Color, color, everywhere

I walked around campus feeling like a little kid today. This morning I got my new contacts and a surprise. After being told that a certain type of lens I was interested in wasn't available as a gas permeable lens, I found out today that there is a gp version. And, in fact the optometrist had ordered one for me. A completely red lens over my right eye will allow me to see true colors for the first time.

These lens allow those of us with "color vision deficiency" to see color as other people see it. I had no idea how intense many colors are, some of them literally popped out at me. Our school color is red and several people and signs were suddenly blindingly obvious. It became overwhelming at times and I had to close my eyes to give my brain a chance to rest. How could I have lived thirty seven years without seeing all the greens in a leaf or the varying colors in the sunset.? Swapping the lens out resulted in a much greyer world, colors don't jump out in the same way.

My coworkers' reactions to the lens varied. An artist friend noticed it pretty quickly but many people didn't notice at all. I think they noticed my expression of excitement and awe before they noticed that my eyes are two different colors with the lens in. Next week I am getting a brown tinted lens so that the contrast between my light blue eye and the red lens won't be so obvious.

I can't wait to go visit a museum or art gallery to truly explore how my perception of color has changed. In the meanwhile I will wear my sunglasses outdoors so that people aren't startled by my sudden fascination with the color of a building or shrub.

Unique gifts

Many women struggle with our relationships with our parents. I suppose we get along best with the parent that is most like ourselves. My father and I have always had a challenging relationship. Once I left the "daddy's girl" stage I think he felt truly lost when dealing with me. Those of you who know me well won't be surprised if I say that I wasn't an easy child. I questioned everything and everyone and didn't believe in following traditional roles. I joined a flag football team (the only girl) and proceeded to have the crap kicked out of me in practice by my teammates. I got that message and moved on to soccer. At one point in adolescence my father told me that I didn't need to learn how to drive as my husband would be driving me around. I finally earned my license at the advanced age of 24 (still not married).

End result was more rebellion and more conflict. One thing we aren't great at in my family is expressing our feelings (except anger, we are pretty solid with anger). So giving compliments is something you didn't do or expect to receive. This has always frustrated me because I have never told my dad how proud I am of his gifts. He works with his hands and although you couldn't tell him this, he is an artist in his own way. He worked as a millwright for 20+ years and has an innate understanding of machinery. One of the last people I could have ever imagined retired, has produced a work of art as a "project". He was asked to reconstruct a horse pulled wagon for his brother. I think that the pictures say more about my father's artistry than I ever could.

Much to learn

There is an old saying, "those that can't do, teach". Well I have to admit I am not sure how this would apply to my Academic Libraries course that I teach for a library school here in Texas. The course is all about what I do. I try to illuminate the processes that I encounter in my job for my students. It is a fine line sometimes between letting them know what they are in for and scaring them away. I hope that when our Dean of Libraries speaks to them that she uses the same approach she did last time which was to talk about how rewarding her 20+ year career as an academic librarian has been. I think at times I frighten them with stories of academic librarians working long hours and experiencing professional disappointments. Academic librarianship is not for everyone.

I hope the one thing that comes through is that I can't see myself doing anything else. It sounds corny to call this job a calling but I think that within a month of starting graduate school I recognized that THIS was what I was supposed to be doing. How many of us started graduate school with a firm idea of what we were going to do once we graduated? If I had stuck to my original plan I would be working in a school library somewhere in Canada and I wouldn't have had the amazing opportunities I have experienced at MPOW.

Contact Removal for Dummies

Well, I have been away for almost a week due to a self-inflicted eye injury. I think that this clinches the soft lens vs. gas permeable internal debate that I have having. Wearing my new soft lenses I removed one from my left eye with apparent abandon and the result was that I damaged my cornea. Now, apparently this is not an uncommon event at the eye clinic but I did impress the optometrist and several students with the level of damage to my eye. She told me as an aside that on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the worst she thought mine was a 9. Makes you proud when you can make the doctor wince.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c7/Schematic_diagram_of_the_human_eye_with_English_annotations.svg/600px-Schematic_diagram_of_the_human_eye_with_English_annotations.svg.png


We have an optometry clinic on campus and as we get a staff discount I had chosen to purchase my new lenses from a very helpful, eager, student. Apparently her training in soft lens removal didn't stick in my head as I tried to remove the lens like it was a gas permeable and not a soft lens. Now I don't have a head for science but listening to the people who surrounded me at various times last week I think that what I did was not only scrape off the epithelial layer but I also got down to the corneal stroma which apparently was what caused the unholy pain part of the equation. I knew that the leftover Vicodin would come in handy some day. I can see fairly well today but the idea of inserting any contact lens into my left eye makes me vaguely nauseous so its my hideous glasses until the I can face the idea again.

Here's for an uneventful week.