THE DRAG OF JET LAG.

 THE DRAG OF JET LAG.

There are people who don't get jet lag.  I believe that they are not real people but aliens who have arrived on Earth after light years of travel so that twelve to twenty-four hours on a plane is nothing to them.  I mean, they might have been born on Earth, but they were probably smuggled into some unsuspecting woman's uterus after being well traveled embryos from a distant planet.

I traveled with one of them once.  We boarded the plane in Brisbane for a twenty-three-hour trip to Paris.  As soon as we took our seats in the cramped Economy section, he closed his eyes and went to sleep.  Just like that, he tuned out the aircraft noise, the lights, the announcements and the sardine-like conditions, and floated off into dreamland.  This is not normal.  He is Polish but I don't think this has anything to do with it.

I have to admit that I haven't traveled overseas for years (financial constraints) and would love to be able to again.  Nonethless I am well acquainted with jet lag.  It is just a shame that my alien co-traveler decided that there was no such thing, decided I was a lost cause and went on his merry way around Paris with his sister, who lived there, for two days while I tried to recuperate in our noisy hotel room.  She had booked this for us, even though she had promised us free use of a friend's apartment.  Trouble was that the friend wasn't out of it yet.  I won't go into the rest of the three-week story, save to say that their disregard for my fatigue in those first days upset my irritable bowel syndrome for the remaining trip.

All I required was one- or two-nights-sleep but friend harangued me about missing Paris nightlife.  I missed it and I don't think he ever found it.  When we drove out of Paris, the pharmacies on the route south to Monaco benefitted hugely from my purchases of medications to contain my trips to the toilet and ease the burning in my intestines.  One thing that really annoyed me about French pharmacies was that none of their analgesics contained codeine.  They put caffeine in its place.  Now why would I want caffeine in an analgesic when I could just have a cup of coffee?

Ten years before the Paris trip I had traveled alone to London from Perth, Western Australia.  I was heading for a pre-paid bus tour of France.  My, then, husband would not join me.  I was in good shape when I boarded the plane and not so good when I got off in London.  Jet lag had hit me hard and, having had panic attacks in the past, I had trouble keeping one at bay in my depleted condition.  Once at the hotel, I discovered that my room wasn't available for six hours and I was really quite sick.  My marriage was under stress at that time, and I think that my nerves just crashed.  I begged the hotel for any room they could give me, and they were kind enough to offer me one that I think was used for flight attendants.  A jackhammer started outside the window just as I arrived at around 7am but I managed to sleep through it.

Sadly, I decided that I was in no shape to go on the tour.  I spent four days in London coming back to my senses and cancelled the tour.  My husband managed to get me on the only available flight at short notice, traveling first class (God bless him.)  It's a real shame that I was in no condition to enjoy first class, but it did not impress me.  Now, this was forty years ago, but I remember it being full of businessmen glued to their newspapers and paying no attention to their first-class surroundings.  I was feeling pretty ill at this point, not from panic disorder, but because an old friend came and took me to lunch at her place in London before my flight.  I told her I was allergic to cream, but she gave me a light lunch with a hummus dip.  Oh, she only put a little cream in it.  I'm glad I was packing Loperamide (for diarrhea) but there went my enjoyment of first class.

One more thing about first class.  There was no tray containing your whole meal.  There was a trolley containing silver service with, first, the entree then, later, the main course and still later dessert.  Give me a good old tray and the whole shebang so that I can sit back, relax and fall asleep, or run to the bathroom.  You see, I have traveled business class.  It was lovely, a real Goldilocks moment.  I was bumped up on my way to London.  The seats reclined just so, the footrest came up, there was elbow space and it was, oh, so much quieter.  The tray also came with the full meal.  If I ever can travel again my choice would be business class hands down.

I can say this, genuinely, because yesterday I watched a video on Facebook of a man taking us with him in a first-class seat on a recent Qantas flight from Sydney to London, with a brief stop at Singapore, where he had an hour at Changi Airport.  I have, in the past, visited that airport often when I lived in Hong Kong and traveled via that route and it is fabulous.

