All the Better to See You With

So, eye doctor today. Nothing new to report, prescription still the same in both eyes, still the same for the last 10+ years, BOO YA. My stockpile of disposable contact lenses that I have built by careful conservation (wearing each pair until it dissolves on my eyeball from filthiness) will last another year. Except that my distance vision is still getting crummier—how do we explain this?

I wonder if I am tainting the data somehow. I mean, we all know that after being asked ‘better, worse, or the same?” about nearly identical lenses for an hour, we give up, we don’t know anymore, we just want this to be over so we can go get some lunch. Sure, “better.” Ummm, “the same.” We just decide that eff it, let’s just wing it and see how this turns out.

We also know that asking “what’s the smallest line you can read” is a total mind-fuck, because you’ve read ALL of the lines ten times already. The first time, yeah, you say “ummm, T Z E C V”, but then the fiftieth time, can you really read them? Or do you just remember them? If you didn’t KNOW that was an E, would you say “B” instead? Is that blurry? Is that sharper? Did that letter just move? Are you hallucinating? Is that a unicorn? Are you losing your everloving mind?

Add to all of this that I was a very good student in school. I don’t claim to be genius-smart, but I have proven that I am some kind of lame-ish people pleaser, and God help me in that little room looking at the reflected projection of TZECV. I just want to get it RIGHT. As if I expect the technician to give me an A+ if I can read more lines. So I push it, I think. I have to breathe deeply just to keep myself from shoving my arm straight up into the air and yelling “ooh oooh ooooh I know! I know! The answer is BETTER!”

So, at the end of the day, my vision is for sure getting worse, but I’m still going to wear the same prescription I wore in high school, because I don’t want to disappoint the optician.

A side note about the eye doctor:
My doctor loves plastic fake-out spills. He has them all over the office— Oh my gosh! A spilled Styrofoam cup of coffee on the reception counter! Somebody clean that u—waaait a minute… you guys really got me with that one! Hoo!

He’s got spilled milk at the frames display, spilled soda in the contact lens area… you get it. But who the fuck has been eating Froot Loops by the better/ worse lens machine? That one’s too big for its britches, accelerating from harmless old man quirk to weird expired joke that makes me angry. You got greedy with that one, Dr. D.

Although, I do have to hand it to the doc— the second layer of the joke (the fact that he has fake spills in a building meant specifically for people with poor vision, which is the only group of people that would be fooled by this) is smart—at least he knows his audience— it’s unexpectedly and deliciously predatory.