Shopping Tips and Guidance by Mandy Claire

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," fellow earthlings! And a blessed howdy to any faeries in orbit around us. It's me, Anne, on my netbook. Snark in the park!

I'm usually a bright and cheery person with an unshakably optimistic outlook on life.

Okay. Not buying it, are you?

I'm usually a serene person on an even keel with a calm and collected outlook on life.

Still skeptical? As well you should be.

I'm at core a pessimist and a cynic. I need to force myself to laugh. Otherwise I'd be a female version of Ebenezer Scrooge ... only more generous to the poor.

But today I think I'll cut loose in all my savagery. You know what I hate? This early application of Daylight Savings Time.

I know, I know. Daylight Savings Time gives us a precious extra hour of daylight in the evenings, which is a green savings on energy consumption. That's the whole rationale behind moving Daylight Savings Time to earlier in the spring.

Do I have to like this because I try to be green? I hope not, because it pisses me off. Oh, I'll do it. And save energy too. But I'll complain about it. Complaining is something I don't get to do enough of.

Farmers successfully lobbied against the whole Daylight Savings Time thing until the 20th century. (Remember, it was first proposed by Ben Franklin, who I otherwise like, but this idea sucked.) It seems the growers of our nation's food and the milkers of our nation's cows kind of liked getting up in the daylight a few months of the year.

I like it too.

Just last week the slightest hint of dawn was starting to creep into the world as I heaved my weary body out of the sack. It sure helped to see the sky brightening a bit.

But no. Spring forward! Back into the inky blackness I plunge, as the alarm screams and EVEN THE CAT DOESN'T BUDGE FROM THE BED. Unfair! Unfair, I tell you! I want my dawn!

You needn't remind me that in a few weeks that dawn will re-surface. We're talking heart-of-the-school-year teaching weeks here, people. I do not need to be sitting here feeling like my melatonin level is off the charts.

Sometimes I can't help but feel a bit nostalgic for the era when the Wheel of the Year turned, and people got up with the light and went to bed with the dark. They say we're more civilized now, but when a little electronic device bleets like a foghorn in pitch darkness, and I have to lumber into the false brightness of a bathroom for a hot shower I really don't need, it just makes me wonder how far we've really come.

How about instead of Daylight Savings Time we call it Daylight Spend Wisely Time, and just get up whenever the hell we want to?

I appeal to all you teenagers out there to endorse this modest proposal.