Jet-lag-o-rama

Sorry to have been absent a while. January ran away with me, and then became a downhill run to returning to Cambridge.

Some statistics (believe them or not!):

Total time spent in transit, door-to-door, from my parents house to my room in Cambridge: 34 hours.

Time spent hanging about at airports (Canberra, Sydney, Singapore, Heathrow), as opposed to flying: 7 hours.

Sleep gained on flight: 2 hours.

Number of movies watched: 5 ½ (Everything is Illuminated, The Corpse Bride, Must Like Dogs, The Constant Gardener, The Brothers Grimm and bits of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigilo).

Pages of international law material read on the flight: nil.

Number of sudoku (easy and medium only) attempted: 10

Number of sudoku completed: 9

Bus trip, Heathrow to Cambridge: 2 hours, 45 minutes.

Time difference between Eastern Australia and the UK: 11 hours.

Average time spent in bed before waking up desperately confused: 2 hours.

Current half-time score: jet lag – 5; Doug – 2.

Fortunately I have a weekend to get myself together before I begin supervising undergrads again on Tuesday. Shame I need to read Pinochet (No 3) in that time as well …

Flashback to jet-lag in the making: in-flight movie reviews

The 40 year old virgin: not just American Pie for grown-ups; foul-mouthed, but rather sweet and with few gross-out jokes.

Who woulda thought condoms and chest-waxing could be so funny?

Cinderella Man: y'know the screenplay Barton Fink writes, about a wrestler who is emotionally and physically (but mostly physically) in tights? Who faces down an evil opponent? To rise heroically from his tenement origins? Yup, this is Barton's film.

... And man, does boxing ever make me feel ill. How is bludgeoning someone unconscious a sport in a civilised world?

Batman Begins: a novel take on a modern myth, dominated by the quest for psychological realism (and big toys!), betrayed by an ending one wishes disbelief could suspend.

Yes, I'll still go see the sequel.

Sky High: high-school - it's where geeks turn out to be cool, your girl-friend turns out to be your worst enemy, your worst enemy turns out to be your best friend, and your best friend turns out to be your girlfriend. Oh, and it's where you go to learn how to use your heriditary super-powers.

NB: Cheerleaders are evil.

Something's Gotta Give: old wrinkly people with heads full of character date young, featureless people with heads full of air - before realising they love each other. I think.

I dunno, I only watched the last 20 minutes.

Wrenching this thing back on course

I've been away from regular blogging for a while, I realise. Partly that's been the fact of coming back to Australia for the holiday season and getting over my usual vicious jet-lag.

But, regardless of jet-lag, Couritng Disaster has been adrift for a bit. I've been very busy of late with the PhD and my first ever semester's teaching and have felt a bit - well, busy to be blogging.

Strange, though, that I could always find time for it when working at a much more time-constrained desk job and even - more or less - through the chaos of my masters year.

First, I think blogging was simply a novelty, and my writing was mostly humourous pieces, reviews and the odd legal issue. Then it was a document of what could well have been my one and only year in Cambridge.

Now, with my life beyond blogging gathering steam, it seems important to re-focus on what I expect to do with this blog.

I think I really want it to be, rather more self-consciously, the blog of a PhD student. This is in itself a weird experience, and one worth recording.

So expect stories of teaching undergrads (including the odd mildly humilatiing piece of on-the-job learning), failed efforts to do PhD reading on long haul flights, and the trials and tribulations of trying to get a few publications out there.

Dammit. I have a book review to finish over Christmas as well.

Bangkok Joe's, Washington DC 

The DC adventure: hitting the town

It’s always fun seeing a city through a friend’s eyes. It’s also fun travelling in a place with a weaker currency than the pound (ie everywhere). While eating out a lot was still an indulgence, it was a far more reasonably priced one.

Led by a Belgian (see yesterday’s entry) the PhD gang hit some great restaurants once the conference buffet dinners petered out. One such establishment was the lovely, and remarkably reasonable, Bangkok Joe’s (see photo). Excellent Thai. We repaired afterwards to the fabulously funky Mie N Yu. Check out the online tour (we were in the Moroccan Bazaar bar).

With my Australian host I saw the inside of several bars, one of the better was Local 16. Including having the experience of a head waitress/bar-person cross the room to give him a hug, have a chat and wave our little party past the ID check to the rooftop bar. (He’s clearly spent some time and money in a number of places.)

And I managed to buy clothes, again. An amazingly sleek grey wool overcoat with duffle-coat toggles and (wait for it) a blue cord jacket with fawn suede elbow patches. Perfect junior academic regalia. My host’s comment on the latter was: “When I heard cord with elbow patches, I feared the worst. But that actually looks like rather funky streetwear.”

A change in my routine

I am attempting to be good this week. Recovering from jet-lag, and still being inspired by the conference and my interviews about my research - it seemed a good time to try and form new habits.

Part of this process is that I’ve come up with a totally new plan of what I want to do for my first year paper, so I’m trying to pull different things together and get a lot of new research done.

So, my new daily routine. Wake up 7.00 or 7.30, 10 minutes yoga followed by a 10 minute run round the sports-ground. Shave, shower, breakfast. Coffee and the online newspapers until 9 am. 9-1 work in my room, mostly writing.

Then lunch from 1-2, and in at the law school library by 2 chasing references, looking things up, photocopying and reading. Leave around 5.30 or 5.45.

