Jet lag

Most people who work in China for foreign companies become more familiar with jet lag then they ever thought they would. If you travel back and forth between coastal China and the East Coast of the US it's particularly bad since the time difference is 12 hours -- your schedule is basically turned upside down. He usually takes me about a week to get over the jet lag. The pattern is roughly as follows, on your first day in either the US or China, depending on which way you're going, you fall asleep pretty early, maybe eight or nine o’clock, but then you wake up about two or three in the morning still tired though basically awake. There's not a heck of a lot to do so early in the morning so you usually call home, check e-mail or call back to the office in the country are not in to talk to people who are in the middle of their workday. Then you can go workout if your hotel has a gym. At that point, it's still pretty early, but you're hungry so you go to the restaurant for breakfast. You're almost always the first one there in the US. Sometimes you actually stand around the door waiting for the restaurant to open. If you come on a China business trip, you find that you've never seen a restaurant so crowded at six in the morning. It's full of fellow jet lag sufferers. You generally feel okay in the first half of the workday, though a little tired. But by the afternoon it's a real struggle just to keep your head off the desk. On each passing day you wake up about an hour later, so after five or six days you are waking up at a fairly normal time. Unfortunately, with many business trips this is exactly the time when you're ready to get back on the plane go back in the other direction and face the same process for the following week.

This past year I had two periods where I had meetings in the US every other week for a six week stretch. One was in March/April and the other in August/September. I didn't want to leave my family nor work behind for a three week period so I ended up going to the US for a week, back to China for a week, back to the US, back to China, backed to the US, and finally back to China again. This is a pretty awful pattern and in during the latter stretches of one of these I'd get almost a little delirious. Its not a good time to make any meaningful decisions. I read an article In the Harvard Business Review a year so ago about jet lag. It was by a doctor and he was suggesting that business people who travel you have three or four days before they're in a situation where they have to make any decisions. It's actually not a bad sentiment, but it's unbelievably impractical.

Jet lag can sometimes have advantages though. My very best weeks for exercise are always the weeks after I get back from a trip, because it's not much else to do at four in the morning. I was in LA on vacation with my family this summer visiting my parents and as usual I found myself awake at about three in the morning. I ended up in the car and going for a drive. My parents live pretty close to Universal Studios so I drove over the hill past the Hollywood Bowl in and down Hollywood Boulevard then over to the Sunset Strip. This was midweek, so there wasn't much of anything going on except for people cleaning the streets and a few homeless guys wandering around. Even places like the Roxy were dormant. I decided to keep driving along Sunset Boulevard. I don’t think I’d ever seen Sunset as quiet. On Sunset you wind your way through Westwood and Brentwood and eventually through Pacific Palisades before hitting the coast. Pacific Palisades is a very nice neighborhood bordering Malibu. I never knew anyone personally who lived there until I was in LA working as a lawyer and it seemed that a disproportionate number lawyers seemed to live there. As I drove through the Palisades I was reminded of Bud Kling, the fiery coach of the Pacific Palisades tennis team. When I was in high school, I played on the North Holland High School tennis team. Tennis is a sport that is in many ways very geographically predictable. Almost universally the high schools with the best tennis teams are in the wealthiest enclaves. When I was attending North Hollywood High, there was a huge mix of people both racially and economically. Our boundaries went up to Mulholland Drive, taking in Universal City, Studio City and Laurel Canyon and spread all the way out into the flatlands of the Valley, which with their significant gang concentrations, couldn’t be more different. Still, there was enough diversity in a school that could still manage to marshal a very good tennis team. The last two years that I was there we played in the city finals against Palisades, winning once and losing once. I just remember the coach of Pali vividly because he was such a character. He was incredibly competitive and incredibly intense. The contrast between him and our coach could not have been greater. Our esteemed leader, Pete Bristol, didn't know how to play tennis far as we could tell and really just provided us with tennis balls and came down to the courts after school in his flip-flops to watch us play. I suppose we had the discipline to practice enough to be fairly good. And some ways Bristol was a perfect coach if you're a high school kid that just wanted to have a good time. He was happy when you won, but he really didn't put any pressure on you.

Just below Palisades is a small beach near Gladstones, a fish restaurant on the beach, located at the intersection of Sunset and PCH, which is where I ended my nighttime sojourns. This is the same beach where I cut my head open surfing as a 19-year-old. Ironically, this was also a fond memory. It was one of the bigger swells of the summer and my friends happily paddled out. While there was sand on the beach, once you got past the sand by a few feet it became all rocks underneath. I fell and hit my head on a rock. Luckily, I wasn’t knocked out but my head was throbbing and I walked up onto the beach dragging my board by the leash on my foot. The horrified looks on everybody's faces on the beach let me know something was wrong and then the blood started to run down from my head onto my arm. My friends came out and slapped a towel on my head and lifeguard came and told me to keep pressure on it. I remained conscious the whole time and my friends drove me to the nearest hospital. I called my mom who insisted that I wait for a plastic surgeon to stitch it up. The best part of all, once my friends saw that it might take a while, they started getting visibly antsy knowing it was one of the better surf days of summer. I just told them to head back to the beach and let me know how that it was. Later my mom came in and then the doctor. It was 40 or 50 stitches in the end.

So there’s the silver lining of jet lag. You get to drive around LA in the middle of the night reminiscing about goofy things that happened to you when you were young.