Jet lag is a cruel mistress

It's Saturday morning. I've slept about eleven hours. My body refuses to sleep any longer but my mind is somewhere else.

I got back Thursday and got out of customs around 5:30 pm Boston time. Note the Boston bit: all of us walking through the line at immigration had watches reading 10:30 pm (or 11:30 pm for the folks that got in from Germany on another plane). You see the bright, happy Boston sun out the window as you've seen the sun the whole trip back. It was a gorgeous day in England at 2:30 when we left and a lovely day at 4:45 when we landed. It felt weird to be in the same point of mid-afternoon for several hours, much like a Sunday afternoon in the summer when you're stoned.

I called up metahacker and quem98 for dinner. Meta had agreed to give me a ride home before I left and I wanted the one thing no one had heard of in England: a quesadilla. Someone asked me how the English could not have heard of Mexican food. Think about our fine derogatory term "wetback" and imagine it were the Atlantic instead of the Rio Grande that gave this name. Anyone who survives that swim would be hired as king instead of janitor.

So we got Mexican food and then walked up Mass Ave to Algiers because I wanted a turkish coffee. Around 8:30 the sun was setting. My brain then decided "ah, no more sun so it's... 1:30 am! Be tired now!" All the energy left me. I could think cogently about it but I couldn't do anything to solve it. Quem went home to write (which she will now be doing all week) and Meta and I caught the electric bus to get his car.

I was fading fast. I dragged my bags out of the car, grabbed the car keys from the house to make certain Zoe would turn over, had success and then went to bed. This was about 9:30, maybe 10.

My body woke me up around 6:30 but mostly for a bathroom run. I was still sizably tired but I couldn't get back to sleep. So I logged into my work desktop, got my schedule and sorted my email backlog. I nodded a little until 8, when I got in the shower, dressed and drove to work.

It felt amazing to be driving. I felt like I was at the end of a dramatic movie, having conquered all fears and become ready to move into the future. It even felt like roads looked different, as if I had more vision out of my left eye and had extra perspective. This was more prominent in the evening.

Then I sat down at work and waved in and out of consciousness. I had a very light work shift, thank Darwin. I probably spent more time telling people about England than anything else.

I stopped feeling tired at 3 pm, when I was close to done with the day. I wound up chatting for a few more hours, then grabbing tkitch for dinner. We went to Friday's in Everett, which has been remodeled and is now WICKED FUCKING LOUD on a Friday night. I had to put in ear plugs.

I also noticed around then that I was passing out again. My cheeseburger had felt like it was made of starchy lead, even without the bottom bun, so i knew I was losing connectivity with reality. So we left and I drove Kitch home. Then I started driving home, which was mostly expressways.

I was nodding out on the 128, which was surprisingly loaded with cars for a Friday evening. It was dangerous of me to be driving in this condition and I am lucky I got home without incident. I tried to call a friend to keep me awake but he was in the middle of a late dinner. I thought about pulling over to nap for a while, but I knew I would've slept until a cop knocked on my window.

Straight to bed. Do not pass go. (Speaking of which, I gotta tell y'all about the Monopoly board in England.) I just woke up.

I need to get groceries since I have no milk to put in cereal or coffee. More when I get back.

Unrelated issue: Has anyone been getting this problem? The entry frame on the Update Journal web page keeps changing its shape as I add lines. It gets so wide that it will scroll back and forth horizontally. This makes it impossible to reread what I'm writing. I noticed this in London and assumed it was something about the shitty resolution or older version of Windows and IE in use. Now I'm seeing the problem at home on my company laptop with Firefox 1.5, where I usually write these entries. It's so bad that I'm writing the entry on a text editor and pasting it back in.