I wrote in a previous post about how nice it is to be as many as 16 hours ahead of your normal timezone. It allows you to delude yourself into feeling that you’re sort of “in the future”, especially if you’re communicating via email or telephone, etc, with that “past” timezone. I can’t really explain very well why I like it. It’s just a fun feeling. I always like that feeling when I come to the “Far East”. It’s an uber-version of that feeling you have if you wake up early in the morning and get to work at 7:00am. You feel you’re getting a little head start. (Never mind that you’re snoring during the 4:00pm board meeting when they’re discussing who to lay off due to the budget cuts. You wake up and wonder why everyone is staring at you…..)
I should also mention that another thing that is nice is the jet lag. Nice? People often equate jet lag with tiredness, but this is really just a confusion of two things, imho. Jet lag is really -in my mind- the result of being able to get your body clock out of sync with the day-night cycle by travelling rather rapidly across the planet. There’s no major reason why this is a bad thing in and of itself. It’s just that we tend to typically within a short time of arriving have to deal with the business of working within the local business hours, perhaps listen to the talks at the conference you came to attend, talk to the people you are visiting, etc. Or, you’ve simply come to a place that has absolutely nothing to do once the sun has set, and so there’s no benefit to being awake at night, so you’ve got to quickly get in sync with the day.
If you’ve no pressure to conform to these things -no immediate meetings to attend, and plenty to do at night- then it’s not an issue. Just ride it out, and your body will adapt by locking back on to the light in its own sweet time. In the meantime, you get to stay up late into the sweet slow hours of the early morning. This is good for thinking uninterruptedly, exploring lively nighttime neighbourhoods and markets, watching movies, and generally pleasantly twiddling ones thumbs and toes.
There are some periods, nevertheless, when you’re trying to sleep because you think you ought to, and then you can’t. Or the day comes, it gets louder and then that when you want to sleep but then its loud. I did not have that latter problem. There were nice thick curtains on my various hotels’ windows, and in case I needed them (I did not) I had the earplugs I always use for flying (always have a million pairs as although I bring my own, the airline always gives me extra sets, bless ‘em).
Overall, I find that jet lag in the Far East can be deliciously bizarre and rather fun. For this trip I was exactly like Bill Murray in the film Lost in Translation for the first few days. It was great. Well, exactly like Bill Murray, except for the fact that:
(1) I’m not funny,
(2) There were no billboards with my face on them around the city, selling Santori (although I did see Santori for sale rather a lot, which amused me no end.)
(3) It was Taiwan and not Japan.
(4) I actually enjoy staying up in a hotel room into the wee hours, and going out exploring a strange city (see later descriptions of explorations).
(5) There was no Scarlett Johansson in my room.
Other than that it was exactly the same.
Huh! Poor guy, you’re thinking. No Scarlett Johansson. Oh, feel no pity for me, dear reader. I had someone way preferable in my room….. Mary McDonnell. (As tasty as she might seem, I’d (probably) boot Scarlett out of my room in favour of Mary McDonnell almost any day….) You’ve never heard of her, in all probability, which is just sad. Sad and wrong. She’s one of many hugely talented actresses above a certain age that become invisible because they’re not eligible to play the eye-candy roles, or the amusing caregiver role, etc. But keep an eye out for her. She is an unacknowledged master at communicating a huge amount of complex information and emotion with her eyes in combination with at least 17 very different types of smile (and smile-related mouth expressions). With her abilities she should be as famous and in demand as several less well talented male actors of the same age….. but there you go. Instead, she’s most well known as the president’s wife in Independence Day, or the mother in Donnie Darko.
Ok, so she was not really in the room with me. Instead, I had some of her wonderful work on DVD in the form of (her role as president in) the whole of season one of the newly re-imagined drama Battlestar Galactica. A treat to myself last semester was to buy that and watch it. Never found the time, and so remembered to order it from Amazon in time for it to show up on the doorstep and get stuffed into my suitcase for watching on walkabout. Perfect occasional viewing in the wee hours of the morning (and later during the trip, during the evening after dinner). I could write a whole post about that show. In short: Don’t be fooled by the “space opera” setting. It is mostly irrelevant. This is some of the best combined writing, directing and acting I’ve ever seen on television in this genre and maybe in any genre. It’s truly -to use a tired term- character-driven, and there’s no dwelling on silly techno-babble and Star Trek type of drivel. It is constantly inventive, challenging, and unpredictable. Go get it (Watch the pilot/miniseries first, though. 2 hours.). (Now I need to find another month away to watch Season 2.)
