JetLag Journals

For much of my young adult life, I believed that jetlag was nothing more than dozing off at inconvenient times (in your lunch, say) after an ass-numbing flight over several time zones, just a few winks short of narcolepsy. With this in mind, I thought that I was immune to the effects of jetlag. Uncontrollable drowsiness was hardly my problem: First and foremost upon landing in a foreign country, my energy level would soar to near-epileptic heights and I'd have the sightseeing strength of a dozen determined tourists.

During my third foray to England nearly ten years ago, however, I also realized that my high-speed mental activity resulted in a no-holds-barred inability to follow directions, an unequaled ineptitude at constructing coherent sentences—in English, mind you—as well as a peculiar loss of motivation. I did practically no sightseeing and took dramatically fewer notes than usual (though I attribute this not to languor but to the curious fact that I was having trouble writing my own name). The notes I did manage to jot down were the embodiment of a stoner's thoughts: lazily scrawled, barely intelligible sentence fragments.

Imagine my relief, then, when I came across an article about jetlag years later, listing among the prominent symptoms: fatigue, disorientation, lack of concentration and motivation, and irregular sleep patterns. Ahh...so I did suffer from jetlag! Finally! A medical explanation for what had been my rather mystifying post-flight afflictions, nuisances that were coupled with a giddy sensation that closely approximated the combining of sleep-inducing cold medication and its non-drowsy counterpart (without the bonus of sinus drainage).

Although this newfound knowledge dashed any lingering belief that hurtling across continents in a large metal container suspends time for all those encased, I was comforted to learn that jetlag—not insanity—was that magic ingredient in my travels, the force behind my many scintillating misadventures and lack of appetite (which, frankly, was a boon, considering the exchange rate). Hence the following ramblings, many of which first appeared in My Letter to the World ’zine...

London, England
Paris, France
Taipei, Taiwan