I’m not a math person; just ask my husband.

I’m okay when the price per ounce is noted; it’s when cost is calculated as the price per pound I get annoyed.  What if you’re not buying a whole pound?  Multiplying by 16 isn’t so easy, I don’t care who you are.

It’s the same when the time changes.

See, I set my clock fifteen minutes ahead to fool myself that I have more time than I really do.  Never works, but that’s beside the point.

What’s being asked of me this weekend is to stretch my fifteen minutes by an entire hour and fifteen minutes.  Just like at the supermarket, I’m reduced to doing math in my head.

This time-change business is troublesome.  For at least two weeks in March or April and again in October or November a muffled question quietly sounds from my side of the bed:  what time is it really?  

I get confused.

• • Why does gaining one hour mean subtracting it?
  • Why doesn’t time do its springing and falling the same date every year?
  • Does a dentist in a non-change-time town put down two appointment times for patients in a next door town where time does change?
  • Who came up with this, anyway?
  • If time is mutable, what time is it . . . really?

To me all this messing around with times and dates doesn’t seem very scientific – it’s a bit contrived, and at the very least not friendly to users like me.

Too bad Einstein’s not around; without doing the math, I think I may have cracked the space-time continuum.

Kathe Skinner is a Colorado Marriage & Family Therapist in private practice who’s about to gain one hour’s sleep.  Find her website at www.coupleswhotalk.com and sign up to get her  newsletter, a weekly quick-read for parents and partners.  It’s free!

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