Friday on my mind

Today I experienced an element of culture shock that I had first experienced at about the same time when I first moved to America. The best way to explain this is to tell you what happened this time.

For the past several weeks I've been expecting the delivery of the 114 cardboard boxes and packages with the worldly possessions my wife and I had in New York. The shipment arrived in England a couple of weeks ago and cleared customs soon after that. Earlier this week I received a telephone call from the UK shipping agent to tell me that my stuff would be delivered next Friday. I was asked to call on Thursday to confirm the delivery time.

Today being Thursday I called to see about tomorrow's delivery time, but I was informed by a slightly confused clerk that the delivery was not scheduled for this week but for next week. Whereas in American-English "next Friday" means the next Friday after today, in British-English "next Friday" means next week's Friday.

It took me a while to get used to this difference when I first moved across the Atlantic. So adjusting back to the meaning structure I lived with before 1994 is easier said than done.

Perhaps this is just a personal misreading of the meaning of "next Friday" since I am not a native speaker of the English language...not even the Anglo-Maltese variation. It could be just a simple misunderstanding between me and the shipping company employee who originally communicated the delivery date to me. Whatever it is all I really know now is that the delivery will not happen before next week. And so back to the Zen life we go.

I go to sleep

My most recent transatlantic journey has shown me that my body is certainly older than it has ever been. In some ways that's stating the obvious, but for the first time in over 10 years of transatlantic flights I found myself falling asleep very easily on the plane.

I remember my father's uncle whom we knew as iz-ziju Mabbli, saying (when he was in his late 80s) that the older you get the less sleep you need. I have always considered this to be something to look forward to as I got older, but somehow I'm discovering that this is possibly only true when you're an octogenarian and it doesn't necessarily apply when you're still getting older but at a relatively younger age.

Perhaps it's also because our lifestyles have changed considerably since the days when iz-ziju Mabbli professed the correlation between age and hours of sleep. He died over 20 years ago at a time when people in Malta still didn't fall asleep in front of the TV almost every night or fly round-trips across the Atlantic more than a dozen times in a decade as if they were just visiting another country in central Europe.

I'm not a sleepy person. I strongly believe that we build sleep debts when we sleep less than 8 hours every day. So I suppose this could explain my falling asleep on the plane instead of watching the in-flight movies as I've always done. Then again the movie I was watching on the flight this last trip was a real sleeper: De-lovely with Kevin Kline as the devine Cole Porter.