I can see clearly now...
Jul. 24th, 2001 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ocelotOriginal: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/24/181750/100
..But it doesn't have anything to do with the rain being gone. In fact, it hasn't rained in weeks, and that was just a piddly drizzle.
Also, a note to anyone who actually follows my journal.
Today is my first day wearing my new contacts, and its shocking how much difference a slight change in prescription makes. When I first put them in this morning, the increase in contrast and detail was so great that it was almost disorienting at first. There were so many more things to see!
I rode my bike to campus, which was absolutely lovely. It's the same road I take home from class all the time, but this was the first time I've seen it during the day, and with my new, improved eyes. Not that it isn't nice at night - it's lovely in its own way, with the stars bright in the sky and the toads croaking. The smell of the fields after a warm day always reminds me of summer camp.
The road runs along the edge of town, with houses on one side and farmland on the other. According to Mapquest, the trip from my apartment to campus is about 3.5 miles, but that's going by the freeway, which is quite a bit more direct. I'd guess that it's somewhere between 4 and 5 miles on bike. Quite a nice ride.
A few days ago, I took one of those online personality test things. One of the questions was whether I'd choose to lose my sight or my hearing. I chose sight, and I think I still would (I appreciate music more than anything I can see), but an experience at the optometrist's yesterday made me think about it more. They dilated my pupils. As I left, they gave me a pair of really goofy looking dark glasses to wear. I went outside, and the glare immediatly forced me to wear them, goofy or not. Then I sat down to try to read the bus schedule. I didn't succeed. I suspect the dilation prevented my eyes from being able to focus properly.
Not being able to read something close up, despite the fact that I can see other things around me just fine, is a disturbing sensation. Almost claustrophobic. You know you should be able to do something, your brain is sending your eyes the signals, but it just isn't working.
Thankfully, the effect was shortlived. I was able to fight down my sense of panic and laugh at how silly I must have looked with big blocky eyecoverings, trying to read the bus schedule I was holding about 3 inches from my face.
I wonder if that's what it is like to have a severe learning disorder? You can see the shapes there, and know that they are supposed to make sense, but they just don't.
The experience also convinced me to get a pair of sunglasses, something I've been meaning to do for several years. Necessity is the mother of invention. Or the mother of getting ocelot to choose, in this case. In the past, I've never been able to settle on a pair. In this case, the prospect of wearing the idiotic ones from the eye doctor kind of forced my hand. I think it also helped that I'd spent a while picking out frames earlier, so I had a recent professional opinion about what looked good on my face.
I think my focus may still be off a bit, though due to the contacts, not the eyedrops. Things just seem slightly...off, like my eyes aren't working the same way they were before. It's possible, and it's possible that this is actually desirable - that my one of my eyes was overcompensating for the other before, or something.
One part of the eye exam was taking my blood pressure. This was something I'd actually been curious about for a while. I figured that with the way I've been eating over the past few years, and my general out-of-shapeness, it would be high. But it was actually below the ideal (not dangerously low. Just healthily low). So was my pulse - 56 beats per minute resting (with the average being 70). This is interesting. I remember getting similar results back in 9th grade during biology class. I had one of the lowest heart rates in the class, despite being in worse shape than probably most of the class. I guess it wasn't just a fluke/miscalculation.
I read a web page yesterday which correlated heart rate with body temperature. This seems like a possibility - it seems that my average body temperature is at least a degree or so below 98.6F (the "normal" body temperature).
Which leads to the question of why my body temperature is low :)
Not a big deal. I'm just curious about how things work. Perhaps I should just go ahead and become a doctor (hah, like I have the motivation to make it through medical school).
That was another thing I was thinking about this morning. Being an optometrist must be one of the more immediatly rewarding medical professions. You give people glasses/contacts/whatever, and they immediatly see the world in a whole new way. And then they go and write lengthy odes to the leaves on trees, which seems to be the stereotypical thing that newly sighted people notice.
Not a job for me, but it does seem like an easier to deal with job than oh...an oncologist or something.
If any of you out there follow my journal enough to care, I set up another one at LiveJournal for various reasons. You can find it at http://www.livejournal.com/users/therealocelot/. Everything posted here will be posted there, too, but not vice-versa. Why? Ask and I'll explain. It's too stupid to go into here.
