Over the last couple months of working in New York City (and commuting back and forth between New York and LA), I've gotten pretty used to red-eye flights. And I didn't even have to take business class! The whole appeal of business class is to try to lay out and get some sleep, but I get decent sleep in the economy cabin. Something about moving steadily in a car or a bus or a plane, any moving vehicle really, that allows me to sleep peacefully, complementing my natural superpower of sleeping almost anywhere, anytime.
The trick to doing a red-eye flight and getting the maximum value out of it, of course, is the following day AFTER the flight. Anyone can pull an all-nighter or go straight through, but it's quite another task to have to go to work the next day, especially a Monday morning, notoriously one of the most difficult days of the work week. There's a reason they call it a red eye, it's cuz your eyes are bloodshot from getting no to little sleep the night before, have no to little energy, and are still adjusting in some cases to a new time zone.
Keys to braving a red-eye flight:
1.) Get plenty of sleep the day BEFORE taking a red eye flight. "Fill up" on sleep so your body has reserve sleep time in the bank to last through a rough day; nothing worse than getting 2 really nights of sleep in a row.
2.) Don't be enticed by those free movies on flights. Sure they're enticing, you've had a long weekend and watching a movie would be a nice unwind to the weekend. But you're wasting valuable time scrolling through the channels to find something you like! There's a reason red eye flights dim the lights almost immediately once the flight takes off, so people can get to sleep and take advantage of every precious second of the flight. Don't wait for snack service, beverage service, or anyone to alert you that it's bedtime. The ideal situation is to pass out in your seat before the flight takes off, and be awakened by the jolt of the flight landing at your destination. Not even once waking up to pee.
3.) When booking a flight, book it to 11:55PM or sometime close to bedtime, not 9:00PM so you're ready to fall into your seat and sleep. Also beware, especially on Sunday nights (the most common time for red-eyes), the airports are pretty packed.
3a.) Corollary to No. 3: booking flights is like the stock market: obviously booking early and fast is the best way to go, but if you can't do that because of an uncertain schedule there's also times prices actually go down. Jump on the opportunity to buy low, because ultimately just like the stock market, flight prices will go up over time 100% of the time, right up until the time of the flight.
4.) Cut Monday's work day short, go home early and sleep.........for like 12 hours. It'll make all your trouble worth it and have you refreshed ready to go on Tuesday morning (and you may even have some sweet dreams during those 12 hours because your body missed the awesome feeling of sleeping the previous nights- it's like withdrawals from drug usage). Monday's like a sacrificial lamb that you feel like a zombie for.....but no one likes Monday anyway, and you got away with not having to pay for an extra night of hotel and lodging!
5.) Difficult to enact, but to combat the zombie state on the Monday after a red-eye, talk to co-workers or anyone you can get the attention of, to stay awake. It's probably the only time I suffer from not drinking any coffee, but co-workers can keep me awake, or at least make the time go faster. People don't talk to one another enough anyway, at work or at home or anywhere really; I went into the breakroom today at work and 12 people were sitting at different tables all just staring into their phones, dead silence except for tapping of fingers on phones. That's not what human life should be like; we are social animals, and not in the social networking site kind of way. Engage in a conversation, laugh, tell a joke, that'll mitigate jet lag and a case of the Mondays
I got red eyes down so much I even have mastered red eye buses and red eye trains! 2 weekends ago when I traveled to Toronto from New York, I got off work on Friday night, got on a bus, and woke up on Saturday morning in a different city in a different country (however, red-eye buses make pit stops sometimes that slows the momentum of the womb-like state of sleep you get on a plane and forces me awake periodically. Pity.)
While MJ takes 6 months to read one book (she's finally finishing Pachinko), I moved on to another young adult series called "Scythe." Did I mention I love young-adult books? Some adult novels are just too sophisticated, lengthy, use too many metaphors, and appeal to the literary experts too much for my taste; young adult books are much easier reads and use less duanting vocabulary but can have just as good of a story and message. Scythe imagines a world where scientific advances have gone so far that people don't die and instead need to be "gleaned" so that there is a controlled amount of people on earth. The scythes, like the Grim Reaper, are in charge of gleaning people. It's a great look into human morals and a futuristic world where we might have a similar problem, the way health advances are progressing these days. Apparently the first person to live to 200 years old has already been born. It's me! Just kidding. It's not me. But maybe it is me! I feel healthy!
Also, cookbooks (who knew!) can have pretty good info about food. I read the NY Times Bestseller "Thug Kitchen: Eat Like You Give a F*ck" and it's got great info like brown rice is so much more nutritious than white rice. But I think people already knew that.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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