Lord I gots the vapours

I had a most unusual (for me) experience yesterday at work.
The track drapes in the front room were mussed and the folk asked me to try to fix that. So I got up and took a look, and determined that the hooks on two of the folds were out of the little plastic part of the track. Incidentally I absolutely HATE those kind of curtains. Why oh why do we need to make something as simple as a piece of fabric mechanical? You will never find those in any house I live in, ever!

Anyway, I had to go behind the curtains to try to fix that. That’s when I realized I was dizzy with the kind of dizziness one gets occasionally from standing up too fast. I was talking it through, that I felt dizzy, that I was going to wait a second, then I would reach up again, get dizzy again, all the while still talking about what I was experiencing.

Suddenly I heard a whooshing noise, then a loud a loud clunk, only realizing when my head started to hurt that it had been my head hitting the floor. I was really confused as to how the floor had reached up and smacked me in the head. I sat up and I seemed trapped in some weird cave of white light, white walls and white curtains. I was trying to fight my way out of miles of unending dusty curtains. I was quite disoriented.

I finally got disentangled. I could see the nice, normal, living room. But man did I feel surreal. Poor Mrs. Folk was pretty wigged out. She has pretty severe verbal difficulty due to Alzheimer's so she was having a lot of trouble expressing her discomfiture. Old Mr. Folk seemed to take it pretty philosophically however. Eventually we laughed and laughed, Mrs. Folk and I. Probably because it made her extremely nervous, and aside from the surreal feeling I continued to have for a couple hours, I was really terribly embarrassed. So what to do but laugh?.

I find it odd that embarrassment was the overweening sensation. How could one possibly find anything embarrassing about something as unexpected and uncontrolled as fainting? But that is exactly what I felt, kind of stupid, clumsy, and idiotic. Embarrassment, what a strange, social construct. In retrospect I realize that I spend an awful lot of time either feeling or reliving it. And I hear it’s even worse in some other cultures. I sure wish there was a pill for that.