Costa: Daylight Saving Time: Fall back, way back

The end of Daylight Savings Time is scaring the daylights out of me. Instead of giving me an extra hour of sleep this week, it has made me an hour late at work. I can't seem to catch up. The items on my "to do" list never seem to get checked off and I feel as if I am running a marathon in ski boots.

My circadian rhythm is full of bugs. I find myself dropping off at 10 p.m. before CSI: Miami's Horatio has had a chance to remove his sunglasses for the first time, which, sadly, function as his only dramatic device. When I arise in the morning, I feel as if I have slept through my alarm. Why is it so bright out there?

I blame fancy Ben Franklin who reportedly conceived of the idea while he was a minister in Paris, the city of lights, in 1784. If, instead, he had stayed home sitting by the stove he invented, maybe we all could get some sleep at appropriate hours today.

Daylight Saving Time proponents claim that the plan saves energy, preserves lives, prevents traffic injuries and shines a light on crime. According to a 2007 study published in "The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy," Daylight Saving Time significantly reduces automobile crashes in the long run with an 8 to11 percent fall in crashes involving pedestrians, and a 6 to10 percent fall in crashes for vehicular occupants.

These are all good things, of course, and that is why DST continues to this day despite the personal problems the time change seems to cause some of us. It usually takes me about a fortnight to become acclimatized to the time change. A fortnight, as you remember from grade school, is about 14 days. No, make that 14 nights. Now that DST ends in November, the cruelest of depressing months, the feeling of seasonal depression is doubly felt: It's gray outside and I'm also behind an hour in my work.

I usually switch to high-octane espresso-like coffee drinks during this critical time and consume coffee at a rate not seen outside the realm of combat pilots. The caffeine regimen busts my budget. I calculate that on bad days, I spend enough money on coffee to fund a small vacation to the Bahamas.

My doctors advise cutting down on coffee and getting more aerobic exercise during standard time months. Actually, they say that about all my ailments, any time of year. Even my dentist advises exercise. How jogging can help prevent cavities is a mystery to me, but then we seem to find that everything these days is medically connected. It's like the Kevin Bacon six degrees of separation theory - there are only six degrees of separation from any medical problem and all of them can be solved by diet and exercise.

The animals I encounter in the morning - the crows on the lawn and the skunk that waddles in the pachysandra - do not adhere to DST or Standard Time. They dig up grubs at dawn and go about their merry way having absolutely no knowledge of Ben Franklin's crazy time scheme. I meet them when I go out to get the newspapers from the driveway. They studiously ignore me.

I wonder if they think I am an hour late?

Peter Costa is a senior editor with Community Newspaper Company. His book, "CostaLiving: Laughing through Life," a collection of his humor columns, is available at amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble bookstores.