Halfway Around the World; Dragging the Soul Behind

09:14h

I'm still stuck in LA but feel as if I'm already halfway around the world. Went out for a jog, just around the block, smelling forgotten, friendly smells, but somehow got stuck in a run down neighborhood and had to jump two fences just to get back to my hotel, which was within line-of-sight the whole time. As everyone knows, this place is not set up for pedestrians. All the trees here third-world-nation different and people drive gleamingly new cars but live in shabby apartments… I love California but even after living here for five years it feels more like a tourist destination than Home.

I'm on the same flight to Auckland tonight so I still have 8.5 hours to kill. Time for a nap.

12:13h

I'm listening to an audio book on my iPod: William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition." The main character is in London with major jet lag. I'm not officially too jet lagged yet but am tired from being airport-bound until 3 AM this morning. Gibson's protagonist describes jet lag as your soul being reeled in from whatever far away place you came from, drifting like a kite through the troposphere, slower than the trans-oceanic jet you came in on. I'm trying to reel in my soul just as quick as can be, 'cause soon he'll have a long distance to make up.

When you're tired but in your normal routine, you've still got the glue of that routine keeping you together and productive. When you're in a new place, with time to kill, but alert and rested, you can happily go exploring, or, if you're a mobile tech warrior, productively tick items off your lists of things to do. But one of the paradoxes of killing time while on travel is that you're both uprooted and exhausted, so you live moment to moment, in a kind of blurry fog, not sure what to do next, and too tired to care very much.

Time to repack, head to LAX and take another stab at Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud (New Zealand).