Market Metaphors, or, Nausea Nightmares

August 13, 2008

Notes to self:
1. Don´t drink the carrot juice if you´re not sure how (or if) the carrots have been washed/peeled.
2. Anti-diarrhea medication on a completely empty stomach may or may not be worth the potential side effects.

I´ve been in bed for two days. Well, no, that´s not entirely true -- I´ve made it to the toilet several dozen times, and this morning I actually managed to get dressed and go out for a whole hour (most of which I spent sitting down), though it took a three-hour nap afterwards for me to recover. But, in essence, I´ve been in bed for two days, recovering from the unpleasant (and, initially, bright orange) side effects of a giant glass of fresh carrot juice I probably shouldn´t have drunk. At least I have a private room, with super-nice Danish neighbors who went to the store and bought me water and crackers in the pouring rain last night.

My main problem the first day and night was nausea. Pain I can handle. Diarrhea I can cope with. Nausea, on the other hand, is a completely different beast, and one I am poorly equipped to fight. I managed to fend it off during the day by remaining horizontal at all times when not in, or on my way to or from, the bathroom, but there was a major battle on Tuesday night, when the fight went from the physical realm to the mental realm, and I had to overcome the nausea in the dream world.

The scene was a Guatemalan textiles market in chaos. My job had something to do with making sense of it, though it was not at all clear how I was supposed to go about it. The only thing I knew was that my ability to keep myself from vomiting in real life was inextricably linked to my ability to sort out this market in dream-life. It was a long, rough night.

Nothing behaved as it should. Piles of scarves, shawls, blankets and other goods covered every surface so that all I could see was a never-ending sea of fabric. I shopped, I haggled, I arranged piles of cloth in different ways, but things always seemed to jump back into place -- or all the way across the market -- as soon as I glanced away, so that my progress was always one step forward, two steps back. After three hours (real time - I was awake enough to look at my clock), I was practically crying with frustration, and had made up my mind to just get up, throw up, and have done with it, but somehow the dream wouldn´t entirely let me go, and sucked me back into the market.

I finally realized that I was going about things all wrong. Rather than simply rearranging things at the market (a mimicry of how the nausea was rearranging my insides), I had to actually get rid of them, to make them disappear so that they could no longer plague me. I became very methodical, working quickly to create piles of similar products and then obliterate them before they could perform their tricks on me. I´m not quite sure how I did this, but it took a huge mental effort. After a while, though, things became a bit more manageable -- I could see patches of ground beneath the piles of cloth, things became easier to organize, somehow simpler, and eventually it reached the point where whoever was in charge was satisfied and let me go. I slept hard the rest of the night (12 hours in total) and woke up weak, sore and mentally exhausted, but nausea-free.

I´m not sure why the Guatemalan textiles market became the metaphor for my nausea; perhaps because it is one of the most complicated, organic, and unfathomable systems I have encountered in Guatemala so far. Thank goodness I didn´t dream about the public transportation system, whichis the other!


08/14/08 Recovering slower than I´d like. Trying to make myself eat something other than crackers. I foresee another day or two in Panajachel.