#oneaday Day 89: Tick

Time zones are a big pain in the arse. Particularly when you find yourself inadvertently operating on one that you don’t live in. I’ve had a pretty ballsed-up body clock for quite a while now, but it sort of doesn’t matter.

It started towards the end of my time in Southampton last year, when I made a new friend online who happened to live in the mountains in the States. We frequently talked until stupid o’clock in the morning which meant that I’d go to bed as the sun was rising and often not wake up until the afternoon of the next day. Like, late afternoon. The kind of late afternoon that made staggering into the local shop and having the man with the smelly armpits behind the counter asking “how my day had been” to be a little embarrassing. Of course, there were extenuating circumstances at the time that meant I wasn’t particularly concerned with social niceties and a sense of “normality” because frankly, at the time, my life was anything but “normal”.

But anyway.

(The fact I was also doing some writing work based on Eastern time shifts probably didn’t help matters. The closest approximation to a “working day” that I had started at about 7pm and ran until 11 at night. But I digress.)

A trip to the States over the holiday period last year offered the opportunity to live like a normal human being for a while. There was also the fact that at roughly 7am (or sometimes before) I’d be woken up by either a large dog wanting a cuddle or children watching television. I don’t begrudge them those things, particularly as I was sleeping in their lounge, but it did mean that I could wake up at a “normal” time.

Currently, it’s not quite as bad as it has been. I still stay awake quite late—despite trying to get to sleep early in many cases—and find myself able to get up anywhere between 10AM and 12PM GMT. Oddly enough, this is only the case when I’m at “home”. When I’m staying with someone else, whether it’s sleeping on a floor, couch or hotel room bed, it’s absolutely no problem to wake up at a normal time—and go to sleep at a normal time, for that matter. It’s curious.

Still, I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I’m essentially operating on Pacific time for much of my waking existence. This isn’t so bad, of course, as the work I’m currently doing is based around Pacific time and I have a lot of friends in the States with whom I can chat via Twitter and various IM systems. (There’s also the fact that some of those people clearly never sleep at all, but that’s an entirely different issue altogether.)

So if you need me, don’t ever worry about it being “a bad time” because chances are, I’ll be awake somewhere, somehow, sometime.

#oneaday, Day 326: Time Zone Trauma

It’s rather late, I know. Although it’s not late where I am, because as I may have intimated rather subtly above and in a post a few days ago, I’m in the States. Yayness, as Recette might say. In local time back home, it’s currently 4:30am, while here it’s 8:30pm. I have been up for over 24 hours. Hardcore.

Time zones are a bugger at the best of times, let alone when your own body clock is buggered beyond all recognition. There are a curious mix of influences at work here, as a combination of insomnia, stress, depression, lack of desire to go to sleep any earlier and friends in time zones other than my own all conspire to bugger up my sleeping patterns. In fact, I’m actually anticipating that I’ll sleep better and at more “normal” times here than back home.

Before I left Southampton, I got chatting to a very lovely person online who happened to live in mountain country in the US. We were frequently up until 4 or 5am GMT talking about things, and that made getting up the following morning rather more difficult. However, being jobless and, at the time, shortly to be homeless, there didn’t feel like much of note worth getting up for in the mornings. So, well, I didn’t. Actually, I haven’t heard from her for a while, so after writing this post I will email her, you see if I don’t.

This had both benefits and drawbacks. Benefits included the ability to play Alien Swarm online with people I didn’t normally have the chance to play online with. Which was nice. Drawbacks included going to the local shop in the afternoon, the man with the smelly armpits behind the counter asking “how my day had been” and me being able to answer quite honestly that it had been just fine, conveniently omitting the fact that I’d actually spent most of it asleep.

A mixed blessing, I’m sure you’ll agree. But at least the shop was open until 10pm in the evening, so even though my day was 6 hours out of sync with everyone else, I could still, you know, buy bleach. Exciting is the life of the unemployed.

I’m actually quite looking forward to (hopefully) getting back into some semblance of normality if (when) I get a job. That or I should just move to the States, which I know there are a number of you currently reading this would be a plan you could firmly get behind. Well, I’ve got nearly a month to enjoy being on Pacific Time, so we’ll call it a test run or something.

So then, who wants to sponsor my visa application?

[If the comic looks a bit different, it’s because I forgot to bring my template with me. Whoops. Ah well. I got it near enough.]