I was finally able to check in for my final flight. I am now no longer sitting on the sidewalk. I have a couple hours to kill. I have had a cappuccino. The voices over the PA system have Australian accents.
I could be amusing myself by quantifying the amount of koala kitsch in the airport gift shops. But no!
I am thinking very very hard about the International Date Line.
I believe everyone has at least one thing that baffles them, no matter how much they research it or encounter it or train themselves to use it. There’s just something about that thing that does not gel in their brains. That thing does not need to be general relativity or topology or the timeline of the Fast and Furious movies. For some folks, it might be converting to a 24-hour clock; for others, it might be the ability to remember left from right. (I’m one of the latter, actually.)
But the thing that really bakes my brain is the International Date Line.
In theory, I know how it works. If you’re spanning enough of the earth, and you’re going with or against the travel of the sun, at some point you’re out of whack with that location’s calendar. The International Date Line is an arbitrary point where we, as a society, agreed that you’ve warped your own perspective enough that you should just update your calendar.
Or something like that.
I can kind of understand what’s happening with me on this trip. I lose a day flying from the US to Australia, and I’ll get it back next week when I fly home. Yet I left on Saturday, night was 15 hours long, and then it was Monday. My lizard brain does not grok this, on a fundamental level.
Yet even worse was the time I circumnavigated the world, in 2019. Minneapolis to Amsterdam to Istanbul (where I wasn’t supposed to be) to Mumbai to Hong Kong to Minneapolis. To this day, I have zero understanding of what happened to time during that trip. If it had also happened during the Daylight Savings Time shift in the USA, my brain might have turned to frappe and I would have been blissfully unaware of the incoming pandemic.
I’m sure none of this is an especially great revelation to you, dear reader, so why am I writing this? Well, you see, last night lasted 15 hours and I didn’t sleep much…
EDITING TO ADD:
- I did my DuoLingo lessons at 9pm last night.
- I crossed the date line.
- Now Duo is angry I skipped a day.
I DO NOT UNDERSTAND ANY OF THIS.
