FOUR EYED

Yesterday I picked up my first two pairs of glasses, probably not 
something worth sharing with the world, but it turns out writing 
this phlog has finally turned me into one of these self-important 
diarying sorts.

Being short-sighted, I underestimated how odd it would be to have 
things get out of focus up close with the glasses on. Having known 
my father switching between one pair of glasses or another all my 
life, it shouldn't have been so surprising, but it was. Altogether 
quite a lot to get used to, although certainly there's a revelation 
to being able to put a certain form to the distant (and not so 
distant) blurs that I'm used to.

To try and get used to the things, preparing to try them while 
driving, I went for a walk by the river in town when I went to pick 
up my groceries (easier to drive in to the closer town where I 
usually shop than try to find things in a different supermarket at 
the big town with the optomitrists). I managed not to fall in, and 
eventually got the hang of it. Somehow even for looking around 
nature though, I'm not quite sure whether I prefer the glasses. 
There's something more immersive about being able to see clearly up 
close, even if it does mean the birds in the trees look more like 
moving blobs. Around the house it's particularly annoying, so I'm 
sure I won't be wearing them much inside.

But it is safer with them on for driving (it turns out I'm way 
worse than the legal minimum vision requirement), especially in low 
light, and they worked great for reading subtitles on the foreign 
movies SBS has on TV. Somehow it's more straining watching TV with 
the glasses though, but maybe that'll pass, or maybe I'll just read 
them for programmes with text/subtitles.

With the cheapest-brand frames, two pairs cost $425 (the government 
covers the cost of the eye test, since somehow that's covered by 
Medicare even though dental work isn't). The second pair was free, 
apparantly mirroring a widely advertised deal from a big 
optomitrists chain, but they noted that if I did buy just one pair 
they could offer a 15% discount. So two pairs cost the same as one 
pair, but one pair costs less if you don't buy two pairs. Not the 
most honest pricing structure, but I wanted a spare pair in case I 
become reliant on them for driving anyway, and it turns out one 
pair in the car and one near the couch will work well.

Picking frames last week I didn't know what I was doing. I looked 
odd in glasses regardless of which style they were. So I went with 
the cheapest, and hedged my bets on the lens size by getting one 
narrower pair and one wide nerdy-looking pair. With more time 
wandering around in them, the wide nerdy ones are definitely 
preferred since the gap around the narrow ones is confusing. But 
that doesn't matter for TV since I'm not looking around, so they're 
perfect for that and the wide ones are in the car.

I remember reading years ago about some sort of liquid lens which 
was designed for use in smart phone cameras, where there's no room 
for traditional focusing optics. Shame that technology hasn't 
allowed for electronic lenses in glasses with variable 
magnification. But if they did make them today, you'd probably need 
some smartphone app to configure them via Bluetooth, so that would 
put me off anyway, grumble grumble...

Anyway, they're useful, though they're another expensive thing I'm 
obligated to wider society for now. I guess if I only need them for 
driving and TV, if I go to life under my off-grid rock maybe I 
won't have a use for them anymore anyway. I dunno, nobody talks 
about off-grid living as excluding buying stuff like glasses and 
medical costs, but if you have to keep a job to earn the money to 
pay for those things still, where do you find the time for all the 
self-sufficiency stuff? Well I guess I have a particularly hard 
time making money too, compared to others, so that doesn't help, 
but where it's easy is with jobs that don't fit an off-grid 
lifestyle. Yeah, that's the game, you've got to rip society off 
enough to get rich enough that you can tell it to fuck off. And if 
you never get there because everyone else has ripped you off too 
much first, then you're just like everyone else. This loop of 
reasoning is torturing me a lot lately as I try to decide upon new 
business opportunities to replace things that aren't working 
anymore.

But at least $425 made the $29 ticket to July's 70mm film screening 
of Lawrence of Arabia at the Sun Theatre in Melbourne look fairly 
inconsequential, so I booked that online last night. Apparantly not 
the first to do so, since it gives you a choice of seats and about 
ten were marked taken, even five months in advance! For me I'm 
pretty sure this is the earliest I've ever booked a ticket to 
anything in my life, but perhaps that's unusual. The train 
timetables will probably have changed by then though, so hopefully 
I'll be able to get there and back on a practical timescale. Hmm, 
after all this I can just see myself forgetting my glasses too...

 - The Free Thinker