Offset

A friend of mine just moved back to the Eastern timezone. She is dead to me now.

Combined with recent events in my life, wherein I've acclimated to two time zones in two weeks, makes me think about what the "best" timezone is.

Eastern time is pretty cool, I'll admit, but there is a certain appeal to waking up to your local NPR affiliate telling you how the NYSE has been doing. It gives you a kind of cryogenic unthawing feeling at times, as though you have leapfrogged over some boring part of history and are now being briefed on recent goings-on that might be pertinent to your new insidious plans.

I've come to the conclusion that Pacific time is better than Eastern: the fact that there isn't much else that goes on in the world after touching the westernmost part of North America gives me the idea that the rest of the world pretty much works for the sole purpose of making sure that our eleven o'clock news is the most up-to-date. Only the Hawaiians have it better and having been there, I can say that the hallmark of civilization is having hot and cold running water in your men's rooms.

Potential candidates for Best Timezone:

JST: you are sixteen hours ahead of the Californians, and are as close to living on the cutting edge of the future as you can be without learning how to speak whatever the hell it is they speak in Pago Pago, just shy of the International Date Line. No Daylight Saving Time. I cannot stress this enough: the entire country runs on one timezone.

GMT: the great granddaddy of all time synchronization started in Greenwich, England. Everyone, everywhere, acknowledges that if they want to agree on when things happen, they define events as when it happened relative to where the sun is in the sky in Greenwich, England. Downsides: GMT is not technically the same as UTC, and I'm not sure what happens in Greenwich when British Summer Time goes into effect. The best place to observe GMT might actually be Iceland.