The fellow first showed us through the Qantas First Class airport lounge in Sydney.  Actually, I've been in the one in Brisbane and it was great.  For our benefit he sampled meals in the airport lounge and on the flight, partook of free champagne in the airport lounge and showed us the seat in its partitioned privacy on the plane.  Honestly, it looked claustrophobic to me.  Yes, it was big enough and, yes, there was a window, but still I preferred the seat I'd had all those years ago when I traveled first class.  He could dim his lights, recline the seat to lying down, rotate his seat towards the window, but all in all, it looked like a comfy office cubicle.  It also looked lonely.  More importantly, when he woke up after nine hours sleep, he took off his eye mask.  Ah ha, I thought, it's not completely dark.  If he's wearing an eye mask, so there is residual cabin light.  Why would I pay $10,000 Australian dollars for a one-way ticket for an office cubicle? More room certainly, possible better but rather ostentatious food, and still not be able to rest in complete darkness?  The answer is that for that price, I wouldn't.  I'm not going to feel well anyway after a twenty-four-hour flight with background noise that cannot be dulled and light that cannot be shut away.

Amazingly there are partitioned seats in the centre of first-class between the window ones.  He advised us to go for the window ones, which is understandable at that price.  If you could pay a price to get rid of jet lag, it would be worth it and perhaps someone will come up with a medication for it someday, but nothing much is going to make a long flight in recycled air and white lights, background hum and announcements over the intercom pleasant.

When you arrive at your destination, if you're not on a business trip and expected to perform as if you haven't shifted many time zones, get a quiet, dark hotel, room service and sleep until you feel ready to face the world.  If I'm very lucky, I may be able to try to do just that again one day.

END

HEAR, HEAR FOR OUR FUNNY LOOKING HUMAN EARS.

 HEAR, HEAR FOR OUR FUNNY LOOKING HUMAN EARS.

"My, what beautiful ears you have," said no one ever.  It's just as well ears are positioned on the side of our head, not in the middle of our face like our nose.  I mean, noses aren't exactly something to get excited about either, but at least they don't look like a raised spiral maze or labrynth.  There are no beautiful noses.  A good nose is one that draws the least attention to itself.  The worst noses have their owners scurrying to a plastic surgeon as soon as maturity and money allow but not many resort to surgery for their ears.  For the ones who do, it is usually because their ears stick out from the sides of their head like vertical wing flaps or angry elephants.

Speaking of angry elephants, nature has cruelly denied humans the ability to express emotions with their auditory appendages.  When an elephant is upset, you know it.  It spreads its formidably large ears to make itself look bigger (as if that were necessary, given their size).  If that doesn't send you running, they'll charge you.  Horses, also, have ways of letting you know their displeasure - ears back.  Given that they are also large animals, it's wise to know what their ears are telling you as a means of life preservation.

Dogs, after centuries of breeding interference by humans, now come with an assortment of ear shapes from pointy to floppy.  Of course, their ancestor, the wolf has pointy ears, making them look alert and intelligent.  No one knows for sure why breeding and the domestication of dogs caused floppy ears.  Theories abound and some are that animals bred for herding and listening for prey kept their pointy ears, which one can assume means that these ears hear better than floppy ones.  Floppy ears apparently help stir up the ground so that pooch can be a better tracker, able to pick up smells from the ground. That seems to be a stretch of the imagination as theories go and I don't know how this works for the shorter floppy eared breeds like Golden Retrievers except that they look cute with them.  Floppy ears, however, are harder to clean and prone to fungal infections and the like.

But back to humans.

According to an AI article:

"Humans developed ear pinnae—the external, cartilaginous flaps of the ear—primarily as a survival mechanism to amplify sound and locate its source. Inherited from our ancient mammalian ancestors..."

Also:

"While many mammals have large, mobile pinnae that they can swivel to track predators or prey, humans and other primates evolved to rely more on turning our heads."

