For reasons that will be apparent in two paragraphs, I’m typing this with my head down, eyes helf-open and fixed on the keyboard. Please be tolerant of errors and typos. Fixing them would hurt me more than they hurt you.<\/p>\n
Tuesday (today, for some of us) was my birthday. It was my 39th birthday. It was not a good one. In fact, this is the second-worst birthday so far, only narrowly edged out by the first one where someone pulled me from the warmth and tranquility of the womb and into this nightmare realm of war, famine, and Michael Bay movies.<\/p>\n
About a week ago I came down with an eye infection. It started out mild. Just a bit of redness on the eyelid. “Ah. Probably just spending too much time at the computer”, I thought, “It will clear up in no time.” This theory was disproven over the weekend, when it did, in fact, get monumentally worse. And gross. And painful. <\/p>\n
If I close my eye, it burns like my tear duct is churning out mace by the gallon. If I open them, the infected eye is pierced with agony because the dang thing refuses to focus on anything or adjust to the light. Covering it up doesn’t seem to help. So it only hurts when my eyes are closed or I’m looking at things. This means the only way to escapse the pain is to sit upright in a dark room with my eyes open, looking at nothing. While this is a tedious way to spend one’s time, it’s better than watching a Michel Bay movie so it’s sort of a mixed blessing.<\/p>\n
It’s been days since I’ve slept more thn two or three hours at a stretch. Now I can’t see and I can’t think. This has made me a little irritable. And it’s ALL YOUR FAULT.<\/p>\n
No. Sorry. It’s not totally your fault. Anyway. On my birthday I went to see the doctor and she gave me some weapons-grade antibiotics. I can’t read the label to save my life, but I’m pretty sure it says something along the lines of, “Jam this crap into your eyeball every four hours until you’re out of medicine or the thing falls out, either of which should fix the problem.” <\/p>\n
So that’s what I’m doing. I have my LCD monitor set to minimum brightness right now, and I can only behold it with fleeting sideways glances. I have to piece togethe rthe world around me with momentary peeks. So all I see are painful flashes of light and abrupt cuts from one disjoined blurry image to the next. So it’s sort of like watching a Michel Bay movie all the time. Which is the worst part.<\/p>\n
I’m actually doing a lot better. It’s only been six hours since I took the first dose of medicine, and it already hurts way, way less. I don’t know if I’ll be back to normal tomorrow or if I’ll end up taking the rest of the week off. We’ll see.<\/p>\n
So this has been a rough birthday. But still. At the end of the day I can at least be grateful for one thing: <\/p>\n
At least I’m not 40.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For reasons that will be apparent in two paragraphs, I’m typing this with my head down, eyes helf-open and fixed on the keyboard. Please be tolerant of errors and typos. Fixing them would hurt me more than they hurt you. Tuesday (today, for some of us) was my birthday. It was my 39th birthday. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[610],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-landmarks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}