. What time are we in right now, anyways?

I could Google the answer, but I don’t know if I trust the internet. That’s how disoriented I am at the moment.

“But Amy,” you ask, “is it really that hard to change things up by an hour? I mean, you travel a lot. Isn’t that the same?”

No, changing your clock is not the same as traveling into a different time zone. Let me explain why.

For one thing, when I travel, time change isn’t the only factor making me tired and confused. There’s spending long periods of time confined in a car or plane, standing in long lines at the airport, arguing with the people around you about how the line is supposed to move, dragging around luggage, and eating nothing but peanuts and crackers for hours. Any one of those things alone would wear you out, but then you mix them all together and you’ve got a recipe for hangry exhaustion.

One of the biggest things that makes travel tired different is the fact that I AM IN A DIFFERENT PLACE. When I fly to Utah to visit relatives, I can look out the window and say “hey, there are mountains here. I’m a different place. The time is supposed to be different here. Also, people say weird stuff like ‘oh my heck’ and ‘fry sauce.’ Clearly, I am supposed to be confused.”

But with Daylight Saving/spring forward/fall back/whatever you want to call it, I don’t have any of those other factors to help me understand why I’m tired and confused. I’m IN MY OWN HOME, minding my own business, and then BOOM! Time change!

I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation as to why we go through this madness in the first place. The most common ones I’ve heard is that it helps farmers and it keeps school kids from waiting for the bus in the dark. Call me cold hearted, but the “kids at the bus stop” bit never moved me much. Probably because I walked to school when I was a youngun’, and I did in the rain and the snow and the cold and the wind, and it was uphill both ways, and nobody ever thought to turn the universe upside down to make my walk easier.

The farmer one could potentially get my sympathy. I mean, I’m not a farmer, but I like food and eating. So I’m rooting for them. But…I don’t get how this is supposed to help them. Anyone know?

So now that I’ve whined about it a bit, here are my thoughts on what might help me get through this time change nonsense:

• Make the day after a time change a national holiday. That way I can stay home and sleep and complain “what time is it?” a million times to my husband in peace. OF course, now that I’m thinking about this idea, I would need to set guidelines as to what counts as “the day after.” Would it be Sunday since the change happens in the middle of the night? Or Monday since that’s the first full day?
• On second thought, let’s make it a week off. Just to be safe.
• If the day/week off thing isn’t an option, maybe people could trick me into thinking that I’ve traveled. Someone could tape some mountain pictures in my window. And everyone I meet could talk about fry sauce. Then my brain would think, “ah, okay. It’s just another time zone. I’ll get used to this in a second.” And then after a couple days the mountains and fry sauce fanatics can slowly disappear and everything will be back to normal.

There are rumors that legislature is in motion to scrap the whole thing. I’d be interested to see how that turns out. Until then, I’m gonna stumble my way through and hope for the best.

How are y’all doing with the time change? Are you going as crazy as I am? Tell me all about it in the comments. I’ll read them as soon as I can. I’ve got some more clocks to change first…once I can figure out what time it is.