Tuesday, February 05, 2008 Bautista: Lingering jetlag By Sam Bautista Tea Leaf Reader
THERE really is no denying it I've got jetlag.
Not the kind you get from traveling inside a jet airplane going against the rotation of the earth. Nah, never been inside one of those things, the closest thing I rode to a jetliner are the Cebu Pacific jets which shuttled me from Manila to Cebu and vice versa -- parang jeep ba -- for a company sponsored event.
But riding one those won't give you jetlag. For one it was only an hour's worth of flight and two it was going north to south and then later south to north, not west to east over vast distances, which is what modern medicine says cause jetlag.
The phenomenon was unheard of before the advent of the jetliner. In olden times, say a millennia or two before the advent of trans-continental flights, the worse a traveler got was seasick, well not really the worse, the worse would have to be shipwrecked and snacked upon by sharks.
But trans-continental flights inside a jet powered aircraft is something else altogether. Especially when you have to go against the spin of the earth. Medicine says this experience happens because the diurnal (meaning 24) clock of humans is not built to cope with the sudden changes in time zones.
Say you're in the West Coast of the United States and have to travel to the other side of the country. If you do that you would probably get jetlag because you're traveling against the rotation of the earth through several time zones. So what happens is that what your body expects to be midnight in California would still be your body's interpretation of when you're already in New York. So even if it's in the middle of the day you feel so sleepy (that is assuming you're asleep at that time back in the Pacific side of the continent).
And in the middle of the night in New York would be the time your most active and awake and usually hungry.
It takes some time before the internal biological clock adjusts to the new time settings. Until that slowly happen it feels like you're in another surreal world all the time, where everything is out of sync.
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That's what's happening to me right now.
Ever since rejoining Sun*Star last January 2, the world seems utterly odd and totally out of measure. Take the time a radio announcer broadcast to the entire Baguio city how I practically changed the Gregorian calendar by adding another day to January. I got a lot of heckles that day, from within and without the office.
However I justify the fact, it was printed. Mia culpa, mia culpa (but the guy in charge of proofing the issue got the wrong side of my tongue for it as well).
That's not the extent of my disorientation. No matter how long I stare at the large numbered calendar in front of me now (I got it as a present from the marketing staff a day after I made the boo-boo, which I might add I was already requesting as soon as I stepped into the office more than a month ago) I still have to double check with the calendar of the computer I use to write and layout. Three times, every time I plop down to work.
It still feels like yesterday to me.
Imagine living in three days worth of disorientation, a temporal black hole if you will -- yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Yesterday because most of the news writing happening around here is about events which happened yesterday (last Sunday). Today because I edit what is written (last Monday). And, tomorrow because the news will only see light tomorrow. The fact that I stay up almost up to midnight every night doesn't help one bit.
For someone who came from the ranks of the weeklies, where the only thing to remember is that the week starts on Sunday, remembering today's date is a challenge enough to boggle the mind.
I don't believe this jetlag will ever disappear. There just isn't enough will power left in me to keep track of the days of the week, not when a lot of tasks I'm supposed to do were due last Monday, or the week before for that matter. So as the sage once told me: Time is the true healer; if the hurt doesn't heal in time, you learn to live with the pain.
Guess that's what will I will have to do: learn to live with the lingering jetlag.
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Happy Valentine's Day to Dawn's Butterfly. Have you found your Prince Charming, who still might end up the Frog, yet? Our mutual birthday is fast approaching, you know my tastes. It will be my 27th birthday (for the 13th time) and it will your what? 32nd?
