Brownian motion

Phew!

Yesterday was the first of five days I'll be off work and although I thought I would be getting up at noon every single one of those days, yesterday I had to visit the optometrist. Which was fun, in a way: for the first time in almost three years, I'd be getting glasses (or spectacles) again in addition to contact lenses.

Eye exams wear me out though. Focusing, re-focusing after getting the burst of air directly on the corneas, then focusing again on three lines while being asked which one was brighter is terrific work for my poor eyes. So much that after 30 minutes of this, I feel I've run a half-mile. For a fat man, that's a long way. And I'm not even done because the dilation part of the exam is approaching sometime in the future causing intense psychich discomfort.

Just before this operation however, I heared (from the doc) about having better than 20/20 eyesight in my left eye--corrected, but that my right eye, while correctable to 20/20, is the unfortunate sufferer of astigmatism. I'd known this all along of course, but it turns out there's a special pair of contact lenses known as torric lenses which will help correct that. Wonderful, I thought, I'll no longer veer to the left of the centerline when landing the Cessna 172. That, or I'm a shitty pilot. I think the latter.

So, the man says, time for ocular rape--he didn't use those words exactly: he squeezes two drops of a most damned liquid, one into each eye and has me wait 10 minutes. The time over, I feel like I've taken a massive hit of low-grade acid. Everything is out of focus and the pressure in my eyeballs is tremendous. Ugh, I remembered just how much I hated this feeling. The good news is I "passed", there were no problems, apart from the obvious.

Exam over, I was given a disposable pair of Geordie LaForge sunglasses and let loose on the world. God help the World (at least in the Boise area) that my wife was driving. I'd have caused serious traffic problems, perhaps a death or two. The new torric lens in my right eye definitely seems to have improved my astigmatism. I say this now some 24 hours after I first put them in because my dilated pupils meant I couldn't make out anything clearer than a whale at two paces for a long while.

So now, it's the morning after and I can see clearly now (the rain is gone -- sorry, Ed.) I'm very excited that I can see immediately I get out of bed because for a long time, I was banned from getting lenses which I could wear overnight. I was a bad boy and got an eye infection from wearing contacts for way past their expiration date. Those were the bad old days though and I've since promised the folks at the American Vision Society to never flaunt their rules so wantonly ever again. There are serious consequences, I've heard, in the form of two burly optometrists named Vinny and Joey both out of New Jersey.

I also got actual, real, palpable glasses. Tortoiseshell frames because--wife #1 says--they make me look classically academic. I doubt anything will make me look academic more than my geek face, but why give the little lady hassles?

I heard about the New York Times' new scent critic on Talk of The Nation on NPR. His name is Chandler Burr and while that name sounds like the sleazy yet courageous protagonist of an Elmore Leonard novel, he's anything but. Mr Burr has written a book titled The Emperor of Scent among others. One thing I learned from listening to him and of course, visiting his website is this:

"One annotation: You've got to start out understanding that there really is no such thing as a "masculine" or "feminine" fragrance. The perfume expert Luca Turin once said to me that masculine perfumery is (very unfortunately for it) defined negatively, which is to say by what you "can't" put in it, flowers, bright notes, etc. And the marketers straightjacket feminine fragrances, simply in the opposite direction. Don't listen to them. Every professional I know, everyone in the industry, wears whatever he or she likes with no attention at all paid to the marketing, and so do I, and that's the only way to approach it, particularly given the amount of clichéd, semi-functional, under-constructed crap marketed as "masculine." You should wear whatever scents you like."

Isn't that amazing? I never knew that! I'd always thought perfumers put a lot of thought into designing "male" smells, as it turns out, I've been a complete shmuck. Let me tell you, there was times I'd loved the smell of a "female" perfume, but refrained from buying it because it would have made me feel I was wearing female underwear on the outside of my clothes.
Here's another quote from Mr Burr's site about this issue:

"As a rule, to any perfume sold as a "masculine" (or "pour homme" or "him" or "lui" or whatever the Orwellian commercial designation), one can generally attach the words "poorly designed product inferior to its feminine counterpart in ingenuity and creativity." Or just: "crap." Set aside for a moment the fact that only dolts swallow the gendered-perfume gimmick and obey some marketing guru's, "This is for boys, this is for girls." (Real adults wear whatever they want.) The ratio of good to bad among masculines is laughable—if they put out this many bad feminines, the industry would implode—and so, in general, are the masculines. Look at the Kenneth Cole scents or Z by Zegna: Smelling them is like smelling fresh insecticide while locked in an aluminum cell."

Hehe... Visit, enjoy.

I'm off to the Boise Art Museum to see the touring exhibition of Frank Lloyd Wright and the House Beautiful.