Day 59
Seasickness is caused in the brain, which is getting conflicting signals. While the eyes show a world that is still, our body is sending signals of a moving environment. It especially affects the equilibrium sensors in our ears. The conflict caused the brain to send a general alarm signal to the whole body to stop all activities, particularly the digestion system.
That's why most seasickness is paired with extreme nausea. I figured out today that the kind of seasickness I get is not nausea based. I just get a really, really bad headache. It's like I can feel my equilibrium being thrown off inside my head. My headache is in my ears and is accompanied with an overall feeling of discomfort and fatigue.
It has been crazy rocky all day. Except the word rocky doesn't seem like the correct word to describe it because at times it feels bumpy. Like you were going over pot holes in a car. It's jerky and bumpy and when it does rock it is huge differences. Walking up and downstairs is hard. And when you are going down a hallway the rocking of the ship causes you to speed up and slow down.
So today was spent feeling all weird. I took a nap after class and then visited Molly at the campus store. Then I went with her to the pool bar because she had slept through lunch. She had been wearing the seasickness patch all night but it made her even more nauseous and gave her cotton mouth. Then, when she woke up she found that her left eye, the side the patch was on, was overly dilated and her right eye was normal. She immediately took off the patch but when her eye did not go back to normal after two hours she decided to go to the clinic. It was really freaky when we were outside because her right pupil was a pin prick and the left was all the way dilated. Henry came over to ask if he could have some french fries and completely freaked out when he saw it. He made her stare at him. Then it was fun to show people and have them freak out.
The clinic told her that because she did not have a headache and was not vomiting that they weren't worried about it. Apparently it is a common thing to happen if you touch the patch and then touch your eye, which she did. It could last up to 72 hours. So now she is walked around looking like someone who is on some drugs. And almost the entire left side of her vision is blurry. So much struggle.
At 7:00 we wanted to go to the explorers seminar on Kokology which is a psychological game that reveals how you feel about work, relationship, family, sex and more. But on the way there I caught a glimpse of the mickey shaped electrical tower that is right outside of Orlando projected on the screen in another class room and we ended up sitting in on Nathan's seminar which talked about gender and sex. We watch part of a movie called Mickey Mouse Monopoly which talked about gender in Disney movies and how it is affecting our children. I love to learn more about the things people think Disney is doing wrong and while I agree with the majority of their points I also think that they are putting too much thought into it.
After the seminar we didn’t know what to. We hadn't eaten dinner but we really weren't sure if we were hungry. I ended up getting a smoothie from the pool bar, which was a fantastic choice. I drank the whole thing and still was not really hungry. I was still feeling weird from the rocky ship.
We played Skip-bo and watched the Big Bang Theory until it was time to sleep. We had to set our clocks forward and hour again. We did it two nights ago as well. This means that we are back to being 6 hours ahead of everyone on the east coast. I was lucky enough that the time change fell on A day, the day I get to sleep in. So losing an hour didn’t affect me all that much. And now I am in the same time zone as my parents who are in Paris!
Kellie was inspired by my dad's question and sent me one of her own. She noticed that I get a lot of stuff in port and wonders where I put it all.
Surprisingly, there is a lot of storage space in our cabins. That, and I didn’t bring all that much stuff with me to start. All the post cards I buy get magnetted to the wall and the pins I buy get stuck in a lanyard. I am already on my third lanyard. Although one is dedicated to the pins I bought in Disneyland Paris. There is a roll out basket in the closet that I have put some souvenirs in and if worse comes to worse I can put thing in my suit cases under the bed. The only issue we have run into is were to put dirty clothes. I failed to bring a laundry basket type thing with me so they just kind of end up in a pile. Besides that everything is pretty organized.
In one of the dean's memos there was this quote. It feels really applicable to the countries that we are in now and puts visiting them into perspective:
When you travel remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable its designed to make its own people comfortable.
~Clifton Fadiman
