I'm being vulnerable here

With the Super Bowl only hours away, a young man's mind turns to something but I don't know what because I'm not a young man. I get all misty eyed when I think about the end of the football season and when I get all weepy, i tend to spill my innermost secrets.

I don't mind telling you this because I feel that we have really gotten close so I'll just lay it out on the table. I'm over 40, considered somewhat intelligent by a few people and I haven't the slightest idea how time zones work. No hold on -- I know what the obvious responses are:

1. you don't know how anything works -- you call in a handy man if your electric jello doesn't taste right. Why focus on time zones?

the answer to that is what would be the next response

2. time zones don't "work" -- they just ARE.

EXACTLY -- it is one thing to hide behind ignorance and say I don't understand how shampoo makes my hair so silky smooth and yet also shiny and clean but that's about a process. Time zones exist because the sun rises and sets in a particular order (alphabetical, maybe...I'm not sure). But I still just don't get it.

I guess this comes up because, naturally, of football.

Today's game (brought to you by the letter $) begins here on the East Coast at somewhere around 6PM. This means that when a man in tight pants down in Texas kicks a little ball towards other men in tight pants and then tries to knock down the man who has the temerity to catch it and try to and bring the ball back to him, someone one time zone over will look at his clock and it will read somewhere around 5PM. Farther west, the time at that moment will be 4PM and in California, the clock will display "3PM, Dude."

So far, so good.

But when I finally let out that last exhale as the clock winds down on one teams attempt at a comeback from a 2 point deficit, the clock by me will read about 11PM and I'll know it is time to go to sleep. In the west, the clock will read 8PM. Will they still have a regular prime time schedule? OK, let's say that they will and the game just happened to start in the early afternoon. Does a regular 1PM football game start at 10AM there?

How about sitcoms? Yes, how about them? I'm glad you asked. A sitcom can be aired on tape at any hour, so it could be watched at 8PM in New York and 8PM in LA. The only difference is that by the time it is played in LA, the New Yorker has had 2.5 hours to feel angry for having watched the show because it was stupid. This would lead me to believe that the ratings in LA would be lower because all the New Yorkers would call their California friends and say "don't waste your time on that crap. I saw it and it made my ears cry." The fact that this isn't the case simply means that New Yorkers are all spiteful bastards who want everyone else to suffer also.

But in the other two time zones, is all of life shifted? Is prime time from 7-10? Or even 6-9? Do they wake up to the 6AM news at 3AM? Maybe that's why we look at the rest of the country as being a bunch of lessers. You all go to sleep at 9:30 and wake at 3AM and that's just weird.

But like I said, I don't really understand time zones.