A Friday Chat About Sunlight and Goblins

Nobody asked for this extra hour, guys!!!

MEGAN: Welcome back! Happy Friday!

NICOLE: Happy Friday! My brain is currently stuck on a ridiculous question: how can a budget defund the National Endowment for the Arts when that money is endowed? Doesn’t an endowment mean you have to spend the money on one specific thing? I need to look this up and understand it, because it’s bugging me.

MEGAN: Yeah, I admittedly haven’t been paying THAT much attention to the horrible news as of late only because I like to give myself breaks here and there for my own sanity, but this is an excellent question. Like, an endowment is just an existing bucket of money that is “endowed” aka ALREADY THERE,(I think), so to defund said endowment would mean…what? Once the money in the endowment is gone, that’s it?

NICOLE: Even if you eliminate the program, which is the plan, you can’t just take the money that’s there and use it for defense spending, right? I have no idea.

MEGAN: Logically, that makes sense. However, so much of the current state of affairs is desperately, comically illogical, it seems safe to assume that a goblin carrying a giant burlap sack will come and steal all the money in the endowment and use it to bring us to nuclear war.

NICOLE: I am ready for our commenters to tell us we don’t understand government programs at all! DON’T WORRY, COMMENTERS, I AM LOOKING THIS UP IN ANOTHER TAB.

What else is on your mind this week?

MEGAN: Hahha, yes commenters, please, educate us!!!! I think the only other thing I have been thinking about is how TIRED I am, which is a very boring thing to think about, but it is directly related to two things: daylight savings time and the fact that if I stay up too late one night of the week, the rest of my week is ruined.

NICOLE: I’m also so tired! Why do we still have daylight savings time? Why does losing just a few hours of sleep ruin everything?

MEGAN: When I wrote about daylight savings time earlier this week, I was jokey and haha about how it didn’t ruin my life and then BAM, here I am, asleep, basically. I’m not sure why we still have it. Something about farmers? Better use of daylight?? I know some states don’t have it.

Did Daylight Savings Time Ruin Your Sunday?

NICOLE: The corn cares what sun it is but not what hour it is. Like, crops can’t tell time! But yes, I think it had something to do with farms. (Today on The Billfold: Megan and Nicole reveal how limited their education is. I blame the schools.)

MEGAN: LOL, I honestly couldn’t even tell you a fake answer that sounds plausible about why the hell this shit still exists. However, the things that I’ve read in passing this week about this scourge have all said that we “get” that extra hour of daylight and then that drives us to financial ruin, spending and buying tea towels and bathing suits and whatever because it’s still light out. Are humans that simple????

NICOLE: Okay I looked it up and DST has nothing to do with farms at all. It’s actually a post-Industrial Revolution thing, formalized during WWI. But the idea is that an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day gives workers more time for “leisure” (which also means SPENDING MONEY) after their jobs, plus it saves on coal because I guess you don’t need to heat your factories as much if they’re heated by the sun? The whole thing is a little confusing.

MEGAN: Hmmmmmm. Okay. So the “leisure” thing I get, because in the summer, when it’s light and breezy til 8 pm or whatever, nothing is better than sitting outside somewhere with a refreshing beverage that you paid for, feeling the sun on your face, etc. What’s really fucking me up, though — and this is a very specific issue — is that before daylight savings time, I used the sunset as a mental reminder for myself to take a break between my day job and my night job. Now, not so much.

NICOLE: You might have to turn it over to an app, the way we app the rest of our lives.

MEGAN: I really do think that the answer to all of my dumb “problems” about “HELP WHY CAN’T I EAT/DO STUFF” normally is in an app.

NICOLE: Well, I found the answer to my NEA question in a good old-fashioned browser tab: the endowment part of the NEA isn’t as large or important as the appropriations part, which is the money given by the government to keep the NEA running. These appropriations have declined steadily since the Great Recession, which should be a surprise to nobody.

MEGAN: Ah ha, ok. So if I understand this correctly, this is bad because of the appropriations. The appropriations are being cut off and all that money is being stuffed into the goblin’s sack and thrown at something else?

NICOLE: That seems to be the case. No more money, no more organization, and a lot more goblins. Or more money for that one goblin. I’m not sure about the distribution of goblins.

MEGAN: Sadly, neither am I. Yet another gap!! So, essentially, this is bad. That much is clear.

NICOLE: Clear as the sun shining through the clouds for an extra hour that NOBODY ASKED FOR.

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