wanderingsoul
Head Administrator
Global user
Registered: 07-2003
Location: Wandering
Posts: 403
Karma: 2 (+2/-0)
|
|
Reply | Quote
|
|
You're Yesterday is My Today, or is My Tomorrow Your Yesterday? - Saturday, January 17, 2004
You know, we are conditioned from a very young age to understand the concept of the passing of a day. It is today when it is light out. It is tonight when it is dark. And you know that when you go to bed, fall asleep and wake up the next day it will be tomorrow. Then when you do actually wake up it is today again and the today and tonight you just had is yesterday.
Sounds confusing, but it is instinctively understood. So when you are talking to someone you refer to yesterday, last night, this morning, this afternoon, etc. and the person you are talking to understands without explanation.
But there can be complications.
Different time zones complicate this. It isn’t so bad when someone you are talking to is one, two or even three hours different from you. In general, that small amount of time still keeps you in the same part of the day: morning, afternoon, evening, night, today, tomorrow. When you get to a five hour difference it gets a bit more difficult. Five hours is almost six hours and six hours has that magic property of being ¼ of the day, half of the daylight times, half of the nighttime times… It can put you in a different part of the day very easily. You can be in today and they can be in tonight. You can be in the morning and they can be in the afternoon. And you can be in today and they can already be in tomorrow—which to them becomes today and you then end up in yesterday. And if you aren’t confused at this point, then don’t even ATTEMPT to deal with people on the other side of the world who are 13 hours ahead of you. Seems they are always on tomorrow when you are still on today—which, of course, is their yesterday. So… since they are already on tomorrow, they are technically in the future… Would they know who won this afternoon’s 5th race at Aqueduct since for them this afternoon is yesterday? Hmm… might be a way to put this massive time zone confusion to good use.
Another, more insidious complication is an alteration of sleep patterns. Our bodies are conditioned to know that once you go to sleep and wake up, it will be tomorrow. Well, that works just fine—if you go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning. But when that gets messed up, when you start going to sleep in the morning and waking up in the afternoon you start to loose a sense of days. And then, if you happen to go to bed and sleep for a few hours in the morning and wake up—and go back to bed in the afternoon and sleep for a few more hours… Well, don’t even TRY to figure THAT out! Your body is completely convinced you have just had two days pass. You speak to someone about yesterday and it is really only this morning. And then the day before yesterday was really last night… No way of unraveling that.
That has been my problem lately. I haven’t been sleeping "normally." I have been catching and hour or two here and there AND talking to someone who is 5 hours ahead of me. It is likely I will never unravel exactly what day it is now. I know for a fact that I talked to Jay three times in one "day" but that doesn’t make any sense since I think an actual "day" did pass in there somewhere, but since I went about 36 hours without sleeping at all then slept for 2 and then woke up and slept later… Oh god.. no way I am EVER going to figure this out. I am fairly certain that a week has passed since last Saturday since the calendar says it is Saturday again. But the internal workings of that week will forever be a mystery for me.
But… Mark is home now. And nothing else matters.
---
And by and by my Soul returned to me, And answered "I Myself amd Heav'n and Hell"
Omar Khayyam
|
|
11/4/2005, 4:17 am
|
Send Email to wanderingsoul
Send PM to wanderingsoul
|
