Whenever I get on an airplane that travels between time zones, I set my computer’s clock to the time at my destination. I do this mainly to help my body adjust to the new time zone — specifically, to know to sleep and when to wake up. I know it seems silly, but it seems to actually work.
At the moment I am writing this while traveling on a flight from the East coast to the West coast of North America. Following my usual practice, I have already shifted my computer to West coast time.
Yet in some sense I don’t feel as though I am in any definite time zone. Rather, it feels like I am in a sort of Heisenberg uncertainty state of time zones. Not literally of course, but psychologically.
Writing a blog post while hurtling around the globe at nearly the speed of sound sort of blurs the whole notion of time zones, or of locality itself. Perhaps this is just one more manifestation of Applin and Fischer’s PolySocial Reality.
Or, in the immortal words of The Firesign Theatre, how can you be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all?