Space, Time, Place

A jetlagged perspective.

~900 words, a five-minute read

The totally unique approach into Singapore, over the Singapore Straits; clearly this is one of the maritime capitals of the world.

Last week I flew back and forth across an ocean to go to a wedding. It’s exciting, dropping in from afar like that. “You must be so terribly jetlagged!” nearly equals as a productive conversation starter in such situations as “So how do you know Joe and Cassandra (hah)?”

(Joe and Cassandra were not their real names. The “hah” is optional.)

There, I was awarded by two excited, type-A friends, the honor of “wedding guest who traveled the furthest distance.” I’m never entirely comfortable with awards, even extra-dumb ones like this. They’re an express ticket to center-of-attention city. Humility is the only way out! “Oh gosh, it’s not about me guys, it’s about Joe and Cassandra. Remember?”

Anyway, I may have traveled the furthest, but I’m certain I didn’t travel the longest. Joe and Cassandra had other guests from lands accessible only by connecting flights. By contrast, Singapore’s astonishing global hub status — achieved in spite of its slightly inconvenient equatorial location where aircraft often don’t benefit from polar shortcuts — is, at present, consecrated by the fact that it’s one end of the longest direct flight in the world. That would be the 19 hour, Singapore Airlines “ultra long haul” that goes all the way to JFK in New York. Throw in some pre-departure commotion with, say, a seatbelt resistant child and the trek easily becomes a full day’s affair. 

“At least it’s direct!” I chuckle to the person in the aisle seat next to me, unsure if I’m audible over the toddler’s shrieking.

In 2025, a 20-hour Qantas Airlines Sydney-to-London flight will dethrone this one as the world’s longest. An article by the BBC notes that the airline will provide a “wellbeing zone” in the lucky airplanes running this route that will “allow passengers to move, stretch and hydrate”. I guess somewhere around the 19.5-hour mark, people apparently start to need more than mere bathrooms and aisles as far as “public space” amenities on airplanes are concerned.

At the wedding reception, and with my newfound powers as Most Jetlagged Attendee, I made my best attempt at incrementally progressing toward my life’s goal of getting the term “city room” (the subject of my last Substack post) into the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Sensing an opportunity to make a clever segue from the painfully humorous airline executive’s description of the move/stretch/hydrate zone, I got more animated, martini in hand, attempting to elicit a stimulating discussion like what is an Airbus A350’s wellbeing zone really but a kind of ultra-compact city room in the sky? Totally utilitarian, oriented toward bodily comfort and ordinary, everyday needs, yet totally controlled and regulated? No democratic ideals in public space up there, I tell you, that’s the price we’ll pay for bottomless Dasani at 35,000’!

It’s an unadjusted idea in a well adjusted crowd. My mileage varied.

Begrudgingly, I must admit to my Singaporean readers: I have high-quality anecdotal evidence that suggests no matter how delightful unique typologies of Singaporean urbanism might be, many Americans are more interested in, let me just call it, the chewing gum thing. I do my best to bring some dignity and clarity to the matter, citing the interview where Lee Kuan Yew responds to a reporter — one who somehow felt moved to suggest to the prime minister that chewing gum correlated with creativity (your guess is as good as mine) — by saying "If you can't think because you can't chew, try a banana.”

Perhaps an even more boss goal than giving “city room” a spot in the OED would be using it to dethrone chewing gum as the immediate American household association of this tropical nation. I’ll do what I can. No promises.

Speaking of distant lands and faraway cultures, I need to try and write something about the Moon.

The Moon. Image Credit: Gregory H. Revera. Link to license.

I say try, because words nearly escape me when I try to capture the feeling I got when I first looked at it from Singapore. Before now, I spent most of my life living in places between 30 and 50 degrees north, latitudinally speaking. Singapore is at 1 degree north, and that’s enough to make the Moon look strangely familiar and unfamiliar all at once. In reality, my body is at something like a 45-degree angle compared to where I used to live, and this tilt is enough to make that grey hunk of rock in the sky look really weird. Entrancingly so. It’s rotated so much it doesn’t even appear to have a man in it. I’d hazard that most people who travel great distances N or S notice this.

(I’ve always thought a cool/useless feature on Zoom would be to twist each participant's window relative to their respective latitude. Of course, it would probably spark controversy about who would get the normal right-side up position (the person talking?), which, given the right mix of folks, could obtain prestige debate status when someone asks what really IS normal?)

Anyway, the Moon thing sure beats the chewing gum thing, as a point of casual conversation about cultural differences. And that’s all I’ve got for now, since I am terribly jetlagged (again) after all, and I better stop before I talk myself out of posting this uncharacteristically whimsical post (Substack is a platform for experimentation, though, right? Right? Hey where are you going?). So it’s time to go to bed, at a 45 degree tilt from a coupla days ago.

Joe and Cassandra, I wish you a lifetime of happiness, full of city rooms, a diversity of Moon perspectives, and lots and lots and lots of chewing gum.

Text and photos (except moon) © 2022 James Carrico