If it ain't happened now, it just ain't happened yet

2003-10-08 - 3:47 p.m.

Today Stretch's oldest brother is having heart surgery in San Francisco. Having just dealt with more heart surgery in San Francisco than I would ever care to, my well-wishes are with him and his family today.

And as everyone knows already, Schwarzenegger is the governor of California. Obviously nobody listens to me around here. All that's left now is a little optimism. Maybe he really will do everything he's promised. Except the only thing he's promised to do is to "clean house."

I just got back from the optometrist. It was depressing, really. She basically said she didn't know why I can't see. And worse yet, she can't correct it. Her: Which letters can you read? Me: What letters? Her: OK...which of these can you see the letters more clearly, 1 or 2? Me: What letters? So she ended up doing some other tests and discovered that my eyeball is changing shape. There are two possibles reasons for this, as she explained it to me. One could be that my contact lens is irritating my eye and causing it to change shape. The other is some funky eyeball disease. She decided that I should wear my glasses for a week and then come back to see her again. If I can see again then, she will know it was the contacts. If I can't, we'll start investigating funky eyeball diseases. So that's it, glasses for a week. My biggest issue with wearing glasses is that glasses are my brain's cue that it's bedtime. I take my contacts out when I'm ready for bed. Contacts are my brain's cue that it's time to wake up. I put my contacts in first thing in the morning. So if I don't put my contacts in, my brain will never realize it's time to wake up and I'll run around in a perpetual state of bedtime. My other issue is that I have a volleyball game tomorrow. I don't want to play in glasses. Sweating in glasses is just gross and besides, playing volleyball in glasses is tempting fate just a little too much. Everyone knows that the moment you step foot on the court with glasses on you're going to get smacked in the face with the ball. I still have a scar on my face from when that happened in eighth grade and I'm not anxious to have it happen again!

I gave blood today, too. Did anyone give with me? My hematocrit was ok again, so that was good. It didn't sink like a rock like last time, but it did eventually sink. I'm such a dork, though. When the lady asked me which arm I'd like to use, I said, "Probably my right." Right after I said that, I realized wait a second, I never use my right arm! I have a small little bit of paranoia that I should use my left arm so that if something goes horribly wrong and I lose my arm I'll still have my right one. But I felt like too much of a dork to tell her that on second thought I'd like to use my left arm. Instead I sat quietly in the chair and hid my little paranoia fit. So today was the first time a vein in my right arm has been punctured. It seems to be ok so far, though.

I finished reading Lady Chatterley's Lover last night. My official review can be found here, but for those of you who aren't going to go there and look anyway, I'd like to touch very lightly on some of the ideas presented in the novel. Besides the book itself, Lawrence wrote a thirty-page post script. He spent several pages of this complaining about the many pirated versions of this book that appeared when he first published this book. The rest of it he talked about how we must use obscene words and how we must have good sex. On the subject of obscene words, to me he never made his point. He states that we need to use them because we need to talk about these subjects. I maintain that we can easily talk about these subjects without using the so-called obscene words. I do agree that having words in a language that it is taboo to use is silly. But at the same time, that's the way things are. Using these words just seems vulgar and an indication of low education. What do you think? On the topic of all of us needing to have good sex, he didn't really make his point either. On this one, though, I just didn't understand what he was talking about. Maybe my experience in this venue is just too limited to understand. Or maybe things have changed in the last eighty years enough that what he says no longer applies. I don't know. Perhaps I will give it another read a few years down the road to see if more of his points hit home then.

I just got an e-mail from Azuma. He wrote, "Did you find a job in Seattle? If you do I`m coming to visit you!!!! Actually, there aren`t many parts of America you could go to that I wouldn`t want to visit you in. The only ones that come to mind are Idaho........and Barstow. That`s about it." Actually I think many parts of Idaho are really beautiful, but that's not the point. Sometimes it only takes little things like this to make me feel really good.