Then on reading an academic article, or a tiny portion thereof, titled: "Evolution of the Mammalian Ear: An Evolvability Hypothesis" (various authors), I came upon this nto very enlightening sentence:

"The transformation of the primary jaw joint into the mammalian ear ossicles is one of the most iconic transitions in vertebrate evolution, but the drivers of this complex evolutionary trajectory are not fully understood. " 

This gave me the cue that I should go no further in trying to understand the anatomy of the ear and would instead concentrate on its appearance.  Nor was I going to drag you, dear reader, down that rabbit hole as it seems that no one can really explain to anyone's satisfaction why we are adorned with our particular variety of hearing appendage.

Birds avoid all this trouble by having holes for ears.  That is, the outside of their ears are simply holes and their hearing is excellent.  Apparently, who or whatever our evolutionary engineers are, they decided to take highly divergent paths when designing mammals and birds.

If humans merely had holes, not cartilaginous flaps, external to their ear canals, we would never have been able to adorn ourselves with earrings.  Even worse, whatever would our spectacles have been able to rest upon?  Probably they would have required elastic bands like swim goggles or, perhaps, we could have had a hole drilled through the bridge of the nose through which a bar could be passed and then lens positioned either side in front of the eyes.

I doubt, though, that if we were given the task of designing our own ears, we would have come up with two rather odd looking, fleshy knobs that would protrude from the sides of our heads.

Whenever you watch a science fiction movie in which humanoid looking aliens are portrayed, the special effects people will always have fun with the ears.  Either they will be larger, pointy perhaps, or not there at all.  I think that is because our ears are probably the most alien things about us.  At best they look like Ammonites, the shells of Cephalopods.

Ammonite

How would we have felt if we had lovely pointy ears atop our heads like an Alsatian, with a fine covering of short hair on the back?  

I had AI create the picture above, but it wouldn't get rid of the human ears.  I'm still learning.  However, I think the pointy ears on the girl look rather fetching compared to our human ones.  Ours are, nonetheless, a bit more compact and handier for hanging things on and, now that I think of it, it would be a lot harder to hold a smartphone up to those pointy ears.

 Perhaps our mammalian designers were thinking ahead after all.

END

HUMAN PLASTICINE: molded for life - from birth to the grave.

 

HUMAN PLASTICINE: molded for life - from birth to the grave.

A funny thing happens to you when you retire: you feel like a third wheel and, with that, comes a sense of disorientation and none of direction.  Of course, that's not everybody.  Some people have definite plans for retirement and the money to carry those out.  Others anticipate days they can call their own; no plans, just the freedom to do exactly as they please.  It's the latter who have the problem.  Who, in life, has had the experience to do exactly what they please?

I'm one of the latter and I keep wondering why I'm not relishing all this free time.  I try to tell myself not to feel guilty and to go with the flow.  The problem is that there is no flow.  You're now in a becalmed canoe and must row.  This, however, defeats the purpose of 'going with the flow'.  The 'flow' is a gentle current that, like a good television show, carries you along while you relax in your armchair, not a canoe you have to row to move forward.

I think we move into retirement somewhat unprepared and I think that is because of how we are brought up.  With the best intentions in the world our parents take one look at that helpless blob of fleshy plasticine that they have produced in an energetic bout of sexual activity and wonder how to make it self-reliant.  Heck, they don't want it weeing and demanding food at all hours forever.  They must school it, and that's only after they have taught it the rudiments of holding their bowels, walking upright and communicating intelligibly.  Added to this, they are sleep deprived and rarely able to engage in sex, can never go out to dinner again without getting a babysitter or have a conversation that doesn't involve bodily functions.

Babies, therefore, are brought into this world and are then expected to move forward in a culturally appropriate way and then to fend for themselves.  We are primates and yet other primates do not have expectations of their offspring other than to live, procreate and then die.  Humans, on the other hand, must attain relevancy in some way.  At first the child finds the whole life thing a surprise so that for the first formative years their only direction about what they're doing in this world comes from the people who brought them into it and who, themselves, have no idea what they're doing because they've never brought a child into being before.

