Jet Lag

Hi. Just checking in. What day is it? Wednesday? In France I fell asleep, exhausted, every day at seven pm. Then I would wake up at five. Oddly, now that I’m back in the states I fall asleep at seven and wake up at five, even though there should be a seven hour time difference.

Once nice thing about waking up at five is you get a few hours to write blog drafts about your trip to France. Dear Readers will be hearing about France for the week to come. Of course, this leaves no time to write a proper blog post.

The bad thing about jet lag is in daytime you operate under REM cycle power. Everything feels like a dream, not a good dream but the kind in which you say, “I had a dream they tore down a building on campus,” and then the next day you drive past the rubble on the way to the parking lot.

Now, in France I had my dreams during REM cycles. For a series of days the dreams were all about pop music. I was training a boy who was prepping for American Idol. Steven Page had a reality show. Leonard Cohen visited me in the hospital. I eventually realized that was because I had been a week without any American music. All I had was “La Vie En Rose” played on the accordian, sax, and violin in the train, metro, and underpass.

“What about the radio?” you ask. It was tuned to a classical music station. And not just any station: one that hourly promoted itself with an sound bite of a well-known classical riff, then a breathy radio voice gushing “ClassIQUE!” in that over-the-top religious ecstacy manner only a trained radio personality can deliver.

So, now that it’s three in the afternoon in my head I have a full day of work ahead in reality.