Monday, January 08, 2007

Issue of the Day: Time Zones

I wonder if I will ever get used to the eastern time zone.

There are so many things that just feel wrong. I feel like I should be watching prime time television at 7PM, but it doesn't start until 8PM. I am starting to wind down for bed around then. Most newscasts do not even start until 11PM. By the time I finish, it is 11:20! That is just not going to happen on a school night.

I have always been the girl who goes to bed at 10:20. Even in college, I would chose my roommates based upon two factors:

1) Do they have a television? If they do, they are out. I can't stand having a television in my bedroom.
2) Do I see them up early in the morning and do I see them getting ready for bed around the same time I am getting ready for bed?

If you passed these initial skill sets, then, we'd move onto questions 3 and 4:

3) Do they come home or do they stay with a boyfriend? I liked to have my room mates come home. I hated when room mates would walk in at all hours of the night or morning and wake me up. They called me "the ogre" in my senior year because I hated having my sleep interrupted.
4) Do they sweat the small stuff? Are they dramatic and crying all of the time? Do they break up with their boyfriends every other week? If they did, they were out. I had no time to be anyone's counselor.

The bonus question for being my room mate, are you tidy? You don't have to be a clean freak and I preferred if you weren't. I just did not want grossness in my room.

It kind of sounds like I had all of the cards. I didn't. They had to want to be my room mate too. However, the older you were, the more seniority you had in choosing rooms. The most coveted of rooms were the carpeted rooms. I inhabited one of the two carpeted rooms all senior year with my room mate, Jill. Jill was a great room mate. She fit all of the descriptions above.

Since we've moved out here, Tim likes to stay up for the news. I against this. I like to go to bed at the normal 10:20 even if it means missing out on some shows or the news. Maybe I'll have to switch all of my clocks to reflect central time and things will be set right in my world.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Would it be wrong to tell you that I actually prefer to catch the 2:00am re-broadcast of the news?
Jen

patrick | steed said...

Eastern Time is God's time. Get used to it.

:)

Totally with you on the roommate thing. Even now, me being single and all, i'm totally picky about my roommates. I almost lost friends because they were crappy, messy roommates, and the roommate i have now, while awesome pretty much all the way around, is very messy. He's got a running-kick-in-the-crotch coming if he doesn't straighten up.

Anonymous said...

Hee. I grew up on the east coast and moved to the Mountain Time zone for grad school (and stayed there). It didn't take long to get used to prime time starting at 7pm, and the news starting at 10pm because it seemed like I needed more sleep living in the thinner atmosphere.

But with cable TV so widespread (with several all-news networks), and many local news stations (at least in the Denver market) extending their evening news to begin at 9pm (sometimes on an alternate cable channel), I would think if you wanted to watch the news at 10pm, you surely could. Heck, many stations have live streaming and numerous "extras" on their websites!

Aaron said...

I always had problems with TV times when I visited my friend in Las Vegas. It really was difficult to get used to prime time programs beginning at 8:00, although it did give us more time to get dinner or something before returning to her apartment.