trinilikesalt:

GPOYW - Version I Have Presbyopia Dadgummit.

So now it’s official. I’m getting old.

How do I know this?  I just came from the optometrist, who updated my glasses/contact lens prescription, and then informed me that I now have presbyopia.

Presbyterian what?

Presbyopia - a condition where the eye exhibits a progressively diminished ability to focus on near objects with age. Presbyopia’s exact mechanisms are not known with certainty; the research evidence most strongly supports a loss of elasticity of the crystalline lens, although changes in the lens’s curvature from continual growth and loss of power of the ciliary muscles (the muscles that bend and straighten the lens) have also been postulated as its cause. Like gray hair and wrinkles, presbyopia is a symptom caused by the natural course of aging. The first signs of presbyopia—eyestrain, difficulty seeing in dim light, problems focusing on small objects and/or fine print—are usually first noticed between the ages of 40-50.

Emphases mine.  

Yup - like sands through the hourglass, like wrinkles and gray hair, one gets older - and one’s eyes get kinda tired as one ages.  Who knew?  (Well - I did - but I didn’t know the fancy name for it.)  I was wondering why, over the last year, my arms weren’t long enough for me to read smaller and smaller print - now I know.

You know what my prescribed course of action is?  

Motherfucking reading glasses.  Magnifiers!  Like I was someone’s grandfather!  Like the kind you pick up in a CVS next to the prescription counter!  And so - here I am, in what I am now calling my Old Man Specs (which I got from LensCrafters, thank you very much), which I should wear when I’m reading or working at the computer, over my contacts.  

(Incidentally, this is precisely the reason I never got Lasik surgery.  If I was going to have someone muck about with my eyes, I wanted a guaran-fuckin’-tee that I’d never have to use glasses/contacts again - and guess what?  Presbyopia will still happen!  I would have needed to wear some form of spec!  And by the way, apparently this will happen to you too - just like gray hair and wrinkles.)

I must say though - when the doc put magnifiers over my eyes?  The heavens parted, I heard angels, and I could see close shit again!  Ohmigod I can’t tell you how much easier it is on my eyes to type this.  or to look at the screen to make sure I typed it right.  Or to see my daughters clearly when they get close.  Or to read a fuckin’ menu without stretching my arms out to kingdom come.  

And so I will wear my old man specs with aplomb, and I will look over them at you with scorn when you do some sort of young person shenanigan.  Because whatever changes I must make as a result of getting older?  It beats the alternative.

Next stop - registering for the AARP, buying some Depends, driving at 20 everywhere, and voting Republican.

Just kidding about that Republican thing.  I’m getting old, not senile, ya whippersnapper.

Oh welcome to the club then!