Ok, there is a major problem to come. I’m now 16 hours back, having spent a month adapting to the other timezone at my leisure. I have only two days* to prepare all my classes and at the same time get my body clock in shape to start a gruelling semester of classes, office hours and meetings, starting 9:00am on Monday! My body will be thinking that it is 1:00am on Tuesday. Confused? I will be.
-cvj
(*And I can’t even start yet. Everything in the house is covered in a thick layer of dust….Must clean….can’t stop myself….)
January 7th, 2006 at 11:29 am
I’m glad you can be philosophical about Jet Lag. When the clocks change just 1 hour for daylight savings time TWICE a year, I am a mess for about 2 weeks each time. I guess my biological clock is a little more sensitive. (DRAG)
But it is good to have you back.
Elliot
January 7th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
Ah, Clifford… Forbidden Planet is the towering opus against which all space operas are judged. Droll Dark Star played for laughs became pulse-pounding Alien played for terror. Babylon 5 is extraordinary sf.
Battlestar Galactica is sci-fi. It provides pause between commercials. Taking a Wagon Train script, substituting spaceships, and repackaging character conflict with cgi wrapping sums to tinsel throughout.
Every major character in Babylon 5 got crunched – wounded near death, killed outright, tortured, thermally burned, mind-burned, mutilated, condemned to an inescapable cyclic future, emotionally crushed, outcast… No cute child made it out alive. Good guys got hit by enemy fire and didn’t shrug it off. Loves were lost, lives were lost, victories were hollow. Everybody got screwed. Nobody made it out smiling. Delenn, at the very end, was denied. Earth was washed by fire and damned in a perpetual Christianoid Dark Ages.
Has anybody aboard Battlestar Galactica suffered a boo-boo? One doesn’t deny you enjoy the program. But what is need compared to the path?
“A stroke of the brush does not guarantee art from the bristles,” Kosh
January 7th, 2006 at 12:26 pm
Uncle Al: – I also loved Babylon 5. (Pre about halfway through Season 5, which was afterwards rather poor). But it is gone now. Time to move on. We’re grown-ups, right? – It’s ok to like more than one show.
Cheers!
-cvj
January 7th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
Also, you mention: -
Well, that may be.. and it was very well written. But it’s also nice to write about the simpler emotional conflicts that happen day to day that you, me and the girl next door might be able to actually relate to. …you don’t need huge dramatic stuff happening all the time to make good writing. “Simpler” stuff like betrayal, love, hate, self-doubt, jealously, loyalty, duty, recklessness, worrying about whether you hurt someone’s feelings, loss of one’s home…. these get to be portrayed too. If done well, and acted well, you can have a good drama without having to have any “mind-burning”, whatever the Dickens that is…. or being “condenmed to an inevitable cyclic future”…..
The best SF can be about the basic everyday human emotions. The space-wrapping is irrelevant.
cheers,
-cvj
January 7th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
Here are the two things I remember (or possibly mis-remember) from the original Battlestar Galactica series:
1. They were approaching a planet and one of the crew announced “Two microns and closing.”
2. There was a fire on the ship. They way they knew it is that the smoke was coming in from under the door of the airlock.
January 7th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
Ah! The charming original clunky series. Wonderfully bad stuff! (To be fair, they did use the micron as some sort of rather macroscopic distance measurement fairly consistently….. but the airlock observation is excellent.)
-cvj
January 7th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
This summer I got my best look at the night sky in years, courtesy of jetlag. We were in a farmhouse in northern Wales, and I woke up in the middle of the night my first night there and went outside to see what there was to see. The place is way out in the middle of nowhere (nearest house over a mile away, and currently uninhabited), so no lights for miles, and miraculously, given the climate, the sky was perfectly clear. It was one of a handful of times in my life when I’ve been able to see how the Milky Way got its name: it was like a shimmery cloud spread across the sky. It was early August, so there were shooting stars. Just beautiful.
Naturally I woke up my husband so he wouldn’t miss it.
These days I’m up a couple of times a night with my 3-week-old daughter, and will be for probably at least another couple of months. Luckily she’s pretty cute, even at 3 AM. But I’m not doing any star-gazing.
January 7th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
janet… yes, the Milky Way is rather lovely.
Also: – CONGRATULATIONS!!!! and I wish you and your little girl the best…..
