The other day I consulted the parents concerning a rather personal problem of mine. As I have no tact or sense of what should be kept within the home and what can be presented to the world, I figured I’d post about it here.
I have an enormous red mark on the area between my chest and my pelvis. It covers most of my front, and resembles (most accurately) Plate V of the Rorschach Inkblot Test. Psychological (and, according to the website, sexual) connotations aside, I can’t figure out what it’s there for.
So I asked those people whom I consider the authority on everything. They say it’s probably just a rash caused by an allergic reaction to the dye in my clothing (I DO wear a lot of black). I am quite skeptical of this, as I’ve had this blob for at least two years (it has expanded almost steadily… which makes me think of it as being more of a strange sort of kelloid scar). My parents, even with the information of the lifespan of this beast, maintain that it is, indeed, just a rash. Again, I remain skeptical at best. Either way, I accepted the weird New-Agey soap they gave me with much grattitude–if it doesn’t work, I can always just go see the doctor, no?
To try and speed up the process, as I’m now enjoying the wondrous vacation Reading Week gives me, I have decided to stay away from clothing in general as much as possible for the next little while. Naturally, this means I’ll be staying inside quite a bit more (and perhaps blogging more often? Who knows).
Anyway, a progress report will arrive… probably when the week is over.
As a side note, I will also, by the end of the week, update with a post about my Halloween costume, which I plan to have finished by this coming Sunday.
The sheer pain one feels when there’s something under a contact lens is enough to make a grown man crawl.
Today was not a good day.
In my utter panic to get out the door on time so as not to miss the city bus that would spare me being late for yet another grammar lab, I quickly opened by contact lens case, took out the right lens, scanned it quickly to make sure there was nothing big on it, then took my standard position right in front of the mirror. I pried open my eye (using that lovely two-finger method that sometimes results in a poked cornea) and popped that sucker in as quickly as I could. And then…
“Oh. My. GOD! AAAAAAAA!”
There is an unbelievable amount of agony involved in having multiple little somethings stuck between your eye and something which, every single time you blink, gets pushed into it–embedding, quite literally, of course, fiery little needles even deeper into your eyeball.
Never, ever again. Ever. For the first half hour of having those… beasts under my lens, I couldn’t even open my eyelid. Couldn’t even open it. It felt like someone was grating sandpaper on my eye… times about… whatever the pain index for having three teeth pulled without anaesthetic is.
As a result of both eyes then wanting to close (try keeping one eye closed and the other open–yeah, that’s right, it doesn’t work), I walked around my apartment like a blind, bumbling fool. On the plus side, I have a newly-found respect for the sightless. On the negative side, my shins hate me for having tripped over the coffee table three times.
Does anyone know how hard it is to dial a phone number without being able to see the numbers? You basically have to rely on your implicit memory and hope that you’ll be able to pull it off. I reached the optometrist on the first try, thank God; but it took me about four tries to get a hold of my mother’s actual number so I could tell her there was no way in Hell I was going to go, basically blind, to the bus depot and take a bus. Marianna, Ken and Lois Silpa, and whoever the person was who hung up on me, I’m sorry. Well, not to the person who hung up on me–thanks for not tell me what your number was, you stupid asshole.
ANYWAY, getting back to me. I finally got to the wonderful, beautiful, spic-and-span optometrist’s office and the doctor (I want to be this man’s mistress, I’m so thankful) checked it out a bit. How he even managed to check what was going on in there in the two-second intervals during which my eye would open slightly and then screw itself tightly shut because of this absolute anguish is a mystery to me, but he did it and then held my eye open with his fingers and popped that stupid fucker right out.
He checked me again, gave me some drops, said some stuff about possible viruses, and sent me on my way–to my seminar for Education.
As though the embarassment of being too stupid to get my own contact lens out of my eye wasn’t horrible enough, the lens of my eye itself is pretty damaged and the whole time, it was tearing (well… streaming) and being all red and swollen, and causing me to have a horrible case of the sniffles.
Want to know what the seminar was about? Signs of Stress and How to Deal with It. Supposedly, crying for no apparent reason is a serious physical and emotional sign of having too much stress.
TWO HUNDRED PEOPLE COULD HEAR ME SNIFFLING. FOR NO APPARENT REASON. And whoever was on my right side (at least half of them), was seeing crying.
The whole time, everybody kept looking at me like I was some crazy whackjob that the seminar presenter had probably hired to see if they could recognize the signs of stress. Some stupid hippy-like girl to my left actually asked me if I was feeling stressed and was starting to crack because of it, since, you know, the right side of my face was crying and all. Oh yes, I’m definitely feeling stressed. But only half-stress, obviously, since ONLY HALF OF MY FACE HAS TEARS. I mean, how stupid can you be? I was looking right at you when you started talking to me, and I could definitely see you staring at the bloody red mess that was of arteries in my right eye. Use your brain, stupid–it’s clearly an irritated eye. It’s like everyone thinks that because they’ve been to some seminar they’re all qualified to be psychologists now and can just throw common sense out the window.
