just the eyes

here you have my new specs.

perception

so I have worn corrective lenses for the past 20 years and I never have worn contacts. Until this week. Three days ago I ventured forth into the world without a pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of my nose, and the experience was.... disconcerting.

First of all I keep feeling like I'm forgetting something. I keep touching my nose where my glasses sit and finding only...nose.

However, I absolutely LOVE that when I want to put my sunglasses on, I just yknow, put them on. No fiddling with cases, no switching out pairs. And when I want to take them off...oh great heavens above, I simply slip them up on top of my head! This ease and convenience is exactly what I was hoping to experience when I decided to try contact lenses.

I think, this morning, I put the right one on inside-out. It was kind of bugging me, and I couldn't see from it as clearly as I would like. I still can't, in fact, but since I fiddled with it it's a little better. I think the prescription is a little off. My eye doctor told me that my eyeballs are a little more steeply curved than the average eyeball, which means getting contacts that fit will be a bit more challenging. Not impossible, but not simple. Of course, those of you who have read my blog know that almost nothing in my life is simple, so why should my eyeballs be?

The hardest thing to get used to about wearing contact lenses is how my face looks without glasses. Asada, geekboi that he is, seems to like his nerdy library girl bespectacled. I wonder if it is harder now, at age 35, at a stage in my life when I am quite comfortable with my appearance, to readjust to such a change in my face, than it was when I got glasses at age 15. Fifteen, an age at which it is nearly impossible to be comfortable with anything about yourself...a terrible time, really, to start wearing glasses. But after 20 years I'm pretty used to it. In fact, at the same time as I got these contacts, I also picked out new frames for the first time in 3 years. They aren't ready yet but I'm looking forward to wearing them because they're very nice.

I guess I've just afforded myself some more choices, about how I perceive myself, and how I am perceived by the people around me. That's kind of cool.

I have concluded that I should not own a car.

After owning it for not even two months, I managed to crash my new car. It is my very first accident ever, and it was totally my fault. I rear-ended someone who had stopped ahead of me for an occupied crosswalk. The pavement was wet and my tires didn't catch and I slid right into her. My front end is crunched, although my headlight didn't even break so maybe it isn't all that bad.

For some reason I'm kind of circumspect about all this. While I recognize the "victim" statement in the title of this post, I actually feel prepared to deal with the insurance company (hopefully tomorrow, when I happen to have a day off work), find an auto body shop that can do the work quickly and as cheaply as possible, and just move on, rather than wallowing in any kind of self-loathing.

That self-blame is lurking around the edges of my consciousness, but I hope to smother that spark before it smoulders into flame.

scent sense

I don't claim to be very fashion-savvy (in fact, quite the opposite), but I do think I know a little bit about scent. At least, I have a pretty sensitive nose.

There are two women I work with who seem to have very misguided notions when it comes to personal fragrance. One is a woman who wears a very large dose of something extremely heavy, which she trails in her wake everywhere she goes. Also she sits in a cloud of it any time she is still for any length of time (which unfortunately really reminds me of the image of Pigpen from the Charlie Brown cartoons).

The other I don't smell very often--mostly first thing in the morning, which leads me to believe that she wears something that tends to wear off pretty fast. But when I do catch a whiff of it it reminds me of a men's cologne. Not one of the good ones either, but the cheapies you often find in scent strips in cheesy magazines. I know that some men's fragrances smell just as good (or better) on women as they do on men, but this woman isn't the most feminine person to begin with, and it makes me wonder.

I try to use scent to enhance something about myself. My personality, my sexuality, my social outlook, my outfit. What does that mean if you apply it to the woman who wears a scent that is clearly masculine? Perhaps that's a judgment call and she doesn't perceive it as masculine at all. Or the one who walks around in a cloud of heavy scent all the time? That woman I think must have a very dull sense of smell. No matter what fragrance I choose to wear, I wear a very little of it. It's ironic with perfume because the rule is, if you can smell it yourself, you're wearing too much...right? So why choose something you like yourself, if you can't even smell it?

Nerd story.

okay so I had the following conversation with my daughter while we were in the car driving to school yesterday morning.

j: I've been having a math fantasy.
k: oh?
j: yes. Do you want to hear it?
k: well okay. Only if you want to share it with me.
j: I do.
k: shoot.
j: my fantasy is that Ms. S [her teacher at school] tells me that because I'm taking math at gifted learner [summer challenge program], I don't have to do any more math homework this year!
PAUSE
k: you realize what that fantasy makes you, right?
j: what?
k: a NERD!
j: oh that. I already was a nerd!