-cvj
January 7th, 2006 at 6:44 pm
I always plan my vacations so that I don’t have to adjust my biorithm too fast. I’m used to working out a lot, but on vacation I’ll typically not train much. That’s no problem if it is for one or two weeks. After return from a diferent time zone, I keep living according to the clock at my holiday destination and resume training immediately.
Then, after about a week, I will return to my normal biorithm. Otherwise I would have to postpone excercising for another week, because my body doesn’t react well to excercise when not sleeping well and not eating on time. But after that week I would have to resume work and then, after three weeks of not working out, it could be difficult to resume the usual training schedules. Then, because works comes first, you can’t always train when you feel fittest. So, effectively you could lose a month of training and that would have consequences for fitness.
January 7th, 2006 at 7:48 pm
Hey Clifford, there are all these urban legends about Melatonin helping regulate the biological clock. Though I am not sure how well this works and have no personal experience, some people speak highly of it.
January 7th, 2006 at 8:47 pm
A travel agent I know, a guy who used to travel a lot between USA and S.Asia, highly recommends bananas. Apparently the sodium and/or (?) potassium helps regulate one’s biological clock.
My tried and true method of coping with long airborne stretches is to force myself to stash away a few books I’ve always wanted to read until the flight. It takes me a lot of self-control not to start reading it in the airport (or even before that
) When I came to the USA (from a S.Asian country) to begin grad school, I brought along 5 Agatha Christie mysteries. These books made the almost 50 hr journey go by pretty quickly.
January 7th, 2006 at 9:29 pm
Count Iblis:- Gosh, are you entering body building competitions?! I’m guessing that is why it would matter that much if your training schedule got disrupted…. no?
Moshe:- I’ve heard that too. Maybe I’ll try it one day, but right now I’ll stick to the old methods, so that I don’t become reliant on having melatonin to recover. Fortunately, what usually happens is that after about two days I sort of “snap” back to the regular clock rather suddenly, and resume my regular cycle of things. (hmmm actually, that’s after an eight hour lag…I’ve forgotten what happens for the really big ones…)
I have a bad habit of not getting as much sleep as I should in general anyway (as anyone who has given a seminar here at USC might have noticed – During the seminar, I can sometimes be seen to nod in agreement with what they are saying just a little too often
), so I’m not really sure what my “regular cycle” is any more….
citrine:- This is somethign I’ve heard too. I try to pick some up as part of my regular fruit intake as a matter of course. Are we talking about a normal amount here, or lots of bananas? Perhaps I could use this as an excuse to make lots of bananas flambe! Yummmm.
I never have a shortage of things to do on long flights. I love long flights, actually, by which I mean eight hours or more. I tend to bring books, calculations I’m doing, blank paper for scribbling random ideas I have, sketchpad and set of drawing pencils for a bit of drawing, powerbook and spare charged battery if I have any work of that sort to do (and for diary writing and blogging these days…) and earplugs and eyemask (in case I’m not in business class, although for flights over 6 or 7 hours I always upgrade -at my own (airmiles) expense, not on anyone’s grant money- and so those you get for free). I seldom use my personal music (i.e., ipod) on flighs any more because you don’t realise how loudly you turn those things up over the engine noise..damages your ears. If I do, it is through the earplugs! Those god isolation headphones which woudl fix the problem are just too bulky for me to bring along (’cause I’ve got all that other junk in my bag….!)
-cvj
January 7th, 2006 at 11:58 pm
Useful for those afraid of flying, I imagine?
OMG, LOL! The funniest travel-story typo ever!
But yes, uh hmm (stops chuckling), I agree. Earbuds can be damaging because they have to be cranked so high due to outside noise; headphones, less so.
January 8th, 2006 at 12:08 am
Ha Ha Ha! that’s good. Of course, god is supposed to be everywhere and so the “god” isolation headphones won’t work. I meant “good” isolation, I think….
-cvj
January 8th, 2006 at 2:00 am
I swear by melatonin tablets to prevent jet lag on long flights. Adusting for time differences (say, England, from Los Angles, +8 hours), based on what time you go to bed (for me, midnight) add the time difference and take the pill at that time for 3 days before flying. So I take 1/2 tablet at 8 am before I travel. You do the reverse when you arrive, subtract the 8 hours and take the pills at 4:00 pm London time for 3 days. It works perfectly for me. Highly recommended.
January 8th, 2006 at 2:10 am
Thanks Henry Holland. I’m confused already though. I’ll stick to bananas flambe, coffee, and late night movies, I think….
