Hey y’all, I made it here to Sydney in one piece, and received a very warm welcome from Paul Morrissey, my host at Campion College. Paul and the college are really going above and beyond the normal bounds of hospitality to make me comfortable. It’s a nearly 15-hour flight from Los Angeles to Sydney (plus, for me, about five hours’ total traveling time from Baton Rouge to LAX, via DFW). They sprang for a business-class ticket for me, so I would be able to lie down flat and get some sleep. I have a bad back and chronic neck pain, and I never get off a transcontinental flight without feeling bad. Flights to Europe from the East Coast are half as long as this Australia flight, so it would have been really hard to have made this trip work otherwise. I am really, really grateful to my hosts for being willing to make it more comfortable for me to travel. Being able to sleep comfortably, and to wake up without pain, makes a huge difference. Thank you!

But man oh man, is this 15-hour time difference playing havoc with my sleep rhythms. I arrived early this morning and grabbed about 90 minutes of the most intense sleep I’ve had in years. It was as if I had been drugged. Got up and had lunch with my host Paul. I was all stumbly-wumbly walking into a cafe for lunch, though two big cups of coffee seem to have stabilized the situation. I’m about to go record a radio interview. Who knows what I’ll end up saying. I’ll probably go into full Tracy Jordan meltdown mode, except talking about the patristic age, and why I’m mad at American Airlines for not providing me with an Emotional Support Koala, despite my business class ticket:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sycfsbu0sys]