Sunrise Sunset

Today is the shortest day of the year. Our progress toward this date wasn’t unnoticed, as I’ve felt a bit like a vampire over the past week or two. And I suspect that I’m coming down with a seasonal affective disorder that tea with honey just won’t cure. I guess the real problem is that, in Moscow, there’s both a front and back end to this situation.

Take a look at today’s stats, for example, with New York as a bench mark:

21 December 2005
Moscow: sunrise was at 8:59 and sunset at 3:56 for 6 hrs 57 minutes of daylight.
New York: sunrise was at 7:16 and sunset at 4:31 for 9 hrs 15 minutes of daylight.

The truth is that its never really that bright to begin with since its snowy and cloudy while the sun makes its low arc across the sky. It is still pitch black well after I’ve already arrived at the office, and pitch black again hours before I go home. My actual outside time is spent in total darkness.

It makes me feel like the only thing I do is work, when in truth my hours aren’t particularly strenuous. And I find it a little disorienting, too. Lack of sunlight has unlinked me from a certain type of rhythm; I find myself inadvertently staying up very late. Surprisingly, I haven’t had trouble getting out of bed in the morning – which is fascinating since darkness and cold and snow are usually a pretty good combination for sleeping in.

But I remember having a similar problem when I first arrived in Moscow. Take a look at the data for that day, too:

4 July 2005
Moscow: sunrise was at 4:53 and sunset at 10:15 for 18 hrs 22 mins.of daylight.
New York: sunrise was at 5:30 and sunset at 8:30 for 15 hrs of daylight.

The near-constant presence of the sun was equally disorienting. I had to rearrange the furniture in the apartment so that I could get some sleep. Again, the whole rhythm was different – it was easy to take the long way home and go sightseeing since the sun would stay up so long. At twilight, I’d start thinking I should stop for dinner when actually I should have been thinking about going home to bed.

What’s really surprising to me is that relatively small changes on the margin can have such a large effect on simple, but deeply held, patterns of life. The length of day isn’t radically different from a latitude like New York, but it is definitely very noticeable in how I actually go about living.

I suppose I’m just grateful that I don’t live in St. Petersburg. Today, they can expect a whopping 5 hours and 53 minutes of sunlight.

California, Here I Come