Journal

Jet-lag reset

4 Comments

Right now it’s 5:15am back in Joburg, which is where my biological clock thinks I live.

Earlier this evening (here in Utah) I spent an hour or so walking around outdoors, with the sun still visible in the sky, in order to convince my internal alarms that bedtime was still a few hours off, rather than several hours ago.

Come midnight I’ll be doped up on Excedrin PM (diphenhydramine citrate — an antihistamine whose effects on me taper off sharply after 10 hours)… my goal is to punch the biological clock’s reset button smack-dabbity hard, skipping any real jet-lag entirely. I expect to sleep until 10am tomorrow, even if I have to retreat into a darkened basement room for the last four hours of my nap, thus getting a good night’s sleep, AND making up for the sleep lost both in transit and in the time change.

They say something about “the best laid plans of mice and men,” but I forget exactly what it is. No worries. This plan involves lots of “laid” (don’t go there) and exactly no mice, so nothing can possibly go wrong.

–Howard “famous last words” Tayler

4 thoughts on “Jet-lag reset”

  1. “… gang aft agley”. “Go often awry” in other words. Robert Burns, if I remember correctly.

    Good luck on the time lag reset. Your technique sounds reasonable.

    ===|==============/ Level Head

  2. Robert Burns

    But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
    In proving foresight may be vain;
    The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
    Gang aft agley,
    An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
    For promis’d joy!

    If you want to see the full thing in context, here’s a link to Burns’s poem, To a Mouse:
    http://www.emule.com/poetry/?page=poem&poem=394

    It takes a bit of puzzling at first if you’re not familiar with the dialect, but it really is a neat poem.

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