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The Eyes Are the Window to the Soul, or Something

9/29/2018

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Eye doctor equipment inspired by Disney Pixar’s “Wall E”

Welcome to the eye doctor! Hard to believe it’s been a whole year. My, how you’ve grown slightly bigger, and aged! I know you enjoy going through life using your corrective lenses and pretending to be just like everyone else, but here at the eye doctor we feel it’s important to remind you at least once a year that you are, as the kids say, “nearsighted af.”

Let’s start in this room with me, a person whose title will forever be a mystery. Am I a Registered Nurse? A Physician’s Assistant? A receptionist from the temp agency? That is for me to know and you to not know, ever.

I (whoever the heck I am lol) will now ask you the first set of questions that you will just make up the answers to, including “how often do you change your lenses, do you ever sleep in your lenses, and what brand of solution do you use?”

Keep in mind that you will be summarily thrown out into the gutter if the answers to these questions even approximate “I change them whenever they are so covered with crud they are rendered opaque, sometimes I fall asleep in them, hee hee, why, is that bad, and how tf should I know the name of my contact solution, it is literally saltwater.” It should be noted that “just use my answers from last year” is also an unacceptable answer for which you will be judged.

Let’s proceed to the part where you have to take out your contacts and really come to grips with your visual situation. We enjoy seeing our patients go from “I’m winning at life,” to “I’m that old man from The Twilight Zone who survives nuclear annihilation only to break his glasses and be condemned to a life of misery.” We believe humility is an important step in acceptance, which is an important step in our secret plan to overthrow the government and install an optometric dictator, wait, I mean eye health.


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The world is over and you can't see. Womp Womp.

Now that you are staring blankly ahead and awkwardly not seeing anything, I will leave you alone with your thoughts while you wait for the doctor. We have a fantastic selection of magazines for you to not read while you wait!  

Hi there, I’m the eye doctor. I hope your favorite thing is when an old man turns all the lights off and sticks his face millimeters from yours while shining laser pointers into your eyeballs!

After that, I will pull this old-timey contraption up to your face and make you look through different lenses and tell me which letters you see. Then I will slightly change the lenses and ask you which of two lenses is more clear, one or two (sometimes I will use different numbers, with no detectable pattern in my number choice). Most of the time the two lenses will look exactly the same to you and you will just randomly pick one, growing ever more anxious as you make up more and more answers and dig yourself into a hole of pure lies. One or two? Two or three? Three or four? Sixteen or Thirty-two? π or θ?

This will last for 550 minutes or until numbers and letters begin to look like meaningless symbols, (whichever comes first) and then the Fun Train will keep on chugging down to pupil dilation! This is where we drop some brackish yellow burny stuff in your eyes and make you wait some more while you look at blurry pictures in People Magazine or just hang out with your own relentlessly unhelpful thoughts.  


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I heard through the grapevine that you have astigmatism.


​Then we shine some more laser pointers into your eyeballs, after which you finally get to go out in public, wearing disposable sunglasses that look like something that would happen if the California Raisins and your grandma designed eyewear together.

You have now completed your eye doctor visit. Go out into the unbearable sunlight, dear patient, with your keepsake glasses, your scarily-dilated pupils, and your ego squashed back down to a healthy size. “See” you next year bwahahahaha!

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The Sentence That Woke Me Up

9/11/2018

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As much as we want our lives to fit into neat thematic blocks or narrative arcs, our days are mostly messy, our lives mostly zig-zag. We are not Sandra Bullock in a rom-com and this is not the end of the second act, with a soaring resolution just around the corner. 
 
But every once in awhile, a theme does emerge from the chaos. And that's how I know it's time to pay attention. Not to get all woo woo on you, but for the universe to get through to me- a woman whose husband could cut the grass, shave off his entire beard, and rearrange the house without me noticing - that means it's really important. 
 
So the theme that is emerging this week is connection. It started over the weekend when I was doing my biannual ironing session (you think I'm kidding, and that's cute) and listening to my favorite podcast, The Next Right Thing. On the podcast, Emily P. Freeman repeated this quote from author Shauna Niequist: "With people, you can connect or you can compare, but you can't do both."
 
I nearly dropped the iron on my foot when I heard that.  GET OUTTA MY HEAD, LADY. Hello, lightbulb moment the size of Citifield. Thank you, laser beam of wisdom right between the eyes.
 
So I've spent the last couple of days rolling that thought around in my head, trying to replace all my comparison moments (how many zeroes are in a bazillion?) with opportunities to connect. 
 
Here's the thing I realized: comparison is easy and takes absolutely no courage. Connection is hard (for me) and takes a lot of courage (for me). But...comparison feels supremely crappy, and connection feels super awesome. I know connecting comes naturally to some people, and guess what? When I compare myself to those people, I feel like a turd. On the flip side, there are things that come naturally to me (sarcasm comes to mind) that may take more effort for other people. 
 
I figure if I can train myself to run a 5K, I can train myself to connect instead of comparing. Running and connecting both take effort and intention and are unpleasant at certain points but so worth it in the end. 
 
So on day two of Connection Week, Hurricane Hysteria started setting in, and I got real cranky. Nothing stresses me out more than Hurricane Hysteria. But today I realized that, in spite of their awfulness, natural disasters bring authentic connection. We are all in this together, even when this is a real bummer.
 
I was sixteen and living in Chapel Hill when Hurricane Fran hit North Carolina. My family slept in the living room, and by "slept" I mean "listened to noises we didn't know wind could make" and "prayed our house wouldn't get smashed to smithereens by falling trees." The next morning my dad loaded his chainsaw into the car and we drove around town looking at all the damage. If a tree was blocking the street, my dad used his chainsaw to clear it. We reached out to our friends and assessed the damage. We connected. 
 
So instead of being cranky and mentally checked out this week, I am going to try to see this hurricane as a chance to connect. Maybe we'll tell ghost stories and read by flashlight if the lights go out. Maybe we'll have a block party and clean out our freezers by grilling together. Maybe we'll get out the chainsaw (although Nervous Nellie over here has to draw the line somewhere, I mean jeez).

Today is September 11. It's a Tuesday, just like it was in 2001. I have the worst memory in general, but my recollections from that day are as clear as the sky was blue that morning. I didn't have much prior experience to base it on, because I'd only been living in New York for 12 days, but I remember people making eye contact that day and in the weeks after that day.

We didn't walk around pretending we were small islands on the bigger island of Manhattan. We looked at each other from across the train like, "W the actual F is going on?" We were all in it together.

​The next day, there was nothing to do but gather. Everything was cancelled, everything was broken. I met up with a couple of other students in my teaching program, even though the semester had just started and we barely knew each other. We didn't even have anything to say, but it was comforting being with other people who were equally shell-shocked and raw. Being alone in my apartment and watching the news felt awful. Being outside with other people felt almost bearable. 
 
We can compare or connect, but we can't do both. I hope I can continue to connect to people even after Connection Week is over, even when I feel shy and vulnerability feels scary, and even when it seems easier to wander through the comparison hellscape of Instagram. I don't want to have to go through another Hurricane Fran or 9/11 to wake up and remember that, when you really think about it, connection is all we have.  

Photo by Raleigh News and Observer
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