Contact lenses

I skipped the gym today and picked up my contact lenses from the optometrist's instead. Since it's my first time ever wearing them, I needed to have a one-hour session with one of the employees in order to learn the correct eye-poking technique necessary to insert and remove them, before being trusted with two boxes full of them (just in case I were to become hyper, rip the boxes open, and run around in a circle with contact lenses stuffed up my nose. Maybe). And don't think you can just drop by whenever you see fit and demand to be taught– no! You need to go early before the shop fills up, otherwise they'd run short of employees and eye-testing rooms. So the only time you can do it is right after they open, or at six in the evening on weekdays.

Since I have classes all day during the week, it had to be the weekend. Today I was really sleepy and so was delighted when I groggily realized that I could sleep in a little more, skip the gym and get my contact lenses instead: a win/lose/ultra-win situation.

While the optometrist taught me how to pull my eyelashes out of the way and pretend I was in a blinking contest so that I could get the lens in, we chatted about metal. Metal as in the music genre, I mean; we didn't converse about tin cans or remark about how, when you run a piece of metal through the sand on a beach, you come up with a bunch of microscopic magnetic particles. This, by the way, is pretty annoying if you're using a pair of metal tweezers to sift through a sand sample looking for foraminifera.

Anyway, after dropping a contact lens on the floor, exchanging band names and staring at my eyes in a magnifying mirror for about half an hour, I finally left the shop and wandered through the mall, the supermarket, the bazaar, a fabric shop, the street and a home goods store looking at stuff. Everything looks much clearer when you don't see it through a layer of fingerprints and muck accumulated on your glasses.

I had to come home from my wanderings when my sister called me because she was locked out of our house and nobody was home, but that was alright because at that point I was debating whether it's okay to buy a plastic eggplant just because it's funny and on discount (!), despite the fact that you know it will sit around the house looking ugly, gathering dust and generally being clutter-y, until one day several years into the future, someone puts it in the trash.

Logic says no, it'll sit in a landfill until the next ice age, but my heart was saying yes, yes, yes, it's an EGGPLANT!

Now that I have contact lenses I can:

a) See where I'm going in the rain

b) Identify people in the gym

c) Get an infection more easily and lose one or both eyes

d) See things under microscopes normally and not have to fiddle with, sharpening the image to my myopic eyes, and thus leaving it out of focus for everybody else

e) Get hit on the nose a bit less painfully

That last one reminds me of that STUPID F***ING thing people do where they sneak up from behind you and cover your eyes. Half the time the idiots are too busy ham-handedly touching your face (ew) that they don't realize that your glasses are crushing the bridge of your nose.

Ahem. Anyway, I have bionic vision now!! You know, sort of.