Eye Balls

As a writer, I never really liked reading much. That, and the fact that I never had formal grammar training in school, explain my sub-par grammar. Once I get involved in a book, I tend to like it. But I have to get over that hump. For example, I much rather do something active and play baseball than read a book. Or, I much rather do something inactive and watch TV than read a book. I’m a equal opportunity book-hater.

My girlfriend Leslie loves reading and she loves Barns & Noble-like facilities. And when I’m in a bookstore, a craving for knowledge comes over me. I want to read everything in the store. Women’s romance section? Who cares, bring them on…I’ll cram everything into this brain that I can.

But then I don’t buy anything because I remember I don’t like reading. Plus, my cost-benefit analysis wouldn’t work out in favor of reading–if I were to spend my time reading a book, I wouldn’t be able to watch that rerun of Scrubs.

So I had an eye doctor appointment on Sunday for the first time in about a year. My vision is fairly awful…I believe it is around 20-300, whatever that means…I think it means I might be able to see a bird flying if it swooped down and crashed into my face. I wanted contact lenses, again. I had contact lenses fitted when I was in high school, wore them for like a week, got annoyed with cleaning them, and gave up.

I have astigmatism, making my awful vision even more awful, and I saw on TV they made a daily contact especially for astigmatism. Meaning, not only do they have decent contacts for my kind now, but I could toss them in the garbage after each day. Jackpot.

The optometrist is a new guy, as my previous optometrist went out of business or something not good like that. But the fact that he went out of business became all too clear when my appointment with my new optometrist began.

He starts out by doing the standard flash of light in the eyes. I blinked a little. “Look left,” he said. “Now look right. Now look at my ear.” He then looks at me and says, “Did you know you have floating eyes?”

Now, I don’t recall if he said floating eyes. Maybe it was hovering eyes. Maybe it was googly eyes. I hope it was googly eyes. Either way, my eyes apparently have a tendency to “float” apart at times. And then he goes, “Do you ever feel like you have blurry vision?”

“No.”

“See double?”

“No.”

“Trouble reading?”

“Umm…yes!” You see, I have always been averse to reading, but it’s not just because of my laziness and love for TV. I get headaches after reading for a while. I lose my space a lot. Reading has always been extremely frustrating, but I figured that was normal. In college I tried something new: I followed along with my finger. Everything went pretty well. But when people started staring at me at the library, I followed along with a pen. Even now at work I read by following along with my mouse cursor or highlighting sentences. I should have realized when I went up to a coworker once and said, “Do you ever feel it’s easier to highlight with your cursor?”

“No. Why?”

“Oh. No reason…”

And who wants to read a book for pleasure when you have to follow along with a pen. I rather watch TV and follow along with nothing.

“So is there anything I can do?” I asked the optometrist.

“You can see someone who can teach you some exercises for your eyes,” he said. And voila. Now I can hopefully read again. It’s not like I wasted 20 years or anything depleting my knowledge base astronomically.

But I still can’t fall behind on the Scrubs reruns that I’ve only seen four times a piece. A man needs to have priorities.

Oh, and add googly eyes to my list of problems.