I could unpack and organize all this at 4 a.m., or I could just contemplate doing so.

Greetings from California!!!!!!

I’m feeling extra peppy because a) I love the magical Bay Area, how did I ever leave it for so long, there are baby birds chirping outside my window!!! and b) It’s been six days since I’ve been back and I’m still waking up at 4 every morning and only surviving these long days with espresso shots every hour on the hour!!!!!

Because, I made a mistake. I slept on the flight home. The whole flight, all 11 hours from Paris to SFO. That’s just what happens when you score big with an entire row to yourself. Plus I may or may not have slipped two sleeping pills into my complimentary ginger ale. (Wine.) They had no personalized TV screens on a TRANSATLANTIC FLIGHT, so in that case, sleeping pills to ward off impending panic attacks just make sense.

Thing is, you’re supposed to sleep on flights going from the U.S. to Europe. That way you arrive in the early morning fresh and doe-eyed and ready to see the 3,000 cathedrals in any given European city. But on the way from Europe to the States, you force yourself to stay up so that when you get home, you crash at a reasonable bed-time hour and don’t spend the next 6—28 days waking up at f*!#ing 4 a.m.

I’ve learned a lot in my travels, spanning languages and customs and tapas-sharing etiquette, but how to avoid jetlag still alludes me. I even took a special vitamin-mineral-magic potion that claims to banish jetlag, and nada. Luckily I’m resourceful, or maybe just hyperactive, so instead of crying out from boredom and loneliness at 4 a.m., I’ve figured out some ways to stay busy. I hope you find the following list helpful; consider it your Plan B once it’s too late to study up on how to actually avoid jetlag in the first place.

What To Do When You Have Jetlag

So you’ve spanned 9 time zones and now you wake up at 4 a.m. every day. I say why fight it? Here are 20 things you can do in the 4 hours you’re alone and awake in this world.

1. Cook and eat an elaborate breakfast, digest, take a two hour hike, and still be home before everyone else’s morning commute.

2. Scroll Craigslist for jobs. Because at 4 a.m. you’re sure to catch the first ones posted! This is tech-centric San Francisco, and techies post jobs at 4 a.m. because they’re not allowed to sleep. It’s company policy.

3. Give your guy in Spain a morning wake up call. It’s 1 p.m. his time; he could use the gentle nudge out of bed.

4. Do crunches. You let any exercise regimen fall by the wayside in Spain, but maybe if you do crunches from now until everyone else wakes up, for the duration of your jetlag, you can get a 2-pack!!!

5. Talk to yourself in Spanish to keep up the language skills, and because no one is awake at this time to judge you for talking to yourself.

6. Mentally map out the location of the peanut butter cups and pita chips at Trader Joe’s. Your first visit to the grocery store since you’ve been back is cause for celebration, but you’ll want to go in prepared. It’s not like Spanish supermarkets, that only stock ham and digestive cookies. This could be sensory overload.

7. Unpack. . . . Nah, that’s best done in daylight hours.

8. Draft cover letters in your mind. Grow indignant that you should even have to send a cover letter!! You’d be perfect for this job, can’t they just know that???

9. No really, unpack. Maybe then you wouldn’t trip over your suitcase handle on the way to pee every night.

10. Compute exactly how much you’d be willing and able to spend on rent in San Francisco, before you’d have to resort to dumpster diving for your daily meals. Then add $400 to that figure to keep things realistic.

11. Feel solidarity with the recycling truck guys. You used to hate them when the sound of breaking glass would wake you up every Thursday at 5, but now it’s like kinship. There’s someone else out there with you, wide awake in the darkness.

12. Plan out the most delectable dinner you could cook your parents that night, since you’re so happy to see them and grateful they took you in again. But first make sure the ingredients are on their dime.

13. Calculate how much more money you would have had you exchanged your euros to dollars five months ago.

14. Look up flights to anywhere, because your fingers navigate Skyscanner’s webpage using pure muscle memory now, so you don’t need to exhaust what little mental energy you have at this hour.

15. Binge-watch Netflix, because you’re now back in the States so they can’t block you from their streaming site. Also, the majority of their free movies available for stream will put you right back to sleep anyway.

16. Unpack for chrissake, you ran out of clean underwear 4 days ago.

17-20.        . . . .

Sorry, just dozed off. Jetlag’s brutal.

About The Author

Jenny

Jenny Marshall studied Language, Culture, and Society at the University of California Santa Barbara, and now teaches English in Spain. Here she writes about the intersection of language and culture, and lives a life translated by travel.