Spending quality couple time is a serious challenge when little ones come along, so when such an opportunity is arranged, the hopes are high. Matthew and I hadn’t had a “date” in many, many months, so with the romantic holiday coming up, we thought it would be nice to get someone to watch Jocelyn and go out and do something together, an afternoon at the movies sounded nice.
If you’re making the effort and incurring the expense, you want to pick a movie that will benefit from a large screen showing. Naturally we chose Avatar 3D. About an hour into the movie, I started to feel unwell, my stomach was tying up in knots and my head was pounding. I tried taking off the 3D glasses, not watching, but I had to leave the theater. Now a movie ticket in Cali is crazy expensive, even a matinee, so I decided after a breather, to head back in to the show. I didn’t watch much, didn’t put on the glasses, but after about another hour (it’s a long movie), I had to run out of the theater. I’ll spare you the details, they weren’t pretty, and I think I scared a bunch of ladies in the restroom. I couldn’t text Matthew because my phone was in my purse under the seat in the theater, along with my wallet and gum, which I so could have used at that point. So I went and waited in the lobby, as long as I could before I was afraid Matthew might think I was dead and come looking for me, then I went back in for the last 10 minutes. I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see credits roll in my life.
To Matthew’s credit, he kept suggesting we go, but I didn’t want to ruin our afternoon, I didn’t want to make him leave the first movie he’d gone out to in six months. In the end, though, my determination to stick it out made things much worse. If we’d left, we could have just enjoyed our afternoon together, instead of me praying to the porcelain gods and Matthew worrying about me. I’ve suffered from minor motion sickness before, flying, windy roads, but never at the movies. I’ve seen other movies in 3D, though none as motion-intense as Avatar. Turns out the not wearing the glasses thing, which I thought would be helpful, probably made things worse, causing my brain to be even more confused by what it was seeing but not feeling.
When we got home, I did a bit of research. Turns out a lot of people had similar reactions. Motion sickness is a quirk of our anatomy, an unfortunate side effect of biology. Kinetosis, or motion sickness, is caused when there is a disconnect between the stimulatory signals received by your brain. When flying, your body feels you moving, but your eyes do not perceive the motion, confusing your noggin; in a 3D movie, it’s the opposite problem, your eyes tell your brain you’re flying through an alien world, but your inner ear is saying you’re simply sitting in a seat in a theater. These conflicting inputs cause your body to conclude you are under the influence of a toxin; by vomiting you might be able to expel any toxin that’s still in your stomach before it affects you further. Great for poisons in the jungle, not so great for 3D movies.
After our less than stellar attempt at romance, we spent the actual holiday doing family activities. We took Jocelyn to the Little Farm at Tilden Park; she was interested, if a bit frightened of the strangers and huge animals. Later in the day, we went to the tot park and pushed Jocelyn on the swings. All my disappointment over our previous-day’s outing evaporated as she laughed with glee when flying through the air. You see, baby smiles and laughter are addictive to parents, they stimulate the reward centers in your brain, much as drugs do. So here it is, my own personal perfect drug.
P.S. I hope you’ll forgive me for getting a little photoshop happy with the last image, I loved Jocelyn’s smile in it, but as she was moving, the focus was a bit blurry, I did some extreme sharpening and ended up with this, which I thought was pretty groovy.
