Black Sunday

Much has happened since I last talked to you. I flew to Milan with a trusty band of sky pirates for three days. I ate delicious cakes. I celebrated the day when Mary brought the city of Zaragoza a pillar; that was a wily one. I knocked a lamp off my desk and broke it. I calculated an economic order quantity. I played basketball with a tall German and three short Spaniards. I still haven't cut my hair, but that belongs on another list.

Yesterday, my roommates and I hosted a Halloween party in our flat. We made punch, we bought orange napkins, and we cleaned the bathroom. Jermaine wore a diaper. Micah carried a sword. Anand wore a wig. I refereed the afair. Long Hai doesn't believe in Halloween, but he supports us. Represented nationalities included the following: American, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Finnish, Polish, and Kenyan/Indian. Many guests had never been to a Halloween party, and most guests did not realize that Halloween is my favorite holiday. Yesterday was a good day.

Today is sad. Part of the sadness is attributable to the post-party effect. Parties, people and energy are interrelated. Parties have energy, people have energy, parties have people, and people have parties. The energy of a party is greater than the sum of the energy of the people at the party. Parties are thus energy multipliers. If we assume that energy is good, then parties are good as well because they allow an individual to experience new, previously unattainable levels of energy. The problem with parties as energy multipliers is that their energy is unsustainable. A party is an event with a finite duration. When the party disperses, so does the energy that it facilitated. When the excess energy leaves, it takes the individual's energy with it. The amount of energy that it takes is directly related to the amount of energy that an individual contributed to the party. Energy in this sense encompasses physical, emotional, and mental forms. When a party is over, participating individuals are partial representations of their whole. This is what I mean by the post-party effect. When a party is over, it takes all of its energy with it, including the energy that individuals gave to the party.

The other part of today's sadness is the end of daylight savings time. Daylight Savings Time might be the best idea in the history of the world. It changes the time standards by one hour to include more daylight in the evening and less in the morning. Because the modern world operates around time schedules, wake up and sleepy times for many people are fixed. During the summer months, the sun rises well before most fixed wake up times. Consequently, people never saw the sun. No, they saw less of the sun than they wanted. By increasing the time standard by one hour in the spring and decreasing it in the fall, people are able to barbeque without mosquitoes longer. It was first suggested by Ben "Jammin" Franklin in 1784, but wasn't adopted until 1918. It was repealed in 1919 under strong opposition from the time travel lobby. It was adopted again after WWII, when the Allies defeated the powerful time travel lobby. The reason that daylight savings time is so great is that mornings are bad, evenings are good, and sunlight is great. By shifting sunlight away from mornings to evenings, I have a better life. My life is so much better that I have created a holiday called Daylight Day, celebrated sometime in the first week of April, corresponding to the start of Daylight Savings Time. But for every holiday, there is a corresponding antiday: Easter and Ash Wednesday, Fourth of July and Columbus Day, Earth Day and Every Other Day. Today is the antiday known as Darkness Day, where we mourn the theft of precious sunlight from our good friend evening. But even on this dark day, a shaft of hope beams through the window. As part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Daylight Savings Time will be extended for two weeks in the spring and two weeks in the fall, starting in 2007. Only 496 days until my next guaranteed life improvement.