First contact
Today, I got a contact lens. Not contact lenses, a contact lens.
Overall, my vision is good. I’ve had a very minor prescription for eyeglasses since I was 21, but I don’t wear them the glasses often because I don’t need to. At night or in dimness, things get a little blurry, so I wear them in the theatre, or to drive at night, but that’s about it.
The past few years, though, I’ve been giving a lot of presentations — speeches or remarks, accompanied, sometimes, by Powerpoint. The glasses have been a pain because I can’t read with them on, and I can’t see the audience in the dim without them. So today I went to my optometrist and he prescribed one — one — contact lens. (So, in other words, I’m paying twice what I should for the little lens carrier.)
My optometrist is a large bearish man of what I take to be Russian extraction, with fingers the size of cudgels. So while I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of my sticking my fingers into my eye, I was less excited about him doing it. But everything went off without a hitch, and he said I proved to be a good subject for contact lenses. (Or lens.) One thing he did note as he swapped out about 500 different lenses until finding the right fit: how very sensitive my vision is. A little too much adjustment this way and it was fuzzy, that way and it was smaller, the other way and I got a glowing 3D effect that reminded me of how much I hated “Avatar.” I was like the Goldilocks of contact lenses. In the end he got it right, but not before I was reminded again that I do have my own way of looking at things.
May 17th, 2011 at 3:18 am
Did you consider just getting a monocle? It’d do wonders for your bohemian image!
May 17th, 2011 at 6:20 am
Damn, that’s exactly what I was going to say. But to the point, I had one contact (right eye) on back in the 70s but since then I’ve graduated to trifocal specs. For Halloween, you could be that dude that shows up on the cover of The New Yorker annually.