exhaustedOnly, see...I get the jet lag. I get the jet lag badly. I always have. I wrote an entire romantic comedy about jet lag (Chasing St. Margaret, not coming any time soon to a bookstore near you). I am not a girl who switches time zones quickly or easily. Normally, I deal with this by giving myself time before the convention to adjust. Sadly, this time, that wasn't an option, as I was a Special Guest at Emerald City Comic Con the weekend before. My schedule looked like this:
Monday morning, fly from Seattle back to San Francisco.
Tuesday morning, get my hair done.
Wednesday morning, fly to England.
Thursday morning, land in England.
Friday morning, the con begins.
...not ideal. And maybe it would have been okay if I had been able to sleep on the plane (I usually can), but this time the guy next to me wouldn't stop snoring, and I had a cough from the cleaning products at the airport, and it was no good. I was awake all the way to London, reading and fussing and trying not to be the worst person anyone had ever shared a plane with.
My handler picked me up at the airport and delivered me to the hotel, where I proceeded not to sleep. And not to sleep. And finally to sleep for twelve hours, which resulted in my sleeping through a panel. When I finally woke up, I went looking for her to apologize, and had literally upward of thirty people laugh and tell me they'd missed me.
Things not to do to people with anxiety: remind them thirty times that they are a failure.
I had a full-blown panic attack, complete with inability to breathe, and stopped sleeping again, since sleeping now equated directly to fucking up. HOORAY. I didn't sleep until I got to Teddy and Tom's after the con, where I crashed for thirteen hours, was up for three, and then napped. I never did get quite onto UK time. I've been home for over a week, and I'm barely returning to normal.
Jet lag sucks.
April 23 2015, 13:03:01 UTC 2 years ago
Coping strategy ...?
Flying UK-to-west-coast is easy; just make sure you stay awake until 10pm the day you arrive, then crash, and you'll wake up on local time.
But flying west-coast-to-UK is harsh. So harsh that my recovery schedule looks like:
Day 1: arrive in destination time zone. Get home, nap for 3 hours, wake up for rest of day. Cognitive state: braiiiiinnnnsss ....
Day 2: Run the washing machine, eat, watch mindless cartoons on TV or read something light. Do not under any circumstances attempt to deal with the backlog of business mail or other correspondence unless it's a screaming emergency (the car's been towed or they're coming to arrest me or something). Cognitive state: moron, tending towards idiot.
Day 3: Perform triage on the backlog of correspondence, splitting into separate piles. File the bank statements and utility bills, set aside anything that requires focus until another day. Maybe go food shopping. Graduate back to reading normal fiction. Filled with a restless energy, go swimming or something to burn it off. Do not under any circumstances surrender to the impulse to try and work productively. Cognitive state: IQ takes a 20 point penalty hit.
Day 4: Beginning to resume normal functioning but may still need afternoon naps at random intervals.
(Do not ask me about the time I flew home from Boston on a Thursday -- thank you, Air France, for rescheduling my earlier-in-the-week flight -- and had to do a GoH slot 500 miles away 36 hours later. I was a zombie.)
TL:DR; west-to-east jetlag really sucks, and west coast to UK is among the worst. Oh, and doing convention GoH slots on consecutive weekends in different countries (or states) is something I now have an official personal ban on, after making the same horrible mistake twice in 2014 (never gonna do that thing again). You are not alone.
July 21 2015, 18:59:20 UTC 1 year ago