#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.]