..But it doesn't have anything to do with the rain being gone. In fact, it hasn't rained in weeks, and that was just a piddly drizzle.
Also, a note to anyone who actually follows my journal.
Today is my first day wearing my new contacts, and its shocking how much difference a slight change in prescription makes. When I first put them in this morning, the increase in contrast and detail was so great that it was almost disorienting at first. There were so many more things to see!
I rode my bike to campus, which was absolutely lovely. It's the same road I take home from class all the time, but this was the first time I've seen it during the day, and with my new, improved eyes. Not that it isn't nice at night - it's lovely in its own way, with the stars bright in the sky and the toads croaking. The smell of the fields after a warm day always reminds me of summer camp.
The road runs along the edge of town, with houses on one side and farmland on the other. According to Mapquest, the trip from my apartment to campus is about 3.5 miles, but that's going by the freeway, which is quite a bit more direct. I'd guess that it's somewhere between 4 and 5 miles on bike. Quite a nice ride.
A few days ago, I took one of those online personality test things. One of the questions was whether I'd choose to lose my sight or my hearing. I chose sight, and I think I still would (I appreciate music more than anything I can see), but an experience at the optometrist's yesterday made me think about it more. They dilated my pupils. As I left, they gave me a pair of really goofy looking dark glasses to wear. I went outside, and the glare immediatly forced me to wear them, goofy or not. Then I sat down to try to read the bus schedule. I didn't succeed. I suspect the dilation prevented my eyes from being able to focus properly.
Not being able to read something close up, despite the fact that I can see other things around me just fine, is a disturbing sensation. Almost claustrophobic. You know you should be able to do something, your brain is sending your eyes the signals, but it just isn't working.
Thankfully, the effect was shortlived. I was able to fight down my sense of panic and laugh at how silly I must have looked with big blocky eyecoverings, trying to read the bus schedule I was holding about 3 inches from my face.
I wonder if that's what it is like to have a severe learning disorder? You can see the shapes there, and know that they are supposed to make sense, but they just don't.
The experience also convinced me to get a pair of sunglasses, something I've been meaning to do for several years. Necessity is the mother of invention. Or the mother of getting ocelot to choose, in this case. In the past, I've never been able to settle on a pair. In this case, the prospect of wearing the idiotic ones from the eye doctor kind of forced my hand. I think it also helped that I'd spent a while picking out frames earlier, so I had a recent professional opinion about what looked good on my face.
I think my focus may still be off a bit, though due to the contacts, not the eyedrops. Things just seem slightly...off, like my eyes aren't working the same way they were before. It's possible, and it's possible that this is actually desirable - that my one of my eyes was overcompensating for the other before, or something.
One part of the eye exam was taking my blood pressure. This was something I'd actually been curious about for a while. I figured that with the way I've been eating over the past few years, and my general out-of-shapeness, it would be high. But it was actually below the ideal (not dangerously low. Just healthily low). So was my pulse - 56 beats per minute resting (with the average being 70). This is interesting. I remember getting similar results back in 9th grade during biology class. I had one of the lowest heart rates in the class, despite being in worse shape than probably most of the class. I guess it wasn't just a fluke/miscalculation.
I read a web page yesterday which correlated heart rate with body temperature. This seems like a possibility - it seems that my average body temperature is at least a degree or so below 98.6F (the "normal" body temperature).
Which leads to the question of why my body temperature is low :)
Not a big deal. I'm just curious about how things work. Perhaps I should just go ahead and become a doctor (hah, like I have the motivation to make it through medical school).
That was another thing I was thinking about this morning. Being an optometrist must be one of the more immediatly rewarding medical professions. You give people glasses/contacts/whatever, and they immediatly see the world in a whole new way. And then they go and write lengthy odes to the leaves on trees, which seems to be the stereotypical thing that newly sighted people notice.
Not a job for me, but it does seem like an easier to deal with job than oh...an oncologist or something.
If any of you out there follow my journal enough to care, I set up another one at LiveJournal for various reasons. You can find it at http://www.livejournal.com/users/therealocelot/. Everything posted here will be posted there, too, but not vice-versa. Why? Ask and I'll explain. It's too stupid to go into here.
