Still Remaining Thankful

The other day my glasses of five or six years or maybe longer, however long I've had this particular frame and prescription... broke. In two, right at the bridge piece that connects the two lenses over my nose. It's kind of ironic, because the frame was from Nike and it's the kind that is designed to be all bendy and not break. But well, these glasses were very old, and I've worn them a lot and this too must pass.

I haven't had a chance to get to an optometrist shop to order a new pair, and I need a prescription anyway. When I'm out of my apartment I can wear my contacts, but I'm definitely not the kind of person who can wear them everyday all day. So for when I'm at home, like right now, I've resorted to holding them together with a somewhat copious amount of electrical tape. I had to work at engineering a solution, initially I tried to take the classic approach and tape the bridge pieces together but they were so tiny that they wouldn't stay stuck to the tape. So now I have a long piece going over the tops of the lenses and then another piece over the bridge... it's pretty ugly, and it works except that the lenses aren't being held in exactly the same position so my vision is a little out of focus.

This got me thinking though how much I take my eye sight for granted. Without my glasses, I am practically non functional, I'm seriously like a mole. I guess if I was lost on a tropical island, and my glasses fell into a volcano, I could survive by groping around and squinting really hard, or I could be eaten by a large jungle cat.

Seriously though, it got me thinking how much I take this material thing, my glasses, for granted and how I always have taken them for granted. Anytime I've worn out a prescription or a pair of glasses, there was a new one! Thanks living in a wealthy western country and having health insurance! But what if I didn't have money, or health insurance, or live in a wealthy western nation? Say I was able to afford one pair of glasses. If those glasses were broken, I would be completely fucked. Or I would have to go to extreme lengths to hold them together, just so I could hold onto that basic human sensory experience of eye sight and not go around completely blind.

This is a fairly basic observation. Obviously we take things like running water, heated shelter, electricity, high speed internet for granted multiple times a day everyday. But for me, I'd never considered my eye sight. And having this happen to my glasses, I had to think about what lengths I could go to preserve it were it not something I knew would be available. Pretty big lengths, that's what. So yeah. End of blog post.