Thursday, April 23, 2015

I guess I never knew what it meant to "blink myopically"

I have recently discovered I am quite probably short sighted. To be fair, I knew my eyes weren't perfect starting last year sometime, where the driver of whatever car I was in would ask, "What does that sign say?" and then be able to read it before I was.

At church, I realized it was hard to read the lyrics from some of the songs while in the back, but blamed it on being far away and whatever funky visualizations they had going on. Then one Sunday, a pastor put up a passage from the Bible to demonstrate formatting. And I couldn't read it. I could have written that off too, saying I could still see the formatting idea and had the text in my own Bible and so didn't really need to read it and maybe that wasn't what he was going for, but David was sitting right next to me and he could read it.

The tragic truth. I was nearsighted.

As the weeks went on after that, I became a bit of a hypochondriac by looking at everything and then freaking out. As it stands right now, letters start to get blurry on signs five feet away. I don't notice it in sunny conditions, but much more in lower lighting. And I notice that I sit someone nearer to the computer than I'd really prefer with this chair and I get a little nearer to stuff in the grocery store to read it than I'd prefer.

It's way more noticeable with letters and signs, largely because of the sharp edges and the fact you have to see all the edges to be able to identify the meaning. Like that park bench could be blurry, but I can still tell it's a park bench. I see it, identify it, and then dismiss it. Which is why I didn't notice for so long. I couldn't tell things were blurry because I only looked to identify, I didn't look to see. But letters... you have to be able to see them.

If I scrunch up my nose and squint, I can make things swim into focus. And I look stupid.

It's not a big deal, yet. I can still see cars and people and everything and even if I can't precisely read the license plate until close, I can still see there is a car, which direction it's going, how fast, and color and type, from the same distance as everyone else.

It's a good thing this didn't happen when I was a kid. I would have been devastated. And glasses would have been the Worst Thing Ever. Because you need them to see, but you have to take them off at night. And they can't fall off or break. And you can't really swim with them on. Now it's like, how was that a big deal? And glasses can be chic.

Even so, I'm mildly annoyed. Is it reversible? Eye exercises, maybe?

Or maybe we can blame the increase in nearsightedness on computers.

*narrows eyes at the computer screen* *not myopically, just glaring*

Analyze This

I found another repressed fear of my dreams!

To date:
-Fear of not flying after jumping off of something and instead hitting the ground. We'll just translate this one as fear of heights.
-Fear of doing something fun when math homework is waiting at home to claim me (from high school)
-Fear of signing up for a class or having an essay and completely forgetting until it's too late to do anything about it except try to right the whole dang research paper in an hour. (from college) Oddly enough, this haunts me more in my dreams than it did in real life. I totally did a research paper in one day once. And got like an A-.
-Fear of making a breakfast sandwich and it taking forever, only to drop it on the floor and have to start over again (from Panera)
-Fear of having camera duties and jiggling the camera when we were recording. Actually, this one is new too.
-Fear of sleeping through my alarm or having to make it to an interview and it taking forever to walk there.
-Fear of trying to run and not being able to run, or like run in jelly, or not run fast enough
-Fear of trