Love Is Extremely Nearsighted

Ooh, the new doctor at my optometrist's office is cute! Or he might be. That might have been the coatrack. It's hard to tell, since they had me take out my contacts before he came in.

Every other year I get my eyes dilated, which is always lots of fun. First the doctor had me read off a line of letters while flipping lenses in front of my face, determined that my prescription hasn't changed any since last year - and thank God for that, because if it gets any worse, I will only be able to see things that are actually behind my head - then tilted my face back, put drops in my eyes, and sent me back to the waiting room to ripen.

So for about twenty minutes I sat there among the new arrivals, as the room grew brighter and brighter. I was bored. It's not like you can read a magazine. I thought about leaning over to one of my neighbors. "Psst! Hey, buddy!" I would whisper, glancing around furtively. "The letters are S, J, X, P, B, Q!"

But I was feeling blue and mopey, and not really up to any hijinks. Too bad, because wouldn't that be funny? You're just sitting there, minding your own business, leafing through a three-month-old Newsweek while you wait for the nurse to call you, and someone with pupils the size of dinner plates tries to get you to cheat on your eye exam. Well, I think it'd be pretty cool. But bear in mind that I'm the kind of person who tries to flirt with furniture.

"Are you driving today?" asked the doctor, shining his light into my eyes. "No, no, I'm on my bike," I told him. "Oh, good," he said. Biking blind is much safer.

Actually (once I got my new contacts in) it turns out he is pretty cute, although he's much too young, probably fresh out of medical school. "The first two years, all my classmates and I had to dilate each other's eyes a couple of times a week," he told my sympathetically when I complained about the sensation. "Partly for practice and partly so we'll know what the patients are going through. I hate it too."

It has to be done. I'll be back again in two years, so if you need to schedule an eye exam, you might want to get it in before then. Because who knows what kind of mood I'll be in?