I just got back from my trip the UK. I last had a normal night’s sleep on Wednesday. Left on Thrusday night, arrived Saturday morning, more zombie than a zombie invasion. Honestly – you want invade a country with zombies, start at the airports. No one will realize. I’ve had two nights of patchy sleep so my brains are coming up toward bureaucrat level. Not one of your great rises…. I’m a very circadian person and it takes weeks to get my head straightened out that what was night is now day.
The airline I flew on: East China Airlines, which had the solitary good point of being the cheapest – well, I didn’t get earphones for one leg, and I am not a big movie watcher anyway, the games module did not work, and thus I was left with 11 hours and 9 and half hours plus all the waiting time in the terminals… and thank heavens for kindle. I read fast, about 2 hours a book – so I would have needed quite a stack. But what was painfully obvious, was the more tired I got the less well I coped with complexity. By the last bit, I was too tired to cope with Louis L’Amour I’ve read 30 times before.
My only value derived from long-haul flight reading is it may be great way for intelligent authors to discover how feels to be thick as a brick – and what those people want to read, and are entertained by.
Mad Genius Club 
6 responses to “Tired…”
Noticing everything is useful for a writer. I remember nights with insufficient sleep that were worse than the all-nighter.
When you are tired enough, your brain can barely handle a comic strip.
The one time I pulled an all-nighter, I felt fine (actually felt the sleepiest at 2 or 3 am and woke up), but I couldn’t write.
I’m leaving Wednesday night from Bangkok heading home to Texas. Travel time is over 30 hours, which includes a 9 hour layover in Osaka. It’s going to be a long trip.
My longest one-stop flight was Sidney to LA (refueled in Hawaii but couldn’t get off the plane.) My longest flying day was 23 hours, because of a weather delay in Dallas/Ft. Worth that caused me to miss my connection in Frankfurt so I got into Krakow at 0200 instead of 1700 the day before. And I had to be ready to go at 0900 that morning. Braaaaiiiiiinzzz, I no had them. The commuter turbo-prop could have flown the last leg inverted for all I would have noticed.
I handle 0300 Vienna time to 2130 Texas time a lot better.
The first time we moved to Japan we had three connecting flights that spanned 36 hours. I did not get any sleep but once my face hit the mattress at the hotel in Osaka I was blissfully out, and that was before we all had our own screens with thousands of hours worth of movies and TV shows to watch. Crossing the world in airplanes is tough!