As young children, we do not question why our parents insist on us doing what we are told.  We are put in clothes, told not to run on the road, forced to eat food we'd rather spit out and then kicked out of the house to attend day care, kindergarten, school etc. with a whole lot of other equally dumbfounded and unformed humans.  What we make of all this activity is unquestioned, at least until we are about five to seven years of age.  If our parents are kind people, we just feel safe and go with the flow.

I think that the sense of repetition and questioning only kicks in at about the age of seven.  The sheer tedium of having to get up, get into a uniform then spend six hours sitting at desks learning stuff before we are released to play and the gloss of being new in the world starts to wear off.  I know that by age seventeen, my only life plan was to leave school and never look back.  Oh, I figured that more was expected of me, I just didn't know or care what.  I hadn't yet seen a light of passion for some career.  I hadn't grown up poor, even though I had no actual money.  I was an adolescent after all.  However, my lifestyle didn't see anyone around me scraping to make do, which might have provided the motivation to earn a living no matter what I did to achieve it.

My mother's mantra was "get a degree."  She had wanted one, but her parents could only afford to send her brother to university.  I felt that a degree was the least that was expected of me, but in what?  Due to being unhappy at high school, my sole aim was to leave it, not gain high marks because I got high marks naturally, without studying much.  It therefore became a shock that I fell behind in the last two years of school.  Word of advice: when you're too quick, you don't learn to study.  My mistake.  I still did well, but not enough to do anything I would have accepted as a career.  There you go - from squirming baby to choosing a career by age seventeen.  You see, we're set on a path we don't chose, with no real knowledge of the world, and meant to know our passion.  Bravo to anyone who manages that.  There was only one girl in school who had a passion and that was to be an actress.  She worked at it through school and went on to become a well-known Australian actress.  I admire her for her early sense of direction.  Few of us have it so young.

I won't bore you with the details of my university days, dropping out initially and later getting a minor degree at forty years old.  I finally saw what I should have done when I was fifty, but it was too late then.  Nonetheless, it's all a journey.  Lucky are those who find a path that suits them.  I watched my son with complete admiration.  He was a real student, happy at school and he would study hard.  He earned great marks, chose a career and followed it.  The only credit I take for this is that I listened to him and made sure he was happy with his school.

In the end I could not get work at forty after getting a degree that could have provided me with some kind of work.  It was hard getting office work at that age too.  I ended up driving a taxi for fifteen years, felt humbled, but absolutely loved it.  The thing I looked down on gave me the greatest pleasure.

People get a great deal of relevance from their work but then, one day, it stops.  Age will stop them; the company will stop them, or their health will stop them.  That train track carved into our brains from kindergarten will run out.  Given that we've been directed to move forward one way or another from childhood, the end of that track is overwhelming.  When you think about it, something has taken the place of our parents all those years, directing us, channeling us, giving us structure.  My oldest grandson loves the idea of not having to get up and go to school.  He says that I'm lucky.  In a way I am but nor can I start a new life or career.  I could study, but for what purpose?  I can learn on the internet.  Years ago, I filled my days applying for jobs and getting rejected but, at least, I had expectations.  There is absolutely no point in applying for a job at seventy-three years of age, no matter how fit and compos mentis I am.  I still have a future, but there is no structure to it and no expectation.

I now live in the land leisure that younger people dream of and I'm not really enjoying it.  I would love to travel more but I'm not rich and I wonder how long incessant travel would please me anyway.  This is when people with hobbies excel.  The passion has to come from within.  I do love to write, but I don't do it incessantly.  I have to have something to say, and I can wait months to say it.  I'm amazed how many people have podcasts now.  There's an awful lot out there, but I don't listen.  I can't even stand the radio.  I prefer my information quiet.

Perhaps parents and teachers are doing the right thing by directing their children.  Certainly, they must teach them and give them the necessary tools to survive.  We're all just muddling around here on this planet since we emerged from the primal soup.  We've still got a long way to evolve.  My next fear is that we'll hand over the reins of life to AI and our direction will be taken over by a pre-programmed, non-human entity.

END