Jet Lag

I recently went on a marathon of business and personal travel. I visited in succession the following cities: New York, Chicago, Wilmington, Bern, Zurich, Prague, Louisville, and Miami. I was on the road for 20 straight days. It seemed like a good idea when I booked the trip.

Now, I saw a bunch of great places and people while I was gone. I ran with the supermodels along Swiss rivers; I drank White Russians overlooking the charming Charles Bridge, on which construction began in 1357; I lounged on the beach in 80 degree weather in late October; I saw my brothers; I attended the wedding of one of my oldest, closest friends; I practiced flirting again, an important step but not necessarily to any satisfying end; I grew a full beard.

All in all exciting and interesting. But I had not planned for the brutalizing, merciless, hideous effects of jet lag.

Let's look at my trip again in terms of time difference from the place where my furniture currently resides: "I visited in succession the following time zones: 3 hours, 2 hours, 3 hours, 9 hours, 9 hours, 9 hours, 2 hours, 3 hours. I changed time zones 7 times in 20 days." Honestly, at some point I was not sure which end was up.

When I got back to home base, my body decided to punish me for two weeks running by operating on an average 3 hour time difference. This means I woke up at 4:30 AM willy-nilly. I was pooped at 5 PM at work. I began to fall asleep on the couch in the middle of "Arrow," I started to cry at Maxwell House commercials, I grew desperate for it to end.

The best description I've read of the torture of jet lag comes from a book by the brilliant William Gibson, which I already featured in this older post. Cayce, the protagonist of Gibson's book, arrives in the U.K. from New York:

"She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage."

PS - It has been a month now and my soul and I are again reunited. Thank goodness. Oh, and you'll want to get united with "Mistress" by Valkyries; now playing on iTunes.