My wife rarely opts for this approach. Her own method of fighting off the effects of jet lag is to do a million little jobs that seem to me like Day 3 or Day 4 jobs, but to each their own. The goal is really not to nap too much (an hour or two at the most) and then go to bed at a normal time (or as close to it as you can manage).
I decided the best way to kill some of that afternoon time was to watch Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Which was clearly expecting too much from myself.
As you may recall if you read this post, I secured myself a copy of this movie via iTunes in the hopes of watching it on the plane from Boston to San Francisco on December 28th. Because buying it was cheaper than renting it, I now own the movie.
I had hoped to charge my laptop during the flight in order to sustain enough battery life to watch the 163-minute movie, only maybe 37 minutes of which I could watch without the battery going dead on that four-year-old device. And there was indeed an outlet at my seat, it just didn't bring the charge symbol up on my laptop when I plugged it in. I shut the laptop off right quick, wanting to make sure that if the issue were related to the laptop itself, I'd have enough battery left to give the thing its last rites when I arrived. But of course it charged fine again in California, meaning plane charging was probably only up to snuff for smaller items like phones and tablets.
I made no other attempt to watch DNETMFTEOTW (still love this abbreviation) while in California, and now returning to Australia, suddenly I am down to my final 11 days before my rankings close. That means if I want a window of time to watch the whole thing in one sitting, I'd have to start early one weekday night, carve out some time on a weekend afternoon, or -- lightbulb going off -- watch it right now on the rule-free Return to Australia Day.
The good news was that from starting it at around 5 p.m., in the hope of finishing it before dinner, I was really giving myself the entire rest of the day before I went to bed to watch the whole thing. The bad news was that I required that entire time, meaning a hypothetical viewing of the new Wallace & Gromit movie at night would need to wait for another day. The worse news was that this is not the sort of action-packed, plot-driven movie that provides an effective defense against the body's desire to succumb to sleep, and the even worse news is that it is in Romanian.
So without doing an in-depth analysis of this film and its merits, let's just say it was probably an even poorer decision to try to watch this while staving off delirium than it was to try to watch RaMell Ross' Nickel Boys starting at nearly 11 p.m. the other night after margaritas. And the outcome was significantly worse.
From that 5 p.m. start time to when I picked myself up off my garage couch at about 7:30 to start making dinner for my kids, I watched about an hour and 40 minutes of the movie, and very little of it at a high quality of absorption. The first 45 minutes were probably the best, as I also ate a bag of Gardetto's Snack Mix that was intended for the plane but never got eaten. Can't return to my diet on Return to Australia Day. That's definitely a Day 2 job.
Once that snack was gone, I started taking the little ten-minute naps I take when I start watching a movie too late at night. I set a ten-minute timer on my phone and then fall deeply to sleep for a very short amount of time. Each time the timer goes off, I decide whether I can return to the movie or if I need another ten minutes. And of course every time yesterday I needed another ten minutes, though I knew what the goal was so I mostly returned to watching the movie, with the sort of poor quality absorption I mentioned earlier.
I had indeed already had the nap you are allowed to take, and thank goodness for my job-doing wife, who capped it at two hours for me. I was very disoriented and thought it had only been one hour. But that meant that every little sleep I did now was, in theory, the sort of thing that might wreck my full night's sleep. So I had to fight it even if watching DNETMFTEOTW were not the goal.
After our dinner and an episode of Futurama, in which my focus shifted to trying to keep my older son from ruining his night's sleep, I returned to the same comfortable couch in the garage to watch the final hour of the movie. A significantly large chunk of this hour is a single shot of a family being interviewed for a workplace safety video. Although I may have taken some of the ten-minute naps in which I pause the movie -- I can't really remember at this point -- I was more likely to just be nodding off, and each time I awoke, being surprised to see that the same shot was still going on.
At this point, this was just a confirmation that the whole thrust of the movie was not really working for me. The reason I'd tried to find a good window of time to watch this movie, ultimately failing utterly in that regard, is that it shared things in common with two previous #1 movies for me. In length and in featuring a single working woman as its protagonist, the movie reminded me of 2016 #1 Toni Erdmann. In country of origin (and I guess also in length), the film reminded me of 2013 #1 Beyond the Hills.
DNETMFTEOTW did not, unfortunately, work for me the way those movies did. In an excerpt from his review included in the film's Wikipedia entry, The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw describes it as a "freewheeling essay-movie-slash-black-comedy," and indeed that's a good encapsulation. Sometimes a movie with that description would work for me, but in this case it did not.
In the same Wikipedia entry, I noted that the acclaim for the movie is nearly universal, meaning I'm the idiot who didn't love it the way everyone else did. However, I think I would have been that idiot even if I'd watched it wide awake in one uninterrupted sitting, so I'm not beating myself up too much for the jet lag viewing.
We finish with two more bits of good news. One is that my long nap and my shorter naps did not impact my sleep in the slightest. I slept straight through from 10:30 until I had to relieve myself at about 3 a.m., and then slept through again until I had to relieve myself again at about 5:30. I almost never get up to go to the bathroom once during the night, let alone twice, but the sleep around that was pure and sound.
I guess the second bit of good news is sort of related to the first, which is that the "start" of jet lag referenced in the subject of this post may also be its end. Although it's too early to tell how my body will react to an first entire day back in Australia, and I do still feel the remaining vestiges of yesterday's delirium, the first hurdle of the first night's sleep has been cleared with flying colors, and that's what always worries me the most. Being awake at 2 a.m. with no feelings of realistic hope about getting back to sleep is what I fear the most from jet lag, and if it didn't happen on the first night, it doesn't seem particularly likely that it will start on the second. And hopefully that means that whatever I watch tonight will be watched with greater focus and a greater potential to be satisfying. (Will probably be my first trip to the theater to see one of the new releases I need to fit in before my deadline. Maybe Nosferatu.)
There's also a piece of good news related to the movie itself. Since I own DNETMFTEOTW, there is every easy opportunity for me to go back and try to watch it again in the future, to see if it works better for me, to see if its long-term reputation can improve for me despite a 2024 ranking that will not be particularly elevated. In the movie, the main character played by Ilina Manolache is herself suffering from sleep deprivation as she works 16-hour days for her job collecting interview subjects for the safety video. Although that should have totally put me on her wavelength yesterday, maybe I'll be more on it when I can see things more clearly.
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