The Best Time Zone in the U.S. (#8)

I still remember the email.  Blah blah blah, blah blah blah, you’ve been selected to join the Teach for America 2007 corps in Atlanta, Ga, blah blah.  Quite possibly the most exciting email I have ever received. (1) Not only did I get selected for TFA, I was placed in my “first preference” city teaching the subject I wanted.  This was a good thing.  I think I called my mom and dad first, followed by Natalie, followed by probably everyone else.  Pure joy, but be careful what you wish for.  Reality set in pretty quickly, I would no longer be living in my beloved Central Time Zone.

After reading this post, you might think that it is slightly exaggerated and that I am just nostalgic for the life I once had.  If you do think that you probably grew up in the Eastern Time Zone and never really experienced anything else.  Well I am here to say that Eastern Time is not the way we were meant to live!  But before you think the meaning behind this post is to propose some maniacal plan to make the Eastern Time Zone more like the Central Time Zone, well, no that’s not what this post is about.(2)  It’s more about how the Central Time Zone is the best time zone in the United States.  Unfortunately, because I have only lived in the Central and Eastern Time Zones I can only compare those two.

A great man once repeated what a great man once said, “Time is irrelevant.”  Thank you Albert Einstein via my father.  I get what he meant.  When you try to kill a fly and miss you say, “Damn I missed that fly by a split-second.”  But the fly is saying, “Dude you are soooo slow.”  Perspective matters and I guess in the grand scheme of things what is late to me may not be late to you, so yeah.  If you are 5 minutes late for your job you can probably get away with it; if I am 5 minutes late there will be a near riot in my classroom.  5 minutes!  Again to you it may seem miniscule, but remember when TBS used to start their shows 5 minutes after everyone else?  Shit was annoying, and I am glad that it didn’t last. So, yeah I guess some people don’t really mind the Eastern Time Zone.  But I do dammit and here’s why.(3)

In reality, my gripe with the Eastern Time Zone centers around two things: prime-time television and sports.

My average weekday looks something like this:  Wake up at 5:30am, hit the snooze about 20 times and finally wake up at 6:30, shower, dress, eat something small, drive 40 minutes to work (4), arrive at 7:40am, leave work around 5:10, drive 45 minutes back home, eat dinner at 6:00pm.  Herein lies the problem: what the heck do I do after dinner?  Before you answer, "Work out, read a book or grade some papers," understand that I just had a long day and the only thing I want to do after I eat is sit down and watch TV.  Living by yourself multiplies the importance of television.  So it's 7pm Eastern and my choices from 7:00pm to 8:00pm are a bunch of game shows or the stupid Entertainment Tonight shows which I absolutely cannot stand.  See, back in the Central time zone you eat dinner at 6pm and by the time the clock hits 7pm you are already watching primetime television.  Primetime on the east coast doesn’t start until 8pm.  IT'S LIKE WASTING AN HOUR OF MY LIFE.  I HATE this about the Eastern Time Zone.  So if I want to watch all the primetime shows now I have to stay up until 11pm.  If I want to watch the late news, it's now 11:30pm.  What the fuck.  My work schedule is essentially the same as my work schedule would have been in Texas but the damn TV schedule is one hour ahead!  My blood is boiling just thinking about this!  Again, for those of you who think I am overreacting...I'm not.  Put yourself in my shoes. Imagine growing up your entire life, primetime starts at 8pm, local news at 11pm.  Now you get a job in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where the time zone is one hour ahead of the Eastern Time Zone.  Primetime now starts at 9pm for you and the local news starts at midnight.  Wouldn't this really get you heated?  Thank you.

I know I said I didn't want to fix the situation, but here is an easy solution:  work day ends at 6pm, but we go in an hour later in the morning.  This means dinner would be at 7pm, and by the time we finished that we would be ready for primetime at 8pm!  No problems there.

As if my primetime schedule wasn't already jacked up, watching sports has become even harder in this terrible time zone.  Exhibit A: NFL football.  Look I hate the Eastern time zone, but if you gave me a choice to live in any time zone I'd still pick Central and here's one big reason why:  Imagine waking up on a Sunday after a long night of drinking in LA.  You finally stumble out of bed at noon only to find that the "early" game is well into the second half.  You see what I mean? Kickoff time in Cali is 10am!  You can't even have a beer at that time.  Noon is a perfect start time for football.  You wake up around 11:30am, watch the second half of the way-too-long pregame shows and by the time you are mentally stable, you are ready for some football!!!  Not only that, you are done with the games by 6:30pm (ehh, roughly), just enough time to spend laying around, dreading Monday morning.  In the East, you start at 1pm (which can be a good thing) but you are done around 7:30pm.  And don't even try to watch Sunday Night Football.

 

Exhibit B: All primetime sports.  Again with primetime, only this now applies to sports.  There is no way that I can ever stay up to watch a West Coast NBA game.  Ever.  I mean they start at 10:30pm EST and, if you are lucky, will end at 1am EST.  That is no way to live. (5) Same goes for baseball and any other primetime sport.  World Series games start and end late, BCS National Championship Games start and end late, etc.  During the NBA playoffs, I shift into “Maximum Game Watching” Mode.  I get home and take a minimum 90-minute nap.  This allows me to stay awake past 1am without feeling really, really ugly the next morning.

 

You know, it wouldn’t be fair for me to just continuously bash the EST without talking about its good points.  Namely:

 

• The United States runs on EST.  Most of the major media markets are located here.  So when something newsworthy happens early in the morning, you are the first to hear it, as opposed to your friends in Montana who are still asleep.
• College football is best viewed in this time zone.  The problem with CST is that the early games start at 11am.  Again, noon is the optimum time for football to start.
• That’s about all I have.

 I am sure that if I grew up in Colorado I would be defending the Mountain Time Zone (sounds weird) or if I grew up in Oregon I would be defending the Pacific Time Zone.  But I didn't, and even if I did I would still have to consider the beauty of the Central Time Zone.  I guess these are things you don't think about until you have to, but like a lot of things in this world, once you've seen the light, you don't want to close your eyes.

 (1)  This is the scary thing about emails: your entire life can change based on the contents of just one email, not always for the good.  Scary! This is why sometimes I hold my breath when I first read my email every morning.  You don’t want that, “Your credit score is now 487” email.

(2)  You want maniacal?  Go to Venezuela, where the time “shifts” half an hour.

(3)  And by the way if you are still dismissing the fact that one silly hour doesn’t really matter, think about how you feel when the clock moves back one hour.  You get home from work and its freaking dark.  Psychologically you think you got home really late and it takes a while to adjust.

(4)  Mike and Mike in the morning helps prepare me for what will no doubt be a wild, wild day.  High school rarely disappoints.

(5)  How many Spurs games did I watch in their entirety on a weeknight this year?  Zero.