Australian Time Travel

[Little Miss Risk]

There is a strange thing that happens when you travel to Australia, I've found. I left Vancouver on the first of December and arrived in Perth on the third. Somewhere over the Pacific, I travelled forward in time and completely lost a full 24 hours, probably somewhere over Jakarta.

It's interesting that this happens because it all has to do with crossing the international dateline, because there is a point on the globe where one day starts and so it has to finish. It doesn't really change the fact that some of us being scientific romanticists are looking at it as travelling backwards/forwards in time.

The inside of a time machine?

So while your losing a day, and not just to the time it takes to get to Australia, your also doing it with an airplane full of other people. I used to think the idea of moving backwards and forwards in time to be a little more interesting instead of seeing people waiting in line to empty their bowels, hassling the flight attendants, and failing to keep their offspring contained and quiet (seriously, you can't have pets in the cabins but kids are allowed?). So while you're trying to figure out how to sneeze copiously on the person wearing the H1N1/SARS mask, you are being moved back and forth through theoretical time. I would have liked to have gone further back in time, had the option been available, but our time-travel technology has only progressed so far to doing on a 24 hour basis. Kind of like the way we have genetic cloning up to a point, but I still can't have an identical copy of myself made that I can pass off as my 'evil' twin.

It's not less unsettling to talk to someone in the northwest hemisphere and realize that they are talking to someone in the future and your, technically, talking to someone in the past. It's all kind of disturbing. Kind of like when you start to think about "perfect" numbers and, how the smallest is 6 but the next one is 28.

Oops, looks like I broke my own reality again...

My head hurts. Time to go throw some bread to the wild parrots.

Little Miss Risk