I guess I’m posting to this blog, like, once a month now? I started to post earlier this week, but then the post got longer and more involved and I realized it was an essay. So now I have this essay I’m working on. That will take a few weeks, and then maybe I’ll submit it to some literary journals, just ’cause that’s what you should do if you write a real essay that isn’t a blog post. It always take a few weeks to find the right journal, and then they have a turn-around time of 4-6 months. If none of them want it, I’ll post here after all. You can look for it roughly around Christmas.
The un-posted story / essay was inspired by an incident in my daily life. In lieu of that, here’s something else inspired by daily life: In my daily life, 80% of my news is provided by Facebook friends who share new stories and thus pretty much shape my world view. Several of them have shared versions of this story about a woman who reported for cataract surgery, only to have the doctors discover 27 contact lenses stuck in her eye.
Since reading this, I’ve been half haunted by the idea that maybe I have a contact lens stuck in my eye. Not 27 lenses, but maybe one. My contacts are so thin and soft I can’t really see them in my eye except when I pull one with a finger and it makes a little wrinkle on my eye. I always wear my right contact lens, but only occasionally wear the left one, because the prescription is very light, and because I need my short-sighted left eye to compensate for me not having reading glasses.
When I wake up in the morning, I close my right eye and and look around through my left, trying to determine if the world looks sufficiently blurry and sometimes, I gotta say, it’s not that blurry. This morning I circled my finger around the entire white part of my left eyeball, to see if there were any tell-tale wrinkles. Either I imagined it, or top layer of my eyeball (what’s it called?) can also wrinkle, very slightly, which is freaky.
I don’t think I have a contact lens stuck in my left eye.
But I might.
Yep, I can relate. I once lost a contact in my eye for three days. It came out in the shower at the corner of my eye. Now that I am 51 years old my eyes have gone the other way and I have perfect vision (well, until probably next year when I start needing glasses for reading). So you see—there are benefits of getting older.