annoying and a little scary

[xela]

This post brought to you courtesy of my 7th grade typing teacher, who made me into an old-school touch typist.

Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I can't focus. I blink and clean my glasses and rinse my eyes*, all to little or no avail: I just have to live with a fuzzy world for a few hours til eventually I can focus again. I'm pretty sure this is caused by sleeping wrong and deforming my eye in my sleep - I think I may have even gotten a medical opinion to that effect some years ago (though long enough ago that I can't remember whether it was from Mass Eye & Ear or from Dr. Zephyr - I should probably check in with an actual opthomologist on it. (Note: I can't actually read what I'm typing, but I can tell that opthomologist is underlined in red. I suspect it's a case of the spellchecker being stupid, but feel free to correct me.)

I've now been up for four hours, which is a long time for this to last, and it's starting to get kind of upsetting. On top of that, I just spent a half-hour trying to assemble a "shop light" fluorescent light from Home Depot, only to conclude the buttheads didn't bother testing whether it was in fact possible to assemble it before foisting it on their customers. (The ... bulb sockets, for lack of a better term, are L-shaped plastic widgets, (imagine an L about 2cm deep by 3 tall by 1 wide) Near the base of the L, on the front and back, are two plastic spring tabs. The stem of the L is supposed to be inserted into a rectangular hole in the reflector; the tabs are clearly meant to hold it in place. Either the widgets are too small for the hole, or the hole is too large for the widgets - at any rate, the widget slips into and out of the hole without the tabs even being pressed upon. There is no way the light can be assembled this way.)

Where was I? I might be able to read this if I knew how to change font size in xjournal. Um. Anyway, my eyes aren't working, I'm annoyed by cheap-ass hardware, I'm s little scared by this eye thing, and I can't even web browse to see if I can find pre-assembled shop lights somewhere.

Hope your day's off to a better start than mine.

---

* except I can't really rinse my eyes this morning, because I don't know where the hell anything is post-move.

Addendum: Found the eye rinse: doesn't seem to have helped but my eye sure feels clean.

I should probably have mentioned that I only have one eye I can focus with in the first place; the other one's only good for peripheral vision. Not having a back-up, I tend to get really nervous when something goes wrong with the good one.

Turns out in FireFox I do remember how to change font size. Which lets me read LJ at what I'm guessing is like 24 point type.

Comments

[coraline]

would sleeping on your eye wrong affect both eyes? is it the same in both eyes?

i get the same thing in the morning sometimes but like you said, it usually goes away by the time i've showered...

(and it's ophthalmologist, with a ph and an al...)

sorry your morning is sucking :(

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I only have one eye that's fully functional. You know that thing where little kids wear an eye patch to encourage their weak eye to learn to see? I was eight when they found it in me, which is too late: the window for my optic nerve to develop was already past.

Ok, the 'al' I'm embarassed about. But the 'phth' has me going, like, really?

[coraline]

oh. that would explain it then.

and well, 106,000 people on google agree with you about the ph, but it is the correct way to spell it :)

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Oh, I wasn't challenging your spelling. It's just... it's one of those words where the only way I could have got it right would be to have memorized it. I don't think any mental heuristics would have led me to that 'ph'. Certainly not pronounciation (op tha mol u jist) nor the spelling of (apparently) related words (optics, optician).

I think I was in fourth grade when spelling became the first thing I consciously decided to triage: I decided there were better things to do with my time than memorize all the words whose spelling I could not correctly divine when needed; that from then on I was going to be content averaging 97 on spelling tests instead of 100. For the most part, when I use such a word, I'm aware of it - Oh, hey, this is one of those words I'm not quite sure how to spell - and either look it up or use a different word. My really there was basically about I failed to notice for all these years that ophthalmologist is one of those words? Really?

[danj17.livejournal.com]

how is it today?

i've had days like that.. i've had days where i wake up, and one eye is bad, and it clears up in half an hour.. i've had a small number of days where i wake up and one eye is blurry, and it doesn't clear up during the day, but it also doesn't get any worse. the next morning, i wake up, and it's completely clear. that's probably happened ~5 times in the last 10 years. it's less of a problem, because i do have a spare eye..

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I'm much better - just a tiny bit blurry now. My doctor diagnosed dust allergy + hay fever = lose. So now I'm on serious antihistimines and getting by okay.