My Own Private Time Zone

It’s pretty incredible waking up at 5:30 AM and feeling like I slept in late. It probably has a bit to do with being on Central Time Zone last week. But I’m guessing it has much more to do with being in Israel a week ago and deciding not to get off that schedule.

I spent last week traveling to places as exciting as Mendota, Illinois and Des Moines, Iowa. I even almost went to Gulfport, Mississippi. They’re about as exciting as you can imagine, so I decided rather than shifting off of Israel time and having the night to myself like a normal person, I’d continue waking up at a late time by Israel time zone standards. It meant on Saturday while still in Los Angeles I woke up at 2AM, bike road for two hours, worked out for an hour, and read for another hour before heading to services. On Sunday I got up at 7am, despite having been out till 3:30 the night before. On Monday, in Mendota, I went to bed at 9pm and woke up at 2:30am. I worked out and wrote for a long time before I got downstairs to start teaching at around 7:15 AM.

On Tuesday and Wednesday it was closer to 3:30am, but followed the same pattern. I got exhausted around 9pm every day, but that’s a small price to pay for 4 hours of bonus morning.

Image Source by Kagen33

I meant to do the same on Thursday, but instead I ended up being stuck in Ft Worth due to a flight cancelled due to weather. I was forced to wake up at 3:40 AM (read: plenty late) to make it to a 5:20 flight. It wasn’t a problem at all. The problem came when the airport system had no record of my freshly assigned ticket and needing to sweet talk my way into getting it assigned with about 20 minutes to go before the flight. The bigger problem came when after getting in to Houston, which was connection #2, I learned that just like the night before, my flight in to Gulfport was cancelled and there were no other flights to get there. But during the whole hassle, I was wide awake. I got to sleep in until 3:40, after all.

The Thursday class ended up getting canceled due to weather, so I flew straight home to Los Angeles 12 hours earlier than expected. I got to go to improv practice, and by the time it was done at 10pm Pacific Time people were worried if I was awake enough to drive. The thing is, I would have been falling asleep just due to the fact I’d been in central time all week needing to wake up at 6:30am.

This schedule is perfect. If I threw in a short daily siesta, there’s no reason I couldn’t wake up at 7am and go to bed at 3:30 every night.

That whole, “Early to bed. Early to rise. Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” thing has always been over ruled by “Early to rise. Early to bed. Makes a man healthy but socially dead” in my mind. Perhaps there’s a way to do both.

Or more likely, it was nice while it lasted.