Thoughts on Jetlag (or, Jetlagged Thoughts)

(Note: The last of my entries from the trip home. This one is something of a running diary of the first hour of the flight.)

The thing about being really jet-lagged is that it's possible to be awake and even alert, it's just that it really sucks and is a chore. You have to focus on staying focused, or else you wind up staring and things, usually people, who then get justifiably creeped out by the dishevelled looking guy in the leather jacket staring at them. And it's no good picking something innocuous, because then you wind up staring slack-jawed at a supporting pillar or something like that. So if you stay still while jet-lagged, you're going to look either like an idiot or a pervert. Or both.

My problem is that I'm too stupid when I'm jet-lagged to read good books, but not stupid enough to read bad ones without realizing how dumb they are. Something about adverbs works on hack writers like solipsistic similes on sophomoric ones. You wind up reading sections like "Bond grunted dubiously. Bond paid negligently," and all the while your critical judgment is screaming at you to drop the book and back away slowly, and the rest of your brain just keeps on trucking, because the braking distance of a brain on a trans-atlantic flight and no sleep for twenty-four hours is considerable.

So I wind up walking around the terminal, because I can't read and there's no one to talk to and I can't really go to sleep unless I use my laptop as a pillow. This being the post-9/11 world, in my paranoid jet-lagged state I worry about being arrested for suspicious loitering and thrown in jail, causing me to miss my flight.

I can hear the announcement now: "Canjet flight 164 is paging Mr. Ian Gray, please board immediately at gate C25, the flight is leaving and your bags are being taken off the plane." (Note: this was perhaps second sight on my part: Canjet lost my suitcase, and is still looking for it a day later. Joy.) Only I will be being interrogated, and unable to heed the call.

What happens to those people? Not the ones being interrogated, the ones who vanish between check-in and boarding. I mean, I understand missing your flight outright-I've done that. What I can't understand is getting yourself to the airport in plenty of time to check in and then somehow contriving to miss your flight. What happens to these people? Are they people stopped from leaving the loves of their lives by frantic last minute dashes by the aforementioned lovers, as we've seen in a million terrible romantic comedies? Do they drink themselves into stupors in the airport bars? Have they been apprehended by the airport cops, and are they even now being interrogated for the crime of walking along the moving sidewalks in a loop to stay awake?

Who knows? I'm sure the answer is disappointingly less dramatic even than the getting-soused explanation, but I can't for the life of me figure out why it seems that roughly one passenger per flight is throwing away their cash and delaying everyone else while they do it. I hope it's the last-minute dashes, though.

I really ought to sleep on the plane from Toronto to Halifax, but I figure that if I get to Halifax at midnight and stagger up the stairs to La Maison Gray at 1:30 or so, I will be able to sleep the sleep of the just without screwing up my sleeping patterns (ha!) too much. I am a genius! I am an idiot. And now it appears that someone checked-in to my flight has gotten drunk at the bar, or arrested by the cops, or perhaps has been won back at the security counter by an impassioned speech by the boy or girl he or she thought she or he had to leave behind forever. Good for them, if so, though why my flight has to be delayed another half hour so the course of their true love can run a little smoother is a question I'd prefer not to ponder in my current cranky state. I expect an invitation to the wedding reception at the very least...

I probably shouldn't laugh, but the guy across the aisle from me has said "I never really thought of that" in exactly the same wide-eyed tone of wonder three times in the past fifteen minutes in his conversation with the guy next to him, and from what I can tell they're not really talking about subjects that will Change The Way You Look At Life. I suppose that everyone has pet phrases that they overuse, but I think we should all try to find pet phrases that do not proclaim "I am an ignoramus" to all the world.

Here's a question for you: why does no airline I've ever flown on serve root beer?

Here's another one: If you were to buy a bottle of vodka the exact size and rough shape of a Kalashnikov assault rifle like the one I saw in the Moscow duty free, would you ever drink it. I mean, it seems like a hard sort of drink to introduce with any sort of panache at all. "Who wants a bloody mary-I've got 'em all mixed up except for the vodka. I know! I'll just add a 'shot' of vodka from my giant assault rifle sized bottle of Kalashnikov vodka!" I, for my part, would not go for drinks at a person's house where the drinks come in fake implements of death.

But if you didn't drink it, what on earth would you do with it? It would make about the most godawful conversation piece I can imagine. "Look here at my giant bottle of assault rifle-shaped vodka! I don't drink it because that would spoil the effect." So again, I have an insoluble problem on my hands: who is paying hundreds of euros for these awful things? And in the name of all that is holy, why are they doing this?