This is proving frighteningly productive, and means I am finally and definitely treating the PhD as an office job. Let’s hope it lasts.

Tomorrow: a day at the baby races.

Naylor

For those who might be wondering what's happened to Courting Disaster, other than an extended holiday and jet-lag, I've been putting my energy towards finishing Naylor's Canberra by crime-novel-by-blog (see new year's resolutions, the last two years running).

Another shortish installment is now up at the Naylor's Canberra site, as the story draws closer and closer towards a conclusion.

Finishing a draft novel while jet-lagged may not be the best way forward, but at least I don't feel like I'm wasting time I could usefully be spending on PhD research ...

Greetings from jet-lag central (for "blogger idol: travel")

I don't take drugs to alter my consciousness.

Except alcohol, caffeine, over-the-counter pain killers and the occasional large dose of legal theory. This may not be so much a matter of personal morality as naivete. I wouldn't know where to score anything else in Cambridge anyway. Despite doing a lot of amateur theatre with thespy undergrads.

Anyway, I digress ...

I write from an increasingly familiar space to yours truly, jet-lag central. I arrived back Chez the Folks, near Canberra, today after a 22 hour flight from London and an involuntary stop-over in Sydney due to a certain lack of foresight on my part in co-ordinating a connecting flight far enough ahead of time.

This is the third time in three months I've done a 22 hour plane trip. Weirdly, I'm getting used to it - especially weird as I can't sleep on planes. Jet lag has become my most expensive form of altered consciousness.

The main thing I notice is that time becomes a marathon race: I'm always counting off the hours to the end of the flight, the time the next good movie starts on the in-flight entertainment, or on arrival the hours until I can reasonably go to bed and (hopefully) sleep.

Also the small stuff stops mattering at all. I just shrug and go: "Huh, I've lost a travel padlock."

"What do you know, despite being up for 30 hours, I just can't sleep. Let's go downstairs and pester the desk clerk for the right time, then."

"Hurm, just dropped the boxers I was planning to sleep in on a wet shower floor."

Everything happens in slow motion, quite some distance away. I can converse, using stock phrases, and listen with polite intensity (because it requires a weird intensity of concentration to get through simple actions like wrapping a Christmas gift) but am relatively useless for any activity which is not closely supervised.

Other weird side effects include making unguarded personal comments to strangers and crying at movies (neither usual pass times). Both I guess indicate that the emotional filters are down, and the world while oddly distant becomes peculiarly heightened, too.

Still, my biggest achievement in all of this has been (other than not losing any luggage) reading and possibly understanding about 150 pages worth of a book on the history of theoretical approaches to international law.

No honestly, it's considerably more interesting than you'd imagine.

Okay, yes I am still jet-lagged as I write this.


PS Blogger idol 'travel' entries that made me think:
Livingroom
A Dervish's Du`a'
Cliff between the lines

(Chinatown markets, Singapore)

Impressions of Singapore (Part 1)
(Photos are over here, towards the bottom of the page ... )

High humidity, warm balmy nights, cicadas singing - to an Australian who’d spent December in England, it finally felt like Christmas. Colonial architecture among commercial high-rises, the knotted arthritic limbs of tropical trees, frangipanni in bloom, a city turned towards the water all deepened the sense of familiarity. Some moments I could have been back in Sydney - well, Sydney minus the pollution, litter, grime and car-choked narrow streets.

Even the fact that walking fifteen un-airconditioned metres would leave me glistening with a Mr Sheen-level sheen of perspiration felt not unlike Sydney.

So, I was in Singapore for the World’s Debating competition. Despite our successes at the Oxford Intervarsity, my team didn’t reach the octo-finals, which was a bit disappointing. In some ways rather more disappointing was the virtual absence of alcohol from the tournament. While my drinking to get drunk undergrad days are behind me, alcohol is perhaps the only genuinely expensive thing in Singapore: S$7 or $8 beers, S$12 gin and tonics or S$60 for a bottle of fairly ordinary Australian wine.

Even for those who did want a punishing drinking schedule, Singaporean bar staff seemed utterly bewildered by Irish/Australian/debater levels of demand. One suspects those native and to the manor born seek to refill their glasses much less often.

The competition itself was run terribly well: I don’t envy convenors the logistical nightmare of coordinating 900 people over 9 rounds of 75 individual debates per round, a finals series and a social circuit.

Otherwise, I met some nice people, bumped into some ANU debating friends (which was scary, I seriously expected to be too old to be recognised at all) and hung out with the Oxbridge gang. Jet-lag at times dulled my enjoyment of the tournament, and my enthusiasm for sight-seeing, but catching up with the family (who I saw after the tournament) was fantastic.

Overall, though, the most intriguing part of the experience was gaining some awareness of the facets of Singapore as a country/city-state: the ethnic mix, the economic miracle, the consumer paradise, the incrementally liberalising democracy, the visibility of guest workers, the endemic civility and community-spiritedness. There was both much to admire, and a direct awareness of the pervasiveness of the nanny-state.

I also bought a lot of new clothes and collected my new laptop from my Dad (ordered and paid for in Australia by me and smuggled into Singapore by him. Yes, I know no-one bothers buying new electronic goods if they’re visiting Singapore … but anyway …), so I came back bout 15 kgs overweight.

(Luggage, not me. If I could gain 15 kilos I might actually hit standard weight-for-height ratios.)