I'm doing 17 things
The whole optometrical process has been a pretty fascinating one. Despite the well-known fact that I’ve had horrible eyesight for years, this is the first time I’ve actually gotten around to doing anything about it.
I’ve actually got pretty good vision coverage with my benefits from work, so there’s no really good reason I’ve put it off until now; just a general hatred of doctors and appointments of all kinds.
My exam was actually a perfectly pleasant experience—the doc even had entertaining banter. The only low point was when she dropped anesthetic into my eyes and then poked them with what looked like a 1950’s TV remote control.
Next came the rather horrendous experience of ordering glasses. I used Kaiser’s shop, which was probably a bad decision, and I had the good and/or bad luck of getting there in the middle of a trunk show.
It was wall to wall craziness, and there was a really wide range of things involved, like “checking in,” which wasn’t something I’d ever had to do in the course of a retail transaction, selecting frames, which I didn’t get any help at all with, and which was pretty confusing, since the store’s ontology was pretty confused—”male, female, discount, boutique” do not form four discrete groups.
Although, come to think of it, it would be interesting to organize a store in a square space with each diagonal representing the range of one of the two dualities. Then you could define a hilarious coordinate system for expense and effeminacy.
Anyway, the upside of the trunk show was that they had a vastly increased selection, which was good, because it was one of the trunk frames I ended up choosing—it was considerably wider than the others, which is important to someone who, like me, has a disturbingly large head. Of course, even with my aforementioned vision coverage, I wound up paying more than I would normally ever consider spending on a given article of clothing, let alone what is technically an accessory, although I’m inclined to think it’s justified.
There are some expected problems—it’ll take me a while to get used to them, and I’m going to need to find a suitable case for them before I inadvertently destroy them. One unexpected problem is that I’m going to need to shave more regularly. (By policy, I do not shave during weekends) Without the glasses, I look like myself regardless of stubble. With the glasses, stubble makes me look like an independent filmmaker.
Now, to the upside. In addition to the fact that, as an uber-nerd, I always wore implicit, psychological glasses, to which these are merely the inevitable physical counterpart, they also accomplish the most astonishing thing: they enable me to see stuff.
Now, since I don’t drive or do anything else that requires long-distance vision, I don’t really need glasses. Nonetheless, the ability to see fine detail on things across the street or on a menu board is quite a revelation for me, although I find myself taking the most interest in the leaves on trees and things of that kind—things which I had lately seen clearly only in photographs I had taken of them. That is pretty fabulous.
