As I've mentioned, I'm getting panicky about scheduling. Major deadlines and events keep sneaking up on me or passing, and well, I have to just buckle down and get things done if I want the next year of my life to go the way I want.
Being sick threw me two weeks further behind on my chemistry applications. I had wanted to submit everything by March 1 (the early decision deadline for one of the programs), but I just couldn't get my letters of recommendation and transcript and stuff all in order by then. Bollocks, I know. June 1 it is.
I wrote out this whole thing about my advisor and department head and deadlines for my art history thesis, but it occurred to me that my real name is attached to this site, and it's probably not smart at all to whine about that stuff until I've graduated. I'll summarize it as my thesis must be submitted to the library about 11 weeks from now, but for various reasons, I will have about 3-4 weeks to have it essentially finished. Aaaand, I'm not super happy about that.
Also, my eyes have to decided to completely fall apart in the last month or so.
I have always had crap vision, as I was born with strabismus, which basically means my eyes don't work together. One of several consequences of this is stereoblindness, a cool-sounding way of saying I can't see 3D and lack binocular depth perception (I could go on and on about the implications of this in me becoming an artist, but that's for another day).
I had several surgeries as a child to try to correct occasional esotropia, and mostly I was left with pretty bad astigmatism and a lot of sighing from doctors who said the technology just isn't there yet for everyone to have 20/20 vision. One, in a woefully misguided attempt to be reassuring, told me that you can be legally blind in one eye and still drive in most states - that's not something to tell an artist, no matter what.
For the most part my vision was manageable with glasses or contacts to correct the astigmatism, and the glasses I got in 2007 also included a prism to address the returning issues from strabismus. They were working rather splendidly for quite some time, but a few months ago, I started noticing dull headaches from reading again and enormous eye fatigue, even with my glasses. I realized how long it had been since my last eye exam and figured I was probably due for an update to my prescription, but this is the most dramatic change I've had in years. What's more, the strain is literally getting worse every day, and that ain't right.
It was my impression that cosmetically, it was under control, and had for the most part been corrected, save for the habit to sometimes blink one eye before the other if I'm thinking about a few things at a time and trying to keep them straight (my labmate says this is charming). Then I was video-chatting with a friend recently and he saw me try to focus on text I was typing into a browser while talking with him. I was tired, my eyes were strained, but I didn't think anything of it. "What's wrong with your eyes?" he asked, and wondered if I was trying to make faces, or if I'd always had a lazy eye and he'd never noticed before. It was immensely tempting to burst into tears and revert to a painfully self-conscious six-year-old getting mocked on the playground by neighborhood twits. I guess I didn't realize that it had become that obvious to other people again.
This, combined with a particularly unsettling trip to the opera where switching focus from subtitles to the stage gave me such a bad headache I felt nauseous, made me decide enough is enough. I made an appointment for this afternoon (and yes, I'm fretting, hence the wikipedia'ing and obsessing). If you ever want to become agonizingly conscious of your eye muscle activity, go ahead and read a few Wikipedia articles about it. Good Lord have I got the chills.
I started examining my own vision as well (I do not suggest doing this if you are already neurotic) and learned that my right eye is essentially useless of late. Honestly, the left eye is doing ALL the work, and when I covered it up (yes, maaaaaaybe I was trying to see what I'd look like with an eye patch), I could barely focus my right eye on text less than a foot from my face. And my goodness, was that tiring to read.
So the right one is the culprit, and that makes a lot of sense, since yknow, I was positive that my left eye was the one that used to turn in when I was a child. I have no idea what they can do to fix it (I do look rad as a pirate), but I'm genuinely concerned. My eyes are really important to me, and I don't want to keep having awful headaches and not being able to focus on things.
And okay, yes, the lazy eye thing is probably the one personal aspect about which I have been most horribly self-conscious in my life. I've stopped being friends with people who have teased me about it, and to this day I'm weird about making eye contact if I worry that I'm tired or drunk or feel like my eyes aren't focusing together correctly. I want them to work together, and I don't want to have to worry about this anymore.
Also, the awful headaches, strain, blurred vision, and all that can go away too please.
