10-26/27

10-26/27, 2005 I’m on a Plane

Well, according to the in flight map I’m coming up on 5,847 km from home. Fucking metric system. That’s just around 3,645 miles. I guess I ought to stop using that term, home really doesn’t describe Tualatin, or Eugene anymore. Neither of the two are really my home, Japan is. Not quite yet, but, it will be as soon as I set foot off this plane.
The weird thing about this flight is that since we are flying in the same direction as the sun, we are flying in daylight the whole 11 hours we’ll be in the air. We departed Portland at 2pm, and will be arriving at 5pm in Tokyo. Weird how that works, especially since it was the 26th when I left and when I arrive it will be the 27th. It’s weird, watching the cabin get darker and the people on the plane start taking naps, when it’s still light outside. It’s 8:45pm in Portland right now, I’ve been on this plane almost 7 hours, so I guess I can understand the desire to sleep, but, for me as long as the sun is up, I’m awake. If I could be on a plane flying with the sun all day, forever, I don’t think I’d ever need to sleep.

I guess I ought to review my arrival information, just to make sure that I have any clue whatsoever where I’m going when I get there. I know I need to take an express from Narita to say, Ueno, or Tokyo proper, and from there hop on the Joban line to Minami Kashiwa, and on to my apartment. I’m supposing that’s where the representative they will have waiting for me will come in, and go out there with me.

Someone has been fucking farting on this plane, and it’s pissing me the hell off. Cause the airjets here just re-circulate the air, so, somewhere, some asshole is wide open blowing off steam, and I have to take it all in like the sonofabitch were sitting next to me. Thanks, asshole.

Anyway, so here I am. So far I’ve watched Dark Water, and The Fantastic Four. Maybe I’ll take in another movie of my choice before landing. Maybe I’ll just chill and write on my laptop and listen to music. Who knows. I can pretty much write as long as I want, stream of consciousness is cool like that. Or verbose, one of the two.


K, so I’ve been thinking about the nature of time, and the relatively poor way in which we’ve decided to measure it. This shit runs through my mind when I’m on a plane. I’m 23 years old. That means, by our terms, that I have lived long enough for the Earth to orbit the Sun 23 times. There are 365.25 days in a year because the Earth revolves around its own axis that many times in the time it takes to go around the Sun.
So, when one day goes by for me, I am at the same point on the Earth’s axis that I was 24 hours earlier. But if I’m on a plane, flying against the Sun, let’s say, at the exact same speed that the Earth rotates, then it would take 12 hours to reach the same point on the Earth again. So would that be a day? If I flew against the Sun like that 365 times, would a year have gone by? Yes and no, I guess. For me, 365 ‘days’ i.e. rotations would have elapsed, but to anyone else on the ground, I would have to do that 730.5 times.

I guess what I’m getting at here is that the only unit of measure we really can apply universally are minutes, seconds, and hours, plus the fractions of seconds. Anything longer than that is relative, dependent on planets or solar systems, and even then what we have left is arbitrary. You would kind of have to know the least amount of time that can possibly elapse, find an actual, quantifiable unit of time that is applicable, and then use multiples of that length to create a physically accurate measure of time that isn’t purely arbitrary. Have we done that yet? I’m curious.