I can see!

I hate getting eye exams for the same reason I always hated getting my hearing tested in elementary school: I feel like if I get something "wrong," even though it's not technically my fault, the person conducting the test is going to think I'm an idiot or they're going to diagnose me with a disorder I don't actually have. There's just too much pressure to read those tiny lines of text correctly, just like there was too much pressure to hear every high-pitched beep in those giant headphones and not only that, but to hear them in the correct ear. There's also a lot of pressure when the optometrist* has you look through this thing and tell him or her if you can see more clearly through lens 1 or lens 2, lens 3 or lens 4, lens 5 or lens 6, etc. It's like if you give the wrong answer because you can't remember what the screen looked like through lens 4 as compared to lens 5, even though you just looked through it half a second ago, then the doctor is going to give you the wrong prescription which you'll be stuck with for a year, meaning that your entire world will be blurry for a whole year. That means a year of squinting, of headaches, of holding books four inches from your face, of not being able to read the board in class, of missing exits in strange places because the sign warning you it was coming was, like, ten feet away. I get serious anxiety before visiting the optometrist. I had my eyes examined (tested?) three days ago and had to go back today to have my new contact lens fitted (lens because only one eye got worse, so I only had to try out the one). Luckily everything seems to have worked out fine, as usual, but there's always the possibility that they won't and that's what all my neurotic worrying is for: to prepare me for the worst. Now I can just continue to worry for the next year that my eyes are going to keep degenerating to the point where they no longer make contact lenses strong enough for me and I'll have to wear glasses on a daily basis (the possibility of going blind altogether is not nearly so frightening. Call me vain, but I just really hate the way I look in glasses).

*I had to look up the difference between an optometrist and an ophthalmologist before writing this. An ophthalmologist, besides having a very hard-to-spell name, can perform eye surgery. An optometrist is the person you go to in the local mall or Wal-Mart to get prescriptions for glasses and contacts.

P.S. Since I doubt I'll be blogging about anything where this will be relevant, I just want to say now that Alanis Morissette's new album, Flavors of Entanglement, is really good. It comes after her break-up with ex-fiance Ryan Reynolds, so it's inspired by heartbreak, just like all of her good stuff. I recommend it, especially the songs "Not as We," "Versions of Violence," "Limbo No More," "Moratorium," and "Torch."