But your advice is no doubt useful to many (or me in the future if I change my mind and come back to read this on day…)
Cheers,
-cvj
January 8th, 2006 at 6:34 am
and earplugs and eyemask (in case I’m not in business class, although for flights over 6 or 7 hours I always upgrade -at my own (airmiles) expense, not on anyone’s grant money- and so those you get for free).
Virgin gives them out free to economy passengers. And you get your own television too, with lots of movie choices. I watched “Wallace and Gromit: the curse of the were-rabbit” on the way back from the US – yay! (Helped to block out the lewd comments on the 70-something archaeologist sat next to me ;( )
Flying again tomorrow – maybe I’ll take some bananas along!
January 8th, 2006 at 7:28 am
Clifford. I have a pair of these http://www.shurestore.com/earphones/eseries_e3c.html. They take up no room at all, are very good at sound isolation, and provide a great sound. They are wonderful for flights and, in fact, one of the types of plug they come with is just like a regular earplug.
January 8th, 2006 at 9:00 am
erc:- I see. I don’t fly with Virgin. But don’t all the major airlines do the individual TV thing now, at least on long flights? (Virgin was one of the first, but a long time ago…) Yeah, watch out for those lewd archeologists…..
Mark:- Thanks! Those look pretty good! Now if only I could afford them….Will have to save my pennies. (annoyingly, I’ve just come back from the land of ridiculously cheap technology…sigh.)
-cvj
January 8th, 2006 at 9:25 am
I don’t really have the figure for that
I do like to stay fit, but actually for me it’s a bit more serious than that. I suffer from a rare metabolic problem. It was not diagnosed until I was 20 years old. It affects my energy levels. I have to eat regularly and try to stay fit. Although my parents always knew that something wasn’t quite right about me, we never saw it as a medical problem at before it was diagnaosed.
Things gradually deteriorated when I moved from home to study physics. Living on your own studying hard is not really the same as living at home and receiving your meals on time
It actually took some years for me to find a way in which I could feel ok and still work hard. When I was at high school living with my parents, I really didn’t have to work hard at all to get high grades. So, I never got the feedback that things actually weren’t going as well as they should go.
Then later when I started my Ph.D. I had to learn to survive going to conferences where the food isn’t always ok.
When I’m very fit then I can tolerate more then when I’m not so super fit. So, then I won’t become unwell too fast and I have time to take measures to improve the situation or simply leave.
January 8th, 2006 at 10:07 am
Clifford, take a look at these
http://reviews.cnet.com/Sony_MDR_EX71SL_WK_black/4505-6468_7-30520512.html?tag=topprods
I own a pair which allow me to listen to music for long periods (most of the day, in fact) without hurting my ears. They also have reasonable noise cancellation and very good sound. Price is good, and if someone in Sony reads that, I want my commission…
As for bananas, I often bring those and other fruit to long flights, alas I am still miserable for about a week later. I blame the oxygen deprivation, in fact I am equally miserable if I fly on north-south routes… This is why I contemplated melatonin, but I share your reluctance to medicate myself unnecessarily.
January 8th, 2006 at 11:01 am
Hmmm, those look good too. Thanks Moshe.
Interestingly, for the second morning running I’ve been up at more or less exactly the right time (6:00am) each morning, feeling fresh (and craving a traditional Taiwanese/Chinese breakfast).
I think this is largely because I did the most important thing of all that you can do on a long (enough) flight: I had some sleep at about the appropriate time of the timezone I was heading to. So while flying over the Pacific from Nagoya to San Francisco, I slept about four hours before we landed at 7:45am, or so…. I think this begins the resetting procedure early, which explains why I don’t feel so bad even though it is supposed to be midnight Sunday right now (i.e. Sunday 8:00am LA time).
I do still get dozy in the late afternoon/ early evening though….. I resist the temptation to go to sleep though, and hold off on that until night…. I hope that goes away soon.
-cvj
January 8th, 2006 at 2:41 pm
Melatonin works for me as well. I take it the first few days on an overseas trip and find that I can sleep through the night and not through meetings during the day.
I’ve got India coming up in March (which is not one, but two overnight flights! And I’m going to invest in a pair of what we on CV now call god isolation headphones. Anyone got a preference for brands?
January 8th, 2006 at 5:17 pm
JoAnne, you should have booked one of Air Canada’s direct flights from Toronto to New Delhi. I think it takes just 14 hours. The route is over northern Greenland, to Western Siberia and then over Central Asia to Delhi.
January 8th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
I now see that Air Canada has stopped flying non-stop to Delhi since 30 october 2005. They now have a flight from Toronto to Delhi with a stop in Zurich.