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new glasses Saturday, August 25 2007
With the mail today came paraphernalia for my middle age, a pair of eye glasses. Since getting back from Scotland, I'd been eager to find a fix for the slight focus problem I'd identified when looking at things in the distance. I'd tried looking for glasses at a drug store, but the only prescription glasses sold there were for problems with focusing on nearby objects (in other words, reading glasses for the elderly). Still, in the process I'd learned about the diopter-based numbering system for lens correction and determined that the glasses I needed would be slightly negative. With this in mind I'd gone online and found a website called EyeBuyDirect.com, where you can pick rims, give your prescription (in diopters and other measurements, depending on the eccentricities of your respective eyes), and they ship you your glasses. Those were the glasses that arrived today. They'd cost me about $20.
I'd guessed that my eyes needed -0.5 diopters of correction each. This is a very small correction, hardly noticeable when I put them on. I gave them their first test drive while watching the television, where I'd identified a slight problem with reading small textual overlays. The new glasses corrected a good half of the problem, but I could still correct it even further by tugging at the corner of my eye (the "instant fix" I'd identified along with the myopia in Scotland). I'm guessing then that a proper prescription for my eyes would be about -1.0 diopters. I'll hold off on ordering another set until I'm sure my eyes are done with whatever metamorphosis they're currently engaged in.
If everyone memorized their glass prescriptions (and it would make sense to; there's not much to know) then anyone like me with the sudden emergence of a need could just try on the glasses of friends to get an idea of the correction needed and then place an order online, bypassing the Opthamology profession entirely. It's the sort of internet-enabled DIY medical care that will prove increasingly essential as the American insuro-medical system crumbles into uselessness. One gets the sense that, like other medical professionals, opthamologists have done as much as possible to obscure the simplicity of much of their work, even (for example) using abbreviations for the Latin terms for "left eye" and "right eye" instead of just using the words "left" and "right" - thereby rendering their prescriptions unreadable to their patients and other layfolk.
This evening Gretchen and I carpooled with our friend Tara to a performance by Arm of the Sea Theater in Saugerties on the banks of the lower Esopus where it empties into the Hudson River Tara's husband Brian plays drums and speaks some of the dialogue for the puppets and masked actors who do the performances. Not unexpectedly, perhaps, Arm of the Sea draws a decidedly liberal/progressive/hippie audience. It seems to derive from the same modern anarcho-hedonist utopian mindset responsible for Burning Man and Bread and Puppet. Today, along with Arm of the Sea Theatre, was the good ship Clearwater, a traditional Hudson River sloop designed to raise awareness of Hudson River environmental issues (as advocated by legendary folk musician Pete Seeger). The Clearwater was tied up there on the bank of the Esopus and we, the general public, were allowed to clamber aboard and look at the deck. The thing that most struck me was its 108 foot mast, the trunk of some sort of evergreen tree. It had been thickly greased to better permit the sail hoops (horizontal hoops securing the sail at the mast) to slide up and down and rotate back and forh.
For awhile rain threatened and even came down briefly in a few showers, but eventually the rains stopped and the PA system, elaborate sets, and musical instruments could all be untarped.
Typical for a production run by a bunch of hippies, the theater was a little slow in getting started, and so the band (The Big Sky Ensemble) performed various numbers to fill the time. They have an odd sound for the modern sensibility, as their tunes are performed using only horns and percussion.
As for the show itself, it was a strangely incoherent mix of myth and science. Early in the action our hero (A Mr. Rip Van Wrinkle) interrupts his painting of a landscape to shoot a doe deer being wooed by two bucks. The doe then is transformed into a human maiden, whom he marries. Mr. Van Wrinkle then gets a job at the Ministry of Reality (which, its minister bemoans, doesn't get anywhere near as much money as such ministries as the Ministry of Faith). Van Wrinkle is soon tasked with looking into a microscope and recording what he sees and soon ends up, Alice-in-Wonderland-stylee, down in the microcosmos, learning about the intricacies of first cell biology and then natural selection. The person who wrote this play obvious knew a lot about cell biology. We weren't burdened with terms like RNA, DNA, and ribosome, but we were shown how all of this stuff functions. It seemed like an attempt to build a fanciful fable with a firm grounding in real science, which could serve a helpful purpose in our society. But, as Gretchen pointed out, whoever had written this thing had smoked entirely too much pot to put together a coherent story. Still, the details of the production were fabulous: the masks, the puppets, the banners, the posters, and the crazy flopping two-dimensional critters. I also liked the weird ethereal synthesizer music that accompanied some of the scenes, particularly at the beginning and end when Mr. Van Wrinkle is shown as a 12 foot tall old man.
After the Arm of the Sea main act, we watched a woman do a solo performance with a small hand puppet presenting an older housewife who told us all about the ins and outs of shopping at the dollar store. One piece of advice was that we keep in mind the alternate uses of products containing unexpected adulterants such as lead. While dogfood might have antifreeze in it, the antifreeze could turn out to be made from hair remover. It was a hilarious skit and made me want to shop at a dollar store sometime very soon.
Gretchen with her perm and me with my new glasses.
Gretchen framed by the crazy sunflowers in our gardens.
Boychick, Andrea's cat who we've been catsitting. He's been hanging out mostly in the basement on a guest room bed.
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