floaters
Suddenly I am reminded of the lyrics to one of the songs from Evita:
Your little body's slowly breaking down
You're losing speed, you're losing strength, not style
That goes on flourishing forever
But your eyes, your smile
Do not have the sparkle of your fantastic past
If you climb one more mountain it could be your last
I mean, I'm not climbing any mountains anyway; that's no concern. Honestly I think my eyes and smile have as much if not more "sparkle" than any time in my past. But those first two lines? Those are the ones that keep repeating in my mind today.
For two reasons.
First of all, in the past several weeks, it feels like almost overnight, my body aches every time I move it after any length of time sitting still. I just get out of my chair at work and I feel like I've pulled a muscle. It especially hurts in my hip area.
I also, every once in a while, get suddenly semi-blinding floaters in my eyes. So I guess that line about the eyes is semi-relevant after all. It's been a while since it happened, but this morning it was bad enough to get legitimately distracting as I attempted to do my tasks on my computer at work.
I found this from everydayhealth.com:
Eye floaters and flashes are caused by changes in the vitreous gel that occur as we get older. Eye floaters occur when the vitreous gel thickens or shrinks due to aging, causing particles to form in the gel. These particles block the light passing through your eye, casting shadows on the retina.
And then this, fromWebMD:
How do I get rid of floaters in my vision?
Move your eyes -- this shifts the fluid around. Look up and down, that usually works better than side to side. If you have so many that they block your vision, your eye doctor may suggest surgery called a vitrectomy. He'll remove the vitreous and replace it with a salt solution.
So I tried this, moving my eyes rapidly around, probably looking like a lunatic at my desk. It didn't seem to make much of a difference. As always, I just had to wait a little while and eventually it went away. It sure is a pain in the ass while it's present, though, making it harder to do my job.
I mentioned it to Noah, who is like one year older than me, and he mentioned a phrase I had never heard of before, saying he has experienced them too and they usually go away in about twenty minutes: "ocular migraines." He even emailed me a link about them. And I did find some interesting insights there.
This might actually make some sense for me – I have a history of straightforward migraine headaches, still get them occasionally, and got them frequently as a kid. That web page says the two have the same causes. Oh, and it also mentions a genetic link – how fun! My mother had them even worse than I did. She once had one so painful she got a shot with three needles into her arm, some kind of relaxer treatment, stupidly drove herself home, and by the time she got to the front door she couldn’t even lift her arms to open it and rang the doorbell. When I opened the door I found my mom just standing there, giggling. It was very weird.
Anyway, the floaters happened this morning and mercifully were gone by lunch time.
I guess I could tell you now that last night I took myself to see Beautiful Boy at the Egyptian, and it was not nearly as good as I wanted it to be, or it could have been -- and, as I wrote in my review, I could not stop thinking about the white privilege that informs its very existence. God forbid we should see any movies like this, devoid of judgment and characterized by empathy, for people of color dealing with addiction issues. Instead this country puts the blame on those people, while offering up these stories of "poor" white people dealing with similar problems in their cushy, upper-middle-class environments. I found it frankly more annoying the longer I watched the movie.
I did wonder whether I was the only one thinking about this while watching the movie -- and, as it happened, I could not find a lot of other people online thinking the same thing. I did find this vice.com piece that gets at basically the same things I was thinking, but it seems to be an outlier, in published pieces, at least. Oh, wait -- thanks to Twitter I just found this even better GQ piece. I'm happy to see that I'm not a total outlier in noticing this, at least.
I think I have finally, for-real-for-sure put my bike away for the winter; it hasn't been too rainy yet, but it's been pretty cold in the mornings again, and I can't imagine any huge warm spells again at this point. So, stopping at Target for a jar of refill hand soap, I walked home yesterday, giving me just a little while at home before I needed to leave again. Shobhit, who has a cold, had fallen asleep and just woke up when I got home. I decided to free up some space in our freezer by nuking the three Amy's frozen meals the broker gave me at work and which I brought home for Shobhit on Friday, and we just split all three of them. I knew the volume would not be ultimately enough for Shobhit, but it worked for me, and for him for the moment. Then I walked to the movie, which thankfully was at the theatre all of six blocks away.
The showtime was at 6:30; I got home at about 8:40 or so; spent the next hour or so on the movie review. And that pretty much sums up my evening.
Oh! I almost forgot. Alicia and I went on the loop walk through Myrtle Edwards Park yesterday. It stayed foggy all day, and I was barely warm enough wearing just my red hoodie. It actually proved to be perfect, once we were done. It was very pleasant, and Alicia got to shake off some stress of a recent work phone call. Me, as always, I was just walking for the hell of it. It's nice to break things up.
[posted 12:43 pm]