I buy lots of foolish crap. It is a popular habit. Perhaps that is too harsh. I plan to buy foolish crap and sticking to a luxury budget generally saves me from sealing the deal. Plus, waiting for my budget to build up to an appreciable amount allows me to forget about buying stuff in general for long stretches.

However, that means that when I look at my lists of desired stuff, it looks pretty weird in retrospect. For example, I listed surgical paper masks. Those, annoyingly, only come in packs of fifty (for six dollars), so I didn’t buy any. Have I become overly asthmatic? No, but it was winter and sinning cold. I felt it deepest in the dark during the earliest hours I work, on my lips and face. A scarf is the traditional answer, but why go overkill with something that doesn’t fit comfortably in my pocket? Surgical masks satisfy that exact need perfectly. However, Orange County’s winter is almost over and they would sit unused until December or so.

Further, in one month and one week, Daylight Savings Time stomps on our biological clocks yet again. If I recall correctly, this one introduces more light into my morning so the temperature will seem to have risen. I could be wrong though. I remember ‘spring forward, fall back’ but spring isn’t a numerical operation, fool rhymer. In one week, I can give the dubious advice to start adding two minutes to each day so that when everyone else claws at their alarms with government mandated jetlag, you are totally ready. Sure, it requires increasing mental gymnastics but I already keep my watch five minutes ahead of most clocks, so it shouldn’t be too different.

Obviously, I have no intention of tricking myself so badly, but it reminds me of a pet idea to eliminate leap days entirely. Yes, leap days and Daylight Savings aren’t the same but both deal with trying to constantly adjust to the Earth’s varying daylight. Daylight savings supposedly matches our mornings to sunrise better. Leap days account for the accumulation of seconds outside the 24 hours on our watches. There are tons of calendar reforms, tons.

I admire most radical variants but recognize that I could never privately transition to Symmetry454 or the French Revolutionary calendar any more than I could learn Esperanto: for lack of partners. Most diverge from our (revised) Gregorian system to trumpet the import of the week. Presently, despite the boozy celebrations, New Years is just a day. It could be Friday, with a nice hangover Saturday. Or, it could be Tuesday and screw your hangover, the economy isn’t going to recover without hard work. Calender reforms usually have ‘intercalendar’ days. That means they exist, not only outside of every month (to keep them uniform) but aren’t any Day of the week either.

I think the best answer would adopt the same solution for the light itself. The buildup of ‘twenty four’ hours difference over four years is miniscule over any given day, but even that is out of step enough that – every seventy years or so – we need a double leap year. Prior to the invention of atomic clocks and digital clocks in general, rounding up was the best option. Frankly, it was the only option. As I noted, a ‘day’ is ever so slightly more than 24 sixty minute periods. An analog watchmaker would have a terrible time creating some mechanism for pocket and wrist watches that skipped enough second’s hand gear teeth to represent the particular day’s extra tenths of a second.

A digital watch hasn’t that problem. Despite all the Millenialist cowering over Y2K, digital clocks can easily adopt whatever time you like. With a little programming experience under my belt, I know it isn’t quite that easy. Nevertheless, you could have the clock program sense 24:00 and then pause (or not count the quartz crystal’s vibration or whatever). That duration is a const variable that we can update accurately. Has Greenland’s ice sheet melted? (That would shorten days by dispersing the mass and increase Earth’s angular velocity.) We decrease the leap microsecond. Are we importing minerals from the Apollo asteroids? We increase the break.

Of course, as with all communist fantasies, it requires a supermajority of the planet agree to switch to all digital clocks or see the buildup of a chronological differential. It would be annoying to fly to Tokyo and not only change the hour but the minutes too. Error creeps in.

Time zone differences remind me of another youthful daydream: an absolute GPS watch. Time zones are a useful fiction that timepiece would take to its ultimate implication. Imagine a watch that not only adjusted when you travelled across the country, it adjusted as you drove around. Time zones would be divided into 60 smaller slices each (or six at higher latitudes). That way, if you imitate the car commercial where the man drives forward to see the sun set again, the watch would adjust its minutes backwards automatically. Time travel for the proles.

Obviously, both are just nice thought experiments and terribly impractical. The latter makes coordination confusing unless in a future environment where even phone conversations can go through filters that alter the time I say into one that makes sense to my compatriot in San Fransisco.