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.

The Avalon

I bought a box set of Hitchcock movies a while ago and we’ve been making our way through them. We watched The 39 Steps recently and it reminded me that the first time I saw this movie was with my grandmother, who I called Mammy, that having been the way I pronounced grandma as a 2 year old. I was the oldest grandchild and as such I got grandparent-naming privilege that is often bestowed on the first grandchild. I’ve known quite a few people whose grandparents nick names are the result of the same poor pronunciation process. Anyway, she was a real character. Born around 1919 in a tiny town called Grantsville, about 60 miles west of Salt Lake City on the edge of the desert that stretches between Salt Lake and Reno. At that time Grantsville couldn’t have had many more than 1000 people and she said that growing up she knew everyone and their dog.

She was enamored with Hollywood and movie stars, going once or twice a week to Grantsville’s little movie theater as a girl. It was an incredible escape for a poor girl in a Depression-era hardscrabble little town whose economy was at that time largely based on the Western Pacific railroad, salt extraction from the lake, and cattle and sheep ranching on land perhaps best left to sagebrush. She was a fantastic and very funny person who loved to laugh and was as positive and supportive as anyone I’ve known. Her mother probably spoke more Swedish than English though Mammy claimed she only knew “tack sa mikket” (phonetic), which was all I ever learned and apparently means thank you. Anyway, once I was a little older, maybe 8 or so, my sister and I would go and spend 3 weeks or so with them each summer. It was fantastic and we always looked forward to it.

One of the great memories I have was going with Mammy and grandpa to the Avalon Theater on State Street in Salt Lake City. The theater wasn’t anything particularly special, but it was an old style theater with one big screen. It showed only old movies, most often in double features and it cost 25 cents. We, not having lots of money, would buy snacks and drinks at a normal grocery store and sneak them in Mammy’s purse. It was Mammy that taught me that a woman’s purse was a sort of sanctum sanctorum, never to be violated with out specific permission and even then very cautiously. This rule and the attitude that lay beneath it served us well in our snack smuggling trade. The drinks we took in were usually in glass bottles, which were pretty common back then.

One night during a movie, Mammy finished her bottle of Pepsi (Pepsi and absolutely not Coke was the undisputed drink of choice for Mammy) and set it on the ground under her seat. A few minutes later, perhaps in a swoon at the entrance of Clark Gable, Gene Kelly or Errol Flynn, she accidentally kicked the bottle over and it proceeded to noisily bump and roll its way all the way down the floor of the theater. We all played dumb as people huffed at the racket. We still laugh about this, years after her death.

Anyway, I remember seeing The 39 Steps with her as a kid at The Avalon, being totally spooked and loving Hitchcock movies ever since.

Notorious

We watched this movie again recently. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. This is the disturbed and twitchy Cary Grant of the Hitchcock films he did and not the goofy romantic comedy Cary Grant. And Ingrid Bergman… Rio looked so clean and elegantly exotic – every one dressed up for day to day life. Great stuff.

I remember when I was in high school there was a theatrical re-release of a series of Hitchcock movies – Rear Window, The Man who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, etc. A new one would come out every 3 or 4 months. I would rally my friends to go see them and they were great on a big screen. They weren’t at too many theaters, but I remember going to an older theater on Hollywood Boulevard, which hadn’t been cleaned up at that time. My friends were pretty reluctant at first, but after seeing one of these on a big screen people started wanting to go. Plus it was a little offbeat, which had an appeal to a certain sort of LA high school kid. LA was a fun place to grow up.

Boys' Glee

I bought a CD recently of some choral songs by a Cambridge University group. As I listened to it one weekend morning while doing some cleaning up I heard an arrangement of “The Lord is my Shepard” that I had sung in 7^th grade boys’ glee club. I don’t think I had heard it since then but it was really lovely and it brought back memories. The Walter Reed Junior High School 7^th grade boys’ glee club was a strange thing in that it was cool to be in it. All my friends were in it also. After boys’ glee you could do choir in 8^th and 9^th grade. This didn’t have quite the cache, but that was somewhat offset by the fact that choir was coed. The singing thing sort of diminished in coolness after 7^th grade, plummeting in high school. I decided to take computer class in 8^th grade instead of choir, drawn in by the allure of the punch cards that were the staple of junior high computer classes at that time (this was slightly pre-Radio Shack TRS-80s). Anyway, it was a really nice arrangement. I can’t even imagine a public school group in the U.S. singing “The Lord is my Shepard” now. I remember hearing that Mr. Kennedy, the glee club and choir teacher, died of AIDS not long after I graduated from high school. That was not uncommon in L.A. in the mid-80s.