Just got back from the optometrist and the news ain’t good.

The good news is that my prescription hasn’t changed much. The bad news is that there’s a fluid buildup in both my eyes. That’s why my vision has been getting worse.

And that’s bad.

So my eyeballs are still the same shape, they’re just ready to explode instead.

That’s probably an exaggeration.

Anyhow, it means I am going back to Doctor Vaezi and his clinic, West Coast Retina. Because fluid buildup like mine is definitely above an optometrist’s pay grade.

The solution may very well involve surgery, possibly even emergency surgery if Vaezi et al decide my vision is in serious peril.

At this point, I feel the need to remind myself that I have already had major surgery on both of my eyeballs before, when they took my cataracts out way back when.

And it was fine. I was technically awake for the entire thing but the drugs they had me on were very, very nice, and I was super relaxed all the way through it.

In fact, they had boomer rock playing and more than once they had to tell me to stop singing along to it.

What can I say, I have a song in my heart. And stents!

So now I am worried about my eyesight. If it does, so do I. Put me on immediate suicide watch because I can’t imagine wanting to live without eyesight.

I am too damn old to learn braille.

And the range of video games for blind people is very, very limited.

On the positive type side, if it’s just a matter of fluid retention in my eyes, it could be that once that fluid is drained, my vision will be way, way better.

That would totally rock.

And to think that this all started because I was having trouble reading my paperback books and that’s just unacceptable.

I can’t afford large print editions of everything I own!

OF course, I could get a magnifier. One of those ones that can lie flat on the page.

Or come to think of it, if I got my tablet working again, I could use its camera as a magnifier. Or just switch to eBooks.

I mean, my tablet IS a Kindle, technically. Presumably it can handle letting me read eBooks extremely well.

And sometimes you can get eBooks for very little. I have heard that there are even subscription based services that work kind of like a library in that they let you “check out” books and you pay according to how many you want to have out at the same time.

Of course, I’d have to pay $35 for a new battery for the thing first.

And there is a very good reason I haven’t done that, and that’s because I concluded that I am much better off without the thing.

I do not need the ability to play video games in bed.

Bed is for resting and reading and listening to YouTube videos. It is not a place for mentally stimulating myself with video games to the point where the gap between my mental state and the sleep state is wider than the Grand Canyon.

Now where was I? Oh right, worried about my eyeballs.

Yeah, if they go, I go. I might be able to survive losing my hearing, although the lack of music in my life would be extremely hard on me.

But life without vision would destroy me. I would most likely go insane.

So now I am waiting to hear from Doctor Vaezi’s office as to when they want me to come in, and I am thinking, the faster they get back to me, the more worried they are, and the more worried I should be.

So I won’t exactly be disappointed if I don’t hear from them until Monday.

More after the break.

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Social retardation and Empathic Reward

By any reasonable measure, I am seriously socially retarded.

Developmentally speaking, that is. How could I be anything else? I was all alone and friendless so much as a kid.

And a child cannot develop socially all by himself.

Because I never went to kindergarten, I was already way behind my fellow Grade 1 students on the first day of school.

They all knew each other from kindergarten. They had learned to play with the other kids, make friends, and get along without me.

And I never caught up. I had no friends until Grade 6. When I did have friends, which was basically most of Grade 6 and junior high (Grades 7-9), they were not exactly close knit male bonding “brothers from other mothers” friendships.

Then High School came along, Jason Heisler and I parted ways forever, and I was once again alone, and would stay that way until college.

So how was I supposed to develop my social skills?

Hence my severe social anxiety. I know that I don’t know what I am doing around people, and have an awful lot of days of icy cold loneliness stored in my soul, and so in my mind it’s only a matter of time before people turn on me and bully me.

Crazy, I know. But so am I.

Thank God I did not end up on the autism spectrum. I really feel like it’s a minor miracle that I dodged that particular bullet.

I owe it all to my babysitter Betty, the tough gal from the other side of the tracks whose solid, grounded, rough cut wisdom and deep but no-nonsense compassion for a weird little boy was exactly the thing I needed to overcome my intellectually enriched but socially impoverished home life.

It’s all so very sitcom-esque.

She almost could have been played by Nell Carter.

And there was always summer. My mother was a teacher, so she was home during the summer, and so were all us kids, and my angry father was at work all day, so it was really the perfect time to be a family.

That’s why when I think “happy childhood memories”, I think of summer.

At least then, my siblings were around some of the time. We were still largely inclined to all be doing our own thing most of the time, but on the weekends we would do things as a family, like go to the beach.

i haven’t really talked about social retardation, have I?

That’s because I don’t really know what to say about it. I never learned to pick up the social signals everyone else understood instinctively.

But I know that I can change all that. I know in my heart than I am, in fact, a very charismatic and lovable guy, and have everything I need to not only be social but even popular, in some circles anyway.

All that cuteness and charm I display as Fruvous comes from me. I could totally see myself finding a nice little clique to click into.

All I have to do is escape my own shadow.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.