Skip to main content

Jet lag

Imagine that moment of confusion when you wake up from a deep sleep and, for a few seconds, you can't remember where you are or why you're there.

Imagine that you had a little bit too much to drink last night. Not enough to be sick, but enough to feel like you're sweating a little bit too much and people are talking just a little too loud. Except... you're pretty sure that you didn't drink last night... whenever night last night was.

Imagine that your body may or may not be fighting off a cold. You're simultaneously too warm and too cold. A painkiller seems excessive, but your bones ache and you wonder whether you've slept too much or not enough.

Imagine watching the sunrise and being disturbed at a deep level because the sun shouldn't be coming up at this hour. What world have I fallen into where the sun rises at the ungodly hour of... 6am. Oh. I guess that's normal. Here.

Imagine that your alarm goes off at 8 O'clock, and you have no idea whether it's 8am or 8pm, and furthermore, you aren't quite sure why you set the alarm in the first place.

Imagine taking a little too much or too little of your daily medications because you take a dose every night, but your last dose was before bed 30+ hours ago.

That's jet lag. That's my next week. 1 day of jet lag per hour of time difference. There's no escaping it.

I'll try all of the tricks that you're supposed to try, but my circadian rhythm laughs at all of them. 1 hour of adjustment per day -- at most -- is all that I get.

We can fly our bodies across the ocean at hundreds of miles per hour. Our souls, though, travel more slowly. Mine will be here in a few days. I suspect that I'll receive a delivery notice in my mailbox. I have no doubt that import taxes will be due.

Next week, I will have a lot of things to say. Today, I just want to sleep.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Chromecast conceptual model

Google makes a device called Chromecast . It's a relatively inexpensive way to turn any TV into a "Smart" TV capable of playing movies or music. It's a clever bit of engineering, but I've run into a few people who have trouble understanding how they work. The key thing to understand is that the Chromecast is the device that's actually receiving and playing the movie (or whatever), and your phone is just the remote. Here's how the process works at a high level: You start watching a video on Youtube 30 seconds in, you decide that you'd like to watch the rest on your TV, so you press the "Cast" button. Your phone stops playing and tells the Chromecast "Get this video directly from Youtube and start playing at the 0:30 mark"  When your phone initially asks the Chromecast to start playing, it also specifies a "default thing" to do when the Chromecast is finished. If the Chromecast is playing a Youtube video, it might...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Virus By the Numbers

I'm writing this because there's some really insane stuff that's being said by people who should really know better, and I'm sick of discussing it one post or email at a time. So, this is my One Big Post that I'll point people toward rather than bringing it up again and again. In case you haven't noticed, we're in the middle of a pandemic. Just so that we're all using the same terminology:  The virus is Severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2 . It's usually abbreviated SARS-CoV-2. It's a brand new kind of Coronavirus, so for a while, before it had this awkward name, people were calling it "novel coronavirus". (For the non-English speakers and D students, "novel" is another word for "new".) The disease that the virus causes is called Coronavirus Disease 2019 , and it's usually abbreviated COVID-19. It's called that because it was discovered in 2019. This came out of nowhere in China in late ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fixing Linux Audio

This is somewhat technical, and it's aimed at people who use Linux and are comfortable editing files from the command line. I was looking for a quick fix, but discovered that most of the documentation out there is wrong. So, I had to research what it all meant, figure out what the correct settings were, and write it all down. For the Impatient If you use Linux, and you're just looking for a quick way to make your sound better, add these lines to /etc/pulse/daemon.conf or $HOME/.config/pulse/daemon.conf   default-sample-format = s32ne default-sample-rate = 192000 high-priority = yes default-fragments = 8 resample-method = speex-float-10 I've tested this on Fedora and Ubuntu with no problems. Also, if you're using an external DAC (if you're not sure, then you're not using one), be sure that it has sufficient power (either plugged directly into the computer or into a powered USB hub. DO NOT plug it into an unpowered hub or dongle. A...
Post a Comment
Read more