I can see clearly now...the rain is gone...

I am now typing my blog with a new set of stylish frames (that I would rather not be wearing at all) because my watch battery died. There have been things I have put off, because I do not want to deal with them, but one thing that is strangely important to me is keeping time. It is through this obsession with time that I came face to face with something I have made excuses for, my reading vision.

I have great vision....for seeing things off in the distance. I think this applies to my life as well. I don't mean to get philosophical about this detail, but when I have a thought, sometimes I chase it down and then beat it to a bloody pulp. However, when you actually go to a foreign country that actually had a person who spoke English that sat me down and confirmed, at last, that I needed glasses.

I could pacify myself, and tell myself, 'just for reading', but the truth was the gray cylinder was housing lens that did very little to really help me. All of the ocular exercises I was used to doing were not helping, and all of the carrots in Korea would now do little for me, perhaps change my tone of my skin to an orange kind of hue. It wasn't helping my vision.

I honestly don't care what the label says on my glasses. It is the other label, the unseen one of my damn pride that came roaring to the surface. In seven years I will be 50 years old, and I am bitching about reading glasses. I can still turn a mean cartwheel and there are a lot of other things I am still doing...but these damn glasses anger me.

They remind me that life is fragile.

I don't need a prop to 'look' intelligent. However, these damn things aren't a prop. They are an essential tool for the scribblings I compose on a daily basis...well, that I can finally get out of my head and on to some paper now that I can see again.

It isn't easy...to let go of the gray cylinder...'the once in a while and only if no one is looking' for these new frames, now posed on the end of my nose...at the end of this rainy season. I have to admire the optician, who smiled at me as he broke the news, "You still have great vision...these are just for reading...nothing more, nothing less."

I studied this new reflection and nodded. I pulled off the frames and sighed. Damn it! I can't read the price tag! That was all the confirmation I needed.

Eat your veggies....

I was writing a friend, making a sort of confession that related to my vanity about my eyes. For as long as I could remember I have never had the need of spectacles...glasses...you know those things that people wear that enable people to see. Well, it has hit this woman square in the eyes, this creeping reality that every once in a while (possibly more than I care to admit) that I actually need help...and the slight blurring of letters that makes me utter a few profane words as I reach for the gray cylinder that houses the smallest and weakest reading glasses I could find.

Clarity. Crisp and clear the images come through. Like a game, I raised and lowered the glasses...watching my vision alter. Damn. There is something to be said for my mostly vegan ways...I adore carrots. I just wonder if I can reverse this aging assault on my vision. After all carrots in South Korea are NOTHING like the carrots in the west. I snapped a shot...and I am rather disappointed...these are on the small side. One carrot could feed a family of 15...well perhaps 5 or 6. The first time I went to the produce section, I wanted to ask what these were. I couldn't believe my eyes. I thought these were rare, but what is rare are carrots that would be considered 'normal' size. Koreans would put them back into the earth.

This is like a fish story, the one that got away, no one ever really believes them, not without a picture, which this 'carrot story' does have. What we would consider mutant sized produce, is averaged sized here. I just wonder how many of these I will have to consume so I can throw away the damn gray cylinder I am carrying around?