Against daylight savings time
I have never particularly cared about or understood the rage aimed at daylight savings time in the states. Daylight savings time is great! It stays light until like 9 pm in the summer! There’s so much fun to be had with those long days! (Especially if you live in a place with a dark and depressing winter—and for those, standard time is the problem.)
Well. After a total of eight summers in Mexico City, I have changed my tune. Today the sun rose at 7:24 am. 7:24 am. 7:24 AM!!!!!! This is a personal offense aimed directly at me and my lifelong struggle with mornings. I can’t wake up without sunlight. Once I slept in a room with blackout curtains and didn’t wake up until 4 pm. It’s not like I leap out of bed immediately ready to face the day if the sun is shining, but at least I can, you know, open my eyes. At least it’s obvious that it’s morning.
And there’s absolutely no long-evening effect that makes up for the morning torture. Sunset is at 7:31 pm today—respectable, but not extraordinary. At most, we get until about 8:30 pm, when the days are at their longest in June. But in many ways, the actual hour of summertime sunset here is irrelevant. For all intents and purposes, the outside portion of a Mexico City summer day ends at 5 pm because that’s when it starts raining. That’s been slightly less reliable this year, as you may recall, but it still gets cloudy and menacing, and you only have to be caught in one hail storm to learn not to risk it.
Summer is a wet and gloomy season here. The evening storms lead to overcast mornings even when the sun does finally deign to peak over the horizon. The cognitive dissonance created by looking at U.S. summer beach day photos on Instagram when I’m getting like 4 hours of good light a day is…intense. I catch myself thinking, Is this really the same season?
And yet, Mexico treats summer just like the U.S. does. Schools go on vacation, people flock to beaches, it’s high season at all the hotels and resorts. Despite the rain, darkness, and sargassum seaweed invasion. It would make so much more sense to switch the relaxing, outdoor part of our year to March, April, and increasingly May, when it’s warm and sunny. Why does the way the U.S. and Europe do summer have to be the way Mexico does summer? Why do seasons have to be experienced the same way everywhere around the world?
The U.S. and Europe get to have their cultural experiences of season line up with their lived reality of seasons. And by U.S., I really mean the East Coast; some of these complaints apply to the way cultural seasons have been imposed on California, etc, too. Of the many things I learned when I moved to the East Coast for college was the point of Christmas lights (sparks of joy when it’s dark and cold!) and Memorial Day barbecues (finally, it’s not dark and cold for while!). Those things make perfect sense there. In Los Angeles or Mexico City or Managua, where I spent a significant portion of a reporting trip in a mall featuring a huge Christmas tree and fake snow, not so much.
The global hegemony of cultural seasons—going to the beach in the summer, hanging up Christmas lights in winter—reveals which cultures matter most. They (we) get to distort the rest of the world until it resembles a twisted, nonsensical image of themselves. They (we) get to feel at home anywhere, while stripping everywhere else of the right to a coherent relationship between a culture and its environment. And Mexico, as it always does, gives in.
Recommendations
“What College Admissions Offices Really Want.” Sometimes I think I will spend the rest of my life trying to figure out what happened in college, where for the first time I encountered so much wealth, privilege, unquestioned and unquestioning whiteness, and, dare I say it, mediocrity. (I’m looking at you, Columbia. Less so at Barnard, at least the mediocrity part. Hmm, I wonder why?) Reading this wild and infuriating ride of an article about the conflicting demands placed on college admissions officers, I felt like a veil had been lifted, at least a little bit. The author, Paul Tough, also has a new book out about college, and I can’t wait to read it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates and (his editor) Chris Jackson on the Longform podcast. On the occasion of the publication of his first novel, Coates makes his fifth appearance on this podcast to talk about his writing. In all of those interviews, but especially this one, what comes through is the sheer amount of work he does, and how much he writes that nobody but his editor ever sees. His willingness to stick with ideas and projects even as he ruthlessly throws out countless lesser versions of them is just what I needed to hear right now.
“Free Solo climber Alex Honnold’s next summit? The rest of his life.” I loved this profile of Honnold, aka the guy who didn’t die in Free Solo, about how to keep living after you’ve done something extraordinary.