spinning

Lord of the Flies

~ thedailydish ~ 6 Comments

When we returned home from the Midwest, the first thing I did was drag my sorry self upstairs to crash out in bed. After nearly 15 hours in the car, it was all I could do. But the first thing my husband did, being the amazing soul he is, was go through the entire house to make sure everything was just as we’d left it. And everything was fine. Save for the flies.

When we left John says he noticed one lone fly bzzzzing round an upstairs room. No big deal. He figured it’d be dead by the time the weekend was over.

HAHAHAHHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAH!!!!

Remember Cutie? My daughter’s runaway hamster?? Yes, I know I haven’t written about him in weeks. But that’s b/c we thought he was still on vacation. Well… he is, except it’s that reeeeeeeaaaalllly long vacation that never ends. Ugh. we can now state w/ fair certainty that Cutie has become banquet to 50,000 flies. So we’ve spent the better part of two days shooing, swatting and otherwise casting out these winged creatures from our happy home. And in tackling this new and vexing challenge, I have noticed something truly profound.

When a fly gets trapped inside, they follow a particular pattern. First, They zoom from room to room looking for an exit. Second, they find a window. They fly back and forth past the window, assessing the possibility of escape. In a last-ditch effort, they begin to fly into the window, over and over, as though their feeble crashes will at last force the glass and they will be free. Eventually, the exhausted fly succumbs to the inevitable, either crawling up into a ball and breathing its last, OR conversely, overcoming its initial aversion and fear and FINALLY allowing me to gently scoop it up and release it out into the world.

Having watched this scenario play out OH SO MANY times over the past couple days, I have been struck by the similarity between humans and flies. These flies leave you wondering. WHAT THE HELL??!! ARE YOU REALLY SO DAMN STUPID?? I AM HERE – ARE YOU BLIND?! MY HAND! It is GUIDING YOU OUT – SEE THERE!! THE OPEN WINDOW!!!! IT’S RIGHT THEEERRRRRREEE!! I AM TRYING TO SAVE YOU, YOU MORON!!!

When a human becomes trapped – and here I am speaking rather metaphorically – so by this I could mean a myriad of things. But when a human becomes similarly “trapped” w/ no hope of escape, their response is very much like the fly. We are stubborn. We are STUPID. We do not want Help. We don’t NEED HELP. Instead we rush round looking for a means of escape. OH! And there it is. But it’s not, not really. No, it’s an impenetrable hurdle. So we bang out heads against the proverbial glass, frustrating ourselves and every conceivable attempt at freedom. And when that *Great Hand from the Sky* reaches down to help, what do we do?? We fail to see it. Or if we do, we RUN THE HELL AWAY.

Sometimes life presents you w/ a metaphor that you just can’t help but notice. I do not profess to be any more in tune w/ the great Cosmos than the next guy, but I can tell you this whole FLY THING has gotten my attention. The past several days have been pretty hard for me. I do not like vertigo. Yes, it is BAD. Having to steady myself constantly against the rotational force of the planet, whilst everyone else goes about their daily business blissfully unencumbered SUCKS. Feeling shitty always puts me in a slightly philosophical frame of mind. SO. Feeling this way, I would just like to say HEY. HEY BIG GUY. If you are up there, pitying me or watching me with amusement, FEEL FREE TO HELP. I am here, just smacking my head against the glass, so You just FEEL FREE to stick that big ol’ mitt out for me already. As long as you’re not going to smash me dead, I_am_YOURS.

Someone stop this crazy thing – I wanna get off.

~ thedailydish ~ 7 Comments

It’s been 3 days since we left the ship and I’m still suffering from motion sickness. The constant bobbing seems to have abated, but I continue having the oddest sensation of falling backward – even when seated – like my head and shoulders have a gravitational attraction to the floor behind me. I also have the persistent sense that things are tilted or slanted. When I walk, the world angles sideways. When standing I feel really off-balance, like I may fall.

It’s definitely getting to me. I try to stay calm and ignore it as much as I can, but frankly it’s not easy. How the hell do you ignore the fact that the whole effing world is skewed?! My personality doesn’t help matters. My normal speed is 50 miles a minute, I bore incredibly easily and can’t sit still to save my life. My husband urges me to rest – but I just don’t do bon-bons and daytime TV! Asking me to lie around all day is equivalent to “let me drill a hole in your head and let your brains ooze out.” I am the suckiest patient ever.

I had some wine the past few nights (to relax as much as anything), and it helped quite a bit. But this morning the carousel was up-and-running and I was really nauseous (and not wanting to spend the day drunk) I ate a bowl of cereal. Immediately the spinning seemed to intensify. WTF?!

Normally when I have this level of dizziness my ear is totally jacked up – meaning my Meniere’s symptoms are terrible: deafness, pressure, tinnitus, the whole shabang. And the episodes almost always have a cause (though whether I can control them is a whole other story). In the case of sodium (aka food) it’s totally up to me, meaning I watch what I eat very carefully. But my ear is also incredibly sensitive to the weather (barometric pressure) and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about that. So, often when we get a quick change of weather (usually fair to rain) I have a spontaneous change in symptoms (fine to bad and then back again). But this is the first time I’ve had the intense dizziness or vertigo without any of the accompanying ear symptoms.

I have been really busy catching up on chores since we got back, and doing a lot of bending over/up/down, so I decided to take a breather and just sit in front of the computer for a little while. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be helping much.

I hate having no control over my own body. . It’s one thing to make the conscious choice of getting wasted or riding the tilt-a-whirl and then paying the price, but this blows. And there’s nothing I can do about it. I have Meniere’s. I can’t change it and it’s not going to go away. But at least I know I won’t always feel as lousy as today. and I love life. So my frame is tilted.. I have to cope the best I can.