introvert glasses

[calimac]

Like me, John Scalzi has two eyeglass prescriptions: one for general-purpose glasses (which in my case I use just for driving), and one for close-up glasses (which in my case I use just at the computer - or I did until I misplaced them last week).

He calls them his extrovert and introvert glasses, because he uses the former when interacting with the world and nobody (outside his family, I suppose) sees him wearing the latter.

I wouldn't use that terminology. I'm still an introvert even when I'm out interacting with the world, which yes makes interacting with the world a bit of a challenge, and people do see me wearing the computer glasses. I wear them when I'm on Zoom sessions (or I did until ... see above), and people have seen me then.

My latest Zoom session was my play-reading group. We've progressed far enough in Shakespeare to reach Timon of Athens. This is, as I well knew from having seen it on stage, an absolutely dandy play, delightful to read, yet hardly anyone knows it.

Comments

[oursin]

I have seen Timon of Athen staged - the 1990/1 Young Vic production.

[calimac]

David Suchet as Timon? Must have been good.

All this time it had been quite plain to Hare that the others knew nothing about speck-a-tickles

[sturgeonslawyer]

I, too, have two pair of glasses, which I think of as my "computer glasses" and my "walking around" glasses; the latter are progressive lenses which include a focus near enough to use at a computer but not conveniently, because it's so narrow (being in the primary zone of progress) that I have to hold my head very still for long periods of time to get anything done -- when, as sometimes happens, I cannot find my computer glasses, I will generally compute glassesless. Contrariwise, sometimes when I finish at the computer, I will forget to change until something I look at farther or nearer than my typical distance from the screen looks blurry, which -- ADHD at work -- I may not notice for some time.

The "walking around" glasses, however, are very important. Without one or another pair of my glasses, I have no depth perception, a reality which caused at least two major car crashes in my younger years and also turns out to be why I was so horrible at baseball, back when I really wanted to play the game. I have a fairly serious strabismus -- my left eye is almost completely walleyed under normal circumstances; both sets of glasses have prisming in them to put the two images to where I can put them together the way optotypical people can.

In fact, I'm lucky that I was able, even with them, to see 3D; after discussion, my then-optometrist and I concluded that it was because, as a kid, I was fascinated by, and spent far too much time with View-Master viewers and their associated discs, which showed me a world with a dimension I did not ordinarily see ... because, to see into the left eyepiece at all, my eye had to pull over into something approximating a o'typical position, at which point the part of my brain that combines the images, and would otherwise probably have ceased even attempting to perform that function, got some exercise. (The side effect of long View-Mastery was always a headache from forcing my eye into that position.)

The consequences when I finally, in my mid-30s, became bespectacled, were dramatic and somewhat comedic. When I stepped out of the optometrist's office that Saturday morning, I wanted to curl up into a little ball and cower at the space in the parking lot -- I had never realized that there was so much space around all the time.

By Monday I was able to function ... until I disembarked from the "O" bus at the San Francisco terminal, and walked out into the street. The tall-to-skyscraperish buildings I had walked by so many times suddenly seemed a terrible threat, practically leaning over to fall, or at least drop their windows*, on me.

And, on our next vacation, I discovered for the first time that I was acrophobic. I had always been one of those people who would walk up to a cliff and look downward with casual interest. No more: it turned out that the only reason I'd never been afraid of those heights was that I had never seen them. I can no longer casually and comfortably maneuver thousands of pounds of steel, aluminium, and plastic, containing a few hundred pounds of living human, along the hairpin curves leading up to various mountaintops or along the stretches of Highway 1 north of the bay (around, say, Fort Ross) which are so close to the edge of the cliffs. Bridges like the San Mateo or the new span of the Bay Bridge are nightmares when I drive them, and as for the Richmond-San Rafael bridge, with the very open spaces in the roadway where you can see, even without looking to the side, how high above the water you are ... FGI.

All in all, I am grateful for having acquired bionic depth perception, if only because I have not had any more major car crashes (well, except one where a garbage truck struck me, but that's another story). It's too late to learn to play baseball well, but my bowling score, when I bowl, improved significantly.
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* As a side note, most of those buildings are designed, for safety reasons, to have the windows pop out rather than in during a major-enough earthquake, which, fortunately, has not happened. It has been calculated that some parts of Market Street would be under ten feet of glass shards, with a thinnish bottom layer of diced pedestrians.