Blind as a . . .

Well, bats aren't really blind. With sonar hearing, they just don't need their eyes much. Unlike me. And I am both blind and a boob. What makes a person a boob is his/her intractable nature about some things. At my most recent eye exam, I found out that my vision hadn't changed much, despite the kind of eye-straining work I do--writing, editing, and webgeeking. That was welcome news, but on the other hand, I'm so, shall we say, WALL-SMACKING BLIND, how much worse CAN it get?

This is how blind: the other day I went into the bathroom in the morning without my glasses on yet, and reached for the soap to wash my hands. No soap in the dish. I said, "Honey, where's the soap?" And Honey said, "Right there," pointing. [I could barely see that he was pointing.] I looked where I thought he was pointing, and didn't see anything. "Where?" He pointed again, indicating the sink. I stuck my face into the white sink, and saw the white soap. "Ohmigod, is that how blind you are??!!" Honey said, laughing. Yeah, that one was a real knee-slapper.

Well, I did order new lenses anyway. I had to, because the two or three necessary coatings on the most recent lenses had disintegrated and crazed to the point that I could not see anything through them. That degradation occurred over the short period of one year. Without my ever using scratchy anything to clean them. Just let me say this, Empire Vision, $##@3**#$$$!!! Why does this make me a boob? Well, the same thing happened with my preceding pair of glasses.

So I got the new lenses, which are graduated bifocals, and I have had them for six months and I still do not understand how to use them! Even though I was trained. My brain won't adjust. I'm always rolling my eyes and jutting my head around like a gawky bird, trying to find the best part to look out of. This has gotta seem pretty stupid to any onlookers. I cannot seem to get used to the idea that I can move a book or paper farther away and see it better. Why, why is this difficult?

Then there's this other problem. Despite being made of a "special" material that makes them thinner (they should be coke-bottle glasses), they are still pretty thick. But the frames these days are rather delicate. So even the thinnest of the thin lenses are constantly in jeopardy. For example--and this is one of those paradoxes that really drives me crazy--if I go to clean them, which usually makes them worse, and then I clean them again because the first cleaning didn't work, one of them pops out. So I have to catch it before it hits the floor. This means that as I snatch it out of the air, I smother it with new messy fingerprints, which means I have to clean it AGAIN, but not clean it YET because first I have to wrestle it back into the frame with my smudgy hands, which makes it much much dirtier than it was the original time I needed to clean it. Then, since I need to clean it again, I try to clean it.

And it pops out again. (Lather, rinse, repeat . . .) SCREAM.

Oh, and then there's the ostensible reason why the lens does not stay in well. It's not entirely because the frame comes unscrewed regularly, which by the way it does. It's because (drumroll, please!) I sat on them when I was getting dressed. Yeah! Dumb! This is how it works: I'm changing my clothes, have 'em out on the bed, and I have to take the glasses off to pull on a turtleneck. Otherwise I would not have to take them off, got it? And so I put the glasses on the bed to put the shirt on. And then when I go to put my socks on, I am still completely blind and so when I sit down on the bed I can't see the glasses and nail them. Good trick? Just let me polish my badge. I've been proudly perfecting it since sixth grade.

The effect of the sitting is not only that the lens pops out. Even better, some background here, these are cool frames by Innovataive M/F Technology that came with matching sun shades that are magnetic to the frame. Pull 'em out, simply hold 'em up to your face, and they leap magnetically onto the frame. I LOVE that (and they were kinda $$$), which is why I would not just get rid of the frames and replace them with something else. Unfortunately, a while ago after the sitting incident, I was putting them on in the car and my husband looked at me funny and said, "Something's not right about that. They don't fit. They don't line up. At all." Well, I couldn't see that from inside the glasses. And the shades still did a perfectly good job. So I went around for a while with wonky shades. I don't care what they look like to you people. I can see fine from my end.

But one day while visiting Blockbuster, I stopped in to the optician's shop next door, and asked if an adjustment could be made to put the frames back in line so the shades would be right. The assistant sat me down across from him, looked at the frames, and looked at me without saying anything for a long, long time. Still without speaking, he took them off of me and bent them a little. Said he was done. I went out. And when I got back in the car after Blockbuster, and looked in the rear-view mirror, the shades were still wonky. And I haven't taken them anywhere else yet. Boob.