Whelp … was anybody planning on telling me about this Daylight Saving thing?
Last Sunday was not my finest hour.
Just as I do every Sunday, I woke up at the crack of dawn (10 a.m.) and moseyed on down to the Waves Cafe, my mouth watering at the hallucinogenic mirage that is a Sodexo worker who is apathetically squeezing three pancakes onto a grill. But when I got there, the lights were dimmed, and the metal gates were covering the entrance. I had three initial thoughts double-dutch through my mind:
1. What is the deal with Pepperdine minimizing the Cafe hours so much this year? I don’t have the actual schedule in front of me, but I think breakfast is served from 10 to 10:15, lunch from 10:15 to 5, and dinner from 5 to 5:03. I don’t know if anyone else is picking up on this, but we are slowly devolving into a glorified old person’s home here.
2. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: When large buildings or areas around campus are vacant, the first thing, literally the first feeling, that rushes through my nerve endings is that I missed the rapture. The minutes that follow perusing the “Left Behind Series” Wikipedia page are some of the most unsettling moments of my week. (it’s a weekly occurrence.) Inevitably, when I saw an empty Waves Cafe I pulled up my Wikipanion App.
3. Why is there a chain-link fence covering the entrance to the cafe? What are we, zombies? What is there to steal in there, anyway? A few cheese Danishes and a jug of thousand island dressing? Thanks, but no thanks, Pepperdine.
Alas, these notions hop-scotching through my brain turned out to be incorrect observations in which the only one to blame was myself (except the last one, which still stands). But obviously I didn’t cast any scorn in my own direction. No, I directed all of my vitriol at the grave of one Benjamin J. (speculative) Franklin.
For it wasn’t 10 o’clock in the morning, it was 9 o’clock. If you can believe it, as I was counting sheep from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Saturday night, the entire country, every single person besides me, somehow talked it out and agreed to to live through 1 a.m. twice. The problem is, my body recognized that added hour because my body knows better.
Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier concluded that “matter could not be created nor destroyed”. Well apparently hours don’t matter, because on Sunday, America watched one go by … twice.
Now I understand this Benjamin Franklin fellow had some good ideas (and a great role in the classic Disney film “Ben and Me”), but this one was a doozy. If I were to suggest that once a year we just acted like a certain Tuesday didn’t happen, there would be a decent chance I’d be burned at the stake. But nonetheless, there Ben Franklin was 100 years ago (speculative again), running around all over Virginia turning everyone’s clocks back. But you know what? This is what we get for listening to a guy who electrocuted himself with a kite. Seriously though — a kite? What is this, 1776?
And I’m not bitter. You guys, I’m not. I just wish one of you would have had the decency to inform me of this phenomenon before it happened, so that I could have avoided all these awful elementary school flashbacks of being the odd kid out. And believe me, that hour spent staring blankly at the metal curvatures of the Waves Cafe gate was one of the most interminable expanses of time I’ve ever survived.
But there is one part of my Sunday routine that Ben Franklin can never ruin: that moment (be it 10:05 or 11:05) when, like a child watching an airplane glide across the sky for the very first time, I stand behind the Plexiglas of the grill and watch the worker squirt out three asymmetrical pancakes.
