Experienced a weird coincidence yesterday, which I would have appreciated much more if it didn’t result in me wasting forty-five minutes of my day driving to the wrong part of town.
Both our kids wear glasses now. Lil' S1 has had them for about a year already, and his little brother just got them. They had an eye appoint a few weeks ago to get a subscription, and yesterday I got a call saying their glasses were ready for pick up. I was in the middle of working on a particularly thorny problem when the call came in, so I was only half engaged -- actually, probably closer to 30% engaged. S took them to the appointment, but she’s out of town for a few more days, so I needed to make the pickup, but I realized I didn't know where they were located. I was about to call back the number on my phone, but instead I figured I would just Google it. I caught the doctor’s name -- Dr. Snyder -- and my phone was telling me the call came from Silver Spring, MD. So, easy-peasy:
From the graphic above, an astute reader might be able to discern the erroneous path down which I was about to embark. The key word above is
ophthalmologist, defined as:
a doctor who deals with the anatomy, physiology and diseases of the eyeball and orbit, and notably not defined as:
a doctor who provides a service related to the eyes or vision. If you had asked me yesterday morning the difference between an
ophthalmologist and an
optometrist, I would have come up with a reasonably accurate answer – I know (and knew) the basic difference. However, when I was performing a Google search for a certain doctor in a certain city, once I saw an eye-related prefix I figured –
got it – and that was that. I mean, it’s not like Silver Spring, Maryland is the epicenter of ocular medicine. How many eye doctors named Snyder can there be?
Only one, as it turns out, but he’s not who I wanted. When I got to his office and peeked through the window, I knew something was wrong, because it was a tiny place that only contained files. There were no display cases of glasses or vision-testing equipment or anything like that. I could tell that this was just a “bookkeeping” office and that most of the work done by this doctor was done somewhere else. I was about to bail, but then I thought:
You’re already here, just go in and talk to the receptionist. It doesn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt, but it did waste a nontrivial more amount of time. I utterly confused the receptionist, an elderly woman, who was very nice, but not at all helpful. It was one of those times where curtly saying, “sorry, can't help you,” would have been the best answer. But instead she went through a bunch of files, which took her forever and a day to find and predictably led nowhere, and then she suggested that perhaps I wanted Dr. Schneider, a cardiologist in the same building. Uh… I said my kids need glasses, not aortic stents.
[By the way, I take ownership of Rob Schneider not being funny like I'm an insufferable hipster who was following that indy band before they got big. I was making fun of him back in the twentieth-century, son.]
I finally got out of there and did what I should have done from the get-go and called the number on my phone to get the correct location. It turns out the optometrist’s name is Dr. Schneid, not Snyder, and he is in Takoma Park a neighboring city of Silver Spring. So, it was a fluke trifecta: 1) The optometrist has an uncommon surname that my mind wrongly auto-corrected to a common surname; 2) the geocoding of the number was off on my phone, telling me the wrong city; 3) there is a prominent eye doctor of said wrong name in said wrong city, whose information immediately comes up when Googled. Weird. Annoying. Weirdly annoying.
So, my kids have their glasses now, and I wonder if glasses are like braces or those cranium-shaping helmets, where if you ask a doctor if your kids need glasses, and the doctor benefits financially from your kids needing glasses, the answer is going to overwhelmingly be "yes." It’s not that they are corrupt or lying or anything like that; it’s just that pretty much everybody could stand to have their eyesight improved in some way (just like everybody could stand to have straighter teeth or a rounder head), so, yeah, glasses will technically help. But obviously there are degrees. There are people like S who needed to wear glasses or contacts just to see “normally” in day-to-day life (she got a cornea-reshaping procedure a few years ago), and then there are people like me who can see pretty well without their glasses, but whose eyes fatigue quickly while reading or working on a computer without them. I’ve had glasses since I was seven, and I do need them to prevent eye-strain, but if I never had them, I probably would have adjusted and been okay -- just as Lil' S1 is doing fine with his evidently flat occiput.
[One of the proudest days of my life was throwing away the referral we got from a nurse to get Lil' S1 fitted for one these bullshit helmets. Super cute stock-photo baby, though.]
The boys are more like me than S – in fact, their conditions sound exactly like mine – so they only need their glasses when their eyes are "feeling tired." The problem is if you ask a six-year-old (let alone a three-year-old) if their eyes are tired, the answer is always going to be no, since a yes would lead to the arduous task of retrieving their glasses and putting them on. So, we basically have to make them wear them. I’ve decided I’m not going to be that militant about it, especially with the younger one. I will try to remember to have them wear them when they’re using the iPad or, in the older one’s case, doing homework, but if they don’t, oh well. What I really want them to do is to learn how keep track of their glasses and use them on their own without losing them – that’s the most important life skill to be learned here, in my opinion.
Anyway…
In other news, my gym is running a "28-day accountability challenge," where you go on a special diet over the next four weeks to avoid the usual pigging out that comes with the holiday season. I find these things kinda gimmicky, but I actually want to do this one. I'm not going to, however, because we'll be spending a lot of time with S's family over the next four weeks (her mom is here now, actually), and I think one of the major reasons her mom likes me is because I eat her cooking. I'm not even joking about this. Food is a major bond between us, and I doubt poori and chapatis will be on the diet's approved list. I just couldn't say to S's mom, "Sorry, I can't eat this delicious masala dosa you've prepared for me. Do you have anything with less carbs? And would it kill you cut back on the ghee a little?" S and her sister will basically do this. They will often prepare their own meals when they visit. And the kids are kids, so they just want to eat cereal and string cheese three meals a day, but for me it's different. I feel compelled to eat S's mom's cooking -- and, even more so, I
want to eat it, because it's delicious. So, it's a win-win, and I don't want to mess it up by going on some sort of restrictive diet.
But I do need to get more selective about what I put in my body. Eating right is the missing piece for me right now, health-wise. For the most part I'm a fit guy -- I don't smoke or do any major drugs; I exercise frequently; and I seem to have made out decently in the genetic lottery. But I don't eat right. I don't eat
terribly -- I typically stay away from fast food and soda, which is good -- but I definitely don't eat
right. I have some small bad habits that add up. Bread is a big one. I eat bread with just about every meal. And I load up on other carbs -- pasta, pizza, chips, crackers, etc. -- any chance I get. I'm not saying I need to go no-carbs or anything that -- just cut back a bit. I also never say no to sweets. This is a problem especially during the holiday season, as there are sweets in my office constantly these days. And I can't help but partake. Cookies with my coffee? Yes, please. Mini chocolates after lunch? Count me in. Cake and ice cream for a birthday? Definitely. Again, I don't need to go LL on everybody, just moderate a little. (LL is a coworker who hasn't eaten a single sweet in 35 years.) Portion control.
The worst is this fancy granola I eat with yogurt daily. I love it, and I love the ritual of eating it shortly before I go to bed. It holds me over to morning, and it's a treat I give myself for surviving another day. That's all fine and good. The problem is that I eat way too much of it. Frequently, I polish off an entire bag in two nights. (It's also six bucks a pop, so it's as bad for my wallet as it is for my body.) It's granola, so it's not like I'm polishing off a half-carton of ice cream every night (although I will do that too, if we happen to have it around), but it's not really healthy granola. It's high in sugar, and it has huge hunks of chocolate in it. For a while I had it going where I would only eat one small bowl every night, but then something happen, I'm not sure what, but the dam burst, and I haven't been motivated to repair it. So now, it's a granola bacchanal in my mouth every night.
[This stuff is the schnizz-nit]
Well, I've used the word bacchanal organically in a sentence, I feel my work here is done. Until next time...
