Those red LED lights

There cannot be a worse feeling than lying in a hotel room, staring at the red clock LED lights and seeing minutes disappear from precious sleep time.
I have come to the conclusion that the effects from overseas flights usually don't hit you until the 2nd night. My first day is one where I lose a night of sleep and muscle my way through the day working on adrenaline and then hit the sack and fall asleep from pure exhaustion.
Day 2 is usually a bit more consistent during the day but my body just doesn't want to shut down at midnight European time which is 6pm NY time. And this is where my story starts.

11:30am. Watch CNN as I lay down in bed,watching Larry King give a Michael Jackson memorial blow-by-blow

12:30am. TV off while I stare at the ceiling, catching glimpses of the clock.

1:30am. I turn on CNN back on to watch that weird British guy dissect spending sprees at high-end PAris hotels.. I wonder who this guy really is, maybe a MI6 spy or maybe just the British Al Roker.

2:30am. TV back off, thoughts race through my mind about work, my fantasy football draft, my mortgage, baby Righetti. My heart rate is at about 150 beats per second. I calculate that if I fall asleep right now I can still have 4 1/2 hours of sleep, I believe this is what US servicemen get by with during combat tours.

3:30am back to CNN, not surprisingly the Nikkei index opens down. Watch the same Larry King piece I saw 2 hours before but also see some study about people who fly often and their propensity to get some kind of clogged vein thing..

4:30am can't keep my mind off this clogged vein midair scenario and desperately I start to count sheep but realize that I can't remember what a sheered sheep looks like. With only 2:30 possible hours of shut-eye, I wonder when delusions would set in.

5:30am still tossing, eyes tired but now so concerned that I won't wake up in the morning that I get up to make sure my alarm is set.
I wonder if anybody else has noticed the irony in the fact the CNN logo uses the same exact shade of red as the LED lights in hotel alarm clocks.

7:00am. Alarm goes off

I have watched more CNN at 3am in a hotel room than all the other times in my life watching CNN combined.
I remember back in 1998 that I was awake at about 3am in Europe when Larry King stopped his show to announce that Mark McGwire had hit homerun 62. Another time I was awake to see the entire Bush-Kerry debate live and more hours then I care to think about have been spent watching the asian stock markets open, worldsport and those weird British guy expose's.

Regardless my life sucks
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