Shit just got real!
I’m now officially a card-carrying wannabe triathlete!
Mommy, why is the scary lady in the ad staring at me like she wants to eat my brains? MAKE HER STOP!
I’ve been wearing glasses since I was 9. I hate them. I hate how they slide down your nose in the summer. I hate how they fog up in winter. I hate how you don’t have peripheral vision. I hate pretty much everything about wearing glasses.
That’s why, in 1991 I finally got contacts — after years of begging — and they were and remain the greatest thing since sliced bread. My eyes are seriously, seriously bad — without glasses or contacts, if I hold up my hand in front of my face, I can only focus when it’s about three to four inches away. I’m okay at navigating without corrective lenses; I can see shapes and colors. One time I made it home on the L without any vision correction after a friend forgetfully dumped the glass holding my contacts down the drain, when he went to go get a midnight drink when I was crashed at his place for the night. That said… life is better in focus than not.
So I have pretty coke-bottle glasses. Even with today’s super thin lenses, which are light-years better than 80s nasty coke-bottle lenses, they’re still about 9mm thick at the edges. And this leads to massive color distortion when I look through them at any angle other than straight on. Usually it leads to splitting red and blue out, which is kind of weird, which is one of the many, many fine reasons I pretty much won’t wear my glasses outside of just after taking the contacts out before bed, and right before putting them in after I wake up. But I’ve got them on right now, because I’m getting ready for bed, and I happened to glance sideways out the window, and — I kind of wish I could take a photo to post for you guys.
See, the Sears Tower spires are lit up in bright pink, for Save the Boobies month, and when my glasses split the red and blue on the spires, they become salmon, with these really super-cool glowing indigo blue shadow twin spires right to their side. It’s so cool I keep looking sideways through my glasses just to look at it. I really wish I could take a picture, but the science of lenses to do that color split with a camera is way beyond my poor little point-and-shoot. But trust me, it’s really, really neat looking.
That said, though… I’ll be back to wearing contacts tomorrow. Cool is one thing, but, seriously, the fogging up in cold weather thing? Not cool.
So last summer quarter I took a class which alleged to be about Stress Management for Health and Wellness, but which was not so much, really. But I did wind up getting something out of it — for a project, I consolidated some of the stuff I’d been noodling on for a while, like my plot to start running this summer and complete a 5k race (which I did!), and came up with new goals. I find that I am good at coming up with ambitious things to do, but unless they have concrete deadlines attached, I suck at actually carrying through with them. (Which is why I signed up for the 5k long before I could run for more than 90 seconds at a time — and why I’m not done with a lot of my independent study stuff for school, but I digress.)
So, for that class, I not only wrote in a paper that I handed in (so there was one witness), but presented to the whole class (so there are like 20 of them): I want to do a sprint distance race in the Chicago Triathlon in 2011, and an international distance race in the London Triathlon in 2012.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a crazyniquischeme! continue reading…
Me in one sidebar frame:
![Likes [81 likes]: Scotch, Pet Shop Boys, Not Being Stabbed Repeatedly](http://ziggurat.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/likes-not-being-stabbed-repeatedly.png "well, these are all true")
