Seeing through new glasses

At the time of this writing, I am adjusting to my glasses.  Any spelling misteaks or non sequiturs should scooter my daisyheads.

I wore the previous pair for five years.  They were my first pair of trifocals.  Yes, I went from being four-eyed to being six-eyed.  If I ever hear that I need quadrafocals, I’m buying a dog.  Or a fox.  Or a raccoon.  Maybe a pigmy goat.  At that point, I won’t know the difference.

I sort of understand how I can be both nearsighted and farsighted at the same time.  There is a loss of elasticity that makes it hard to pull the eyeball back far enough for close focus, and I can feel that.

I picked up my new glasses about two weeks ago, a week after they were ready.  I have put this moment off for as long as I could.  Yesterday afternoon, I made the switch.

With trifocals, you hear, you have to point your nose at what you want to see.  Yeah, and what if your belly keeps your chin from reaching an angle that puts your nose on it?  Damnit, my whole body is conspiring against me.

That first pair had minimal near-focus magnification.  Five years later, it was useless.  For most purposes on my phone, I was taking my glasses off.  I could move a report to the right distance but holding, say, 1100 pages of statistics textbook at that distance, for as long as it takes me to learn, say, the aptly-named dummy-coding of variables, well, my arms aren’t strong enough for my eyes in that case.  I was mostly concerned about the corrosion in the frames and the growing possibility of spontaneous disassembly, but yeah, a grad student has to be able to read.

Reading is much easier and I have discovered that much of driving is really gross vision.  You need to know that a car is approaching from your left.  The brand isn’t that important.

However, the floor in my apartment seems to have moved, even though I renewed my lease.  That’s really the problem.  Yes, the new prescription is a better fit for my eyes but the nose-range data have to be recalculated for everything.

I’m complaining, and joking, but it’s like any other first-world complaint.  I have friends with third-world vision, which is to say, none, or little, legal blindness, macular degeneration, dark and heavy shadows moving inevitably toward night without a dawn.  I’m griping about the fit of new shoes to someone with no feet.  That is wrong and the discomfort makes me grateful for what I have.

It’s also about change, which is hard, even when for the better. Like most, I prefer the devil that I know to the devil that I don’t, but what if we can shed the acquaintance of all devils? 

 In a few days, I will adjust and then I will go about the world, seeing it better.  When I startle to think that I haven’t thought about my glasses for a few hours then I will know that I have made the adjustment.