My aversion to plagarism has been defeated by my love of a good conundrum.
I am posting this entry on a day that will never exist for me (although I did have to log it against my vacation time at work!)
Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean September 11 became September 13.
But I won't even try to explain it since the definitive explanation was already written by Bill Bryson in the book "In a Sunburned County."
Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the international date line. I left Los Angeles on January 3 and arrived in Sydney fourteen hours later on January 5. For me there was no January 4. None at all. Where it went exactly I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that for one twenty-four-hour period in the history of earth, it appears I had no being.I find it a little uncanny, to say the least. I mean to say, if you were browsing through your ticket folder and you saw a notice that said, “Passengers are advised that on some crossings twenty-four-hour loss of existence may occur” (which is, of course, how they would phrase it, as if it happened from time to time), you would probably get up and make inquiries, grab a sleeve, and say, “Excuse me.” There is, it must be said, a certain metaphysical comfort in knowing that you can cease to have material form and it doesn’t hurt at all, and, to be fair, they do give you back the day on the return journey when you cross the date line in the opposite direction and thereby manage somehow to arrive in Los Angeles before you left Sydney, which in its way, of course, is an even neater trick.
From In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson
I seem to be in good company in my confusion. Read Time Traveling at Stop Design.
See you in Sydney, mate!
Posted by rollingrains at September 12, 2004 12:05 AM | TrackBack