I doze off to Interstellar in one country, wake to hot food over the Pacific Ocean, and land in another country halfway across the world two days later. The buffering day exists, but only in transit.

Then, reversing that trip, I live most of a day, take off at 7:55pm, travel 15 hours in the air, and arrive at 8:10pm on the very same day. Bonus hours in transit, reclaiming almost everything I lost, arriving 15 minutes after I left. It’s common for frequent travelers, and I’ve done this specific trip over 24 times (SFO → KUL), but it’s still a bit of a mind-bender.

It’s the closest feeling to time travel we can get: moving forward in time, bypassing hours, and moving backward, clawing them back. Interstellar trades decades for an hour on a distant planet. I just trade a day.

Jet lag is the toll. My body hasn’t caught up to where my mind already is, still trying to gain or lose that time. Sleep slams into me in the middle of the afternoon and I’m ravenous in the middle of the night. I feel like Coop when he wakes on the station that orbits Saturn, a person out of time.

Recently

I revived my old photo blog, where recent entries from the trip Jen and I took to Malaysia above are posted. Visit absenter.org, and if so inclined, the backstory of its revival.

Aphera, the photo editor I co-create, launched this past summer. To be clear, it’s not a vibe-coded, one-shot rip/replica of Lightroom. Aphera is its own thing: keyboard-driven, lightning-fast, from-scratch pipeline, and a method which accelerates your time enjoying editing and your images. We’re proud of it. And we just launched a new website. I’d love for you to try it if you have a Mac and care about your photography.

Thanks for reading. Questions, comments, and replies are always welcome.

Naz.