Stupid, stupid girl. I wouldn’t have been stressed at all had she not spoken to me, I think. Sure, the pain of the contact hurt like monkeys were digging for ants in my eye, but I have surprisingly seen a lot of worse incidents with contacts and wasn’t insanely worried about it. Having that girl sit there and give me smarter-thus-holier-than-thou pity looks was the real mood ruiner of the day today. Better lay off the speed, honey. I don’t think we want hard drug addicts for teachers.
I have another appointment with the optometrist tomorrow, just so he can check to make sure my eye’s not gotten infected and that the cornea is regenerating at its usual rate (it regenerates itself every fourty-eight hours, just so you contact wearers know). I’ll let everybody know how that goes.
For now, my eye freaking burns. Even with these drops, I can still feel heat just… emanating from it. Ugh. Talk about taming the shrew just a bit.
As virtually the only member of the self-proclaimed literati who despises (with a blinding passion, I promise) Orwell’s 1984, I’ve come to realize that my skewed view of reality is, indeed, very close to what he entailed in his novel. Of course, part of that isn’t my fault–it’s the crazy government, I tell you. It’s like they’re just pulling their cues from ol’ Georgie, my friends.
Submission #1: Has anyone been to London lately (after the bombings of July 7th or so)? Have you taken note of the insane amount of observation cameras they have set up on roads and intersections? Last I checked, there can be about seven separate cameras on one electrical pole. Telescreens much? I think so.
Submission #2: Thinking rebellious thoughts (at least in the United States) is now illegal. How do I mean, you ask–protesting, in the form of demonstrating, is now prohibited in certain areas of the U.S. (ultimately, all public areas–”Oh, you want to protest the war in Iraq by chanting your thoughts while in front of the White House? I’m sorry, but that’s against the law. We’ll have to arrest you for that. That’s thoughtcrime, after all.”).
Submission #3: The infamous Big Brother. Was I the only one who was more than a little freaked out when major countries in the Western hemisphere started to introduce that fingerprint-ID program? Where your entire life and comings-and-goings pop up conveniently on a little screen whenever they need it? Or a blacklist of people they don’t like (which usually doesn’t contain actual names, but rather descriptions of people–which is why Maher Arar was sent off to Syria)? I’m the first to tell you that I freaked right out when I found out I could be put on a rather arbitrary blacklist containing the names of people who openly oppose the government (a former MI-5 agent who then decided to write a book detailing his operations for the government has his name on this list)… which essentially disallows them from crossing into certain countries. I’m sorry, but I don’t see how letting the government take away my freedom to travel freely where I would like when I haven’t committed a crime is going to help conserve my freedom in the long run.
Submission #4: War is peace. Of course, I make reference to the Iraq war. We invaded the country, first of all, on false pretenses. Second of all, we declared that we would help to rebuild the country. But honestly, have you seen any rebuilding being done there? Because the only buildings I’ve seen being built so far are enormous military fortresses to protect our forces from bombs and attacks. Maybe they wouldn’t attack us if we built things for them, too? Just a thought. Then again… Bush DOES probably make more money off of soldiers who die before they can collect their paychecks, not to mention the amount of people who no doubt decide to trust him implicitly because “there’s no way the president would lie to us about a war–nobody’s that cruel,” … so maybe not. Which leads me to…
Submission #5: The government has repeatedly lied to its subjects (no matter where you come from). I’ll submit an instance of lying from my own government–one I have no doubt most people don’t know, because even though we cover the incident in our history classes, such a dirty spot on our “clean” record usually rests unmentioned. In Canada and the United States in the 1950’s, research was conducted to test the effectiveness of a chemical that was supposed to have roughly the same effect as mustard gas. Ultimately, a cloud of the chemical was dropped over Winnipeg and other small towns of Manitoba, as well as being dropped by the Golden Gate Bridge in California. Why? They wanted to see just how good the chemical was at demobilizing people before they produced any more and sent it to the fronts in China and North Korea. And they lied about it, saying there was an explosion of a reactor of some kind that led to a leakage of a non-threatening gas. The documents have only been de-classified in Canada for about ten years now. Nice of them, eh? To lie to us like that? Sure proves to me I can trust the government to keep my health and welfare at the forefront of their minds.
I’ll reiterate–I could not stand reading 1984. It was pure torture for me. I understood the ideas and everything, but I just couldn’t like anything about it. I hated it, hated it, hated it. And yet, seeing the state of society through my own very Natalija-coloured lenses, I’m forced to draw up the memory of the Party’s slogans in that horrid novel:
WAR IS PEACE.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
If this is where the western world is headed, it’s definitely a sad day for mankind.