It has been a solid 13 years, plus a little, since I have had the pleasure of flying across the ocean. Previous versions of myself had always failed to attain any meaningful sleep on these journies. But age 23 and under Michael held much high expectations for what a relationship with the Sandman was supposed to look like. Age 36 Michael holds no such expectations. Routinely joined in the marital bed by various spawns of the union, meaningful sleep often elludes me. In fact, the increasingly adorable now 3-year-old is quite the diva in the dark. As if it weren’t enough to come into our bed and then demand that we retrieve whichever stuffed animal is the flavor of the week, the princess also favors a geometrically awkward horizontal sleep from time to time.

All of this is to say that current me, with my now lowered expectations for what a night of sleep should be, was a smidgen optomistic that maybe a shortened night on row 56 of a Boeing 767 wouldn’t be so bad. But, as you may have figured out by now, I wouldn’t be writing to you like this in the middle of the night over the middle of the ocean if I were peacefully sleeping on my actually quite comfortable neck pillow that my lovely wife purchased for me for the expressed purpose of maybe being able to sleep on the red eye. No, in fact, I am writing run-on sentences because my best sleep tonight has come from placing the minature pillow, gifted to me by Delta, on the minature TV screen in front of me and using that as my bed.