If I have to type Socrates' name one more fucking time, I'm going to scream, I swear it. I'm just about halfway done with the paper I'm writing -- it's due Monday, and it's currently just a few minutes past midnight on Sunday morning. Oh yeah, and I work all of Sunday. I don't know why the hell I always have to be procrastinating right up to the very end. My paper sucks so much. I've got forty more pages to read, and six pages or so more to write. Argh! I blame all of this on Plato. Fuck Plato. And not in a nice wholesome way.
Okay, screw it. I'm too pissed off at ancient Greek dead people to work on my paper anymore tonight. It'll either get handed in like it is, or I'll have a burst of inspiration and make the whole thing beautiful when I wake up in the morning. Whatever. Right now, I don't even care. Right now, I'm going to take my mind off all of this crap and write an entry.
At least this journal doesn't require much in the way of thinking. I guess you'd probably figured that out by now.
Well, about a month ago, Jake broke his glasses. It was really a very weird occurrence. He noticed that they looked sort of bent, and when he picked them up, they sort of just... well, broke into two pieces.
From my perspective, this really wasn't any huge deal. Compared to mine, Jake's vision is damn near perfect. When I look through his glasses, it's like looking through window panes; there's like, NO change. But Jake has been freaking out for the past few weeks. For one, he's started squinting at the television and grunting occasionally when he doesn't see some nuance in some sitcom actor's arm movement, or something. Also, he claims to be unable to read road signs, although I suspect some of this blindness may be affected.
Now, pardon me if I sound a little bit unsympathetic. The thing is, I didn't see stars until I was seven years old. I thought they were sort of like dragons. You mother told you they were real, so you believed in them to make her happy. When I was four, my family took a trip to the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee, and my dad kept pointing out the "magnificent" clouds rising up off the mountains. I didn't see any clouds. Or smoke. I kept asking why they called them the "Smokey Mountains," and everybody sort of regarded me as though I were the dumbest four-year-old in the world. But, REALLY, I didn't see any smoke. This was when I was FOUR. By the second grade, I was wearing my first pair of glasses.
When I was a kid, I was totally obsessed with my eyes. I can't really explain this, although I have a couple of theories. When I was maybe eight or nine, my mom gave me a children's book called "Follow My Leader," about a kid who get hit in the face with a fire cracker and went blind. The kid got a guide dog, which he named Leader. For some reason, I think I thought I would get a lot of attention if I went blind like that. I was the oldest of three, and my youngest brother was way cuter than me, so he was ALWAYS getting all the attention. So, around the age of eight or nine, I decided to will myself to be blind, so that I would get attention. Something like that. It's sort of hard to remember, much less understand, what the fuck was going on in my head as a kid.
I even learned Braille. Really, I did. I don't remember it now, really, except for the "e" and the "i," which were very easy to mix up.
Maybe I really did will myself to go blind. I mean, maybe that really is what happened. Who knows. I know I didn't have great sight to begin with, since I couldn't see stars or smokey mountains, but how else can you account for my horrible vision NOW?
I have not seen my bare face in a mirror since I was eight. I cannot walk to the mailbox without my glasses. I cannot read without them -- like, there's NO way I can read without them. When I go to the eye doctor and they ask me to read line number nine on the eye chart, I say, "what chart?" I mean it; I haven't seen the big "E" since I was maybe eleven. Oh yeah, and most airplane windows are thinner than my lenses.
My mother attributes much of this to genetics, but also to my insatiable habit of reading to fall asleep. I didn't used to have a lamp in my bedroom as a kid, so I had to read by the light from the hallway bathroom. She's probably right. There's no REAL way to will yourself to go blind.
Whatever. Okay, you're probably laughing at me at this point, thinking, "whoever heard of a kid who WANTED to go blind?" Well, I didn't really WANT to go blind, it was just a stupid fantasy. And besides, nobody actually wants to WEAR a retainer in third grade, but all the kids think they're cool shit, and anybody who has one gets to show it off, so all the kids claim to want one... You see what I'm getting at here?
Anyway. Jake and I went to LensCrafters today. Jake picked out a new set of frames, and the LensCrafters people still had his old prescription on file. The frames he picked are big and dorky and brown, but I like them. Jake refers to them as, "the Clark Kent glasses." I think this is very cute.
I've had my own glasses for the past eight years. This was because I pitched a fit when my dad tried to buy me a pair of glasses at Walmart. Every single set of frames was ugly as shit. Like, bright purple with little yellow ladybugs on them -- shit like that. I pitched an absolute fit, and demanded to be taken to a REAL glasses store. There, I promptly picked out the most expensive ones in the store (years later, my friend Nathan would taunt me mercilessly about my one and only article of designer attire). My dad relented and bought the glasses, on the condition that I use these frames for at least five years. For the past eight, I've been walking around with five hundred bucks hanging off my nose.
There are two things I believe in paying full price for. One of them is shoes. Shoes are always on your feet, and they've got to be comfortable or you get whiny and the quality of your life plummets through the floor. The other is glasses. They sit ON YOUR FACE, f'gahd's sake! People judge faces before they judge much of anything else, and I refuse to have purple and yellow Walmart ladybugs crawling around my damned eyes. Five hundred bucks is not a big deal, really. Or, it shouldn't be.
Well, it's been EIGHT YEARS. My lenses are scratched to hell, and the frames are sort of disintegrating behind the ears... Plus, you're supposed to have an eye examination every two years, at least, until you're 25 or so.
So, for shits and giggles, and because I haven't had new glasses in EIGHT YEARS, I poked around at some frames while Jake was parading around, Clarke Kent style.
And I found a pair that was sort of cute. And I'll be damned, they didn't look that bad on me. Actually, they didn't look like much of anything on me. It almost looked like I only had TWO eyes, instead of four.
I signed myself in for an eye exam. First things first; they checked my current glasses to see what the prescription was. When the woman wrote it down on her little chart, there were numerous digits. As in, you know how normal people have 20/20 vision? Let's just say that I have way, way more digits than just those four. I said: "is that bad?" The receptionist girl raised an eyebrow and sort of shuffled her feet. Behind her, the doctor said, "Yeah. It is."
So, they gave me all sorts of tests. They had me look into various machines and tell them which letters I could read. And, "let me know when you can see the picture of the barn coming into focus." I kept asking them if these were trick questions. They laughed and thought this was utterly hilarious. Come to think of it, so did I. Whatever. So I have the gimpiest eyes any 23-year-old has ever had...
Well, several things came out of this examination... First, I learned that my eyes have not actually changed much at all in the past EIGHT YEARS, and if anything, they've gotten a tiny bit better... Weird, huh?
Second, I have two visual quirks -- aside from extreme nearsightedness -- that not everybody has... First, I learned that not everybody sees the veins in their eyes when somebody's shining a bright light into their eyes. I've always been enthralled by those weird little vein-like specters than appear when somebody's pointing a flashlight at your eyes, so I had to ask the doctor. She said, "yeah, those really are veins. Not everybody can see them, but some people can."
Well, that made me feel pretty damned special.
But not as special as the other thing she told me... I asked about another phenomenon I'd noticed... Sometimes, when I stare at the sky or any well-lit, pale background, I'll see these little tiny, clear circular things floating in my vision. I can sort of make them go up and down, if I want to, and they're always there if I'm paying attention. Well, I used to think that I was somehow magical, and could see the molecules of air in front of my eyes. I used to think that I could even make them dance, and that was why they sort of went any direction I wanted them to go. Damn, I thought I was special. Well, more recently, I've sort of been thinking maybe I'm sort of a lunatic, or that I really am going to go blind someday. Something awful like that. Well, the doctor told me that these "floaters" (and that's what they're called) are common, but especially in people with bad eyesight. She said I wasn't seeing molecules in the air, but tiny cellular particles that are IN my eyes. So, I can't actually see molecules, but I CAN see cells.
Personally -- refute this all you want, but I'm sticking to my guns here -- I think that this really is magic.
Anyway...
So, happily, Jake and I received an inside tip about an upcoming sale on glasses, so we'll be ordering them a little later and saving a shitload of money. That'll be nice. It'll also be nice to see the world without scratches.
I'm tired. I'm going to bed now.
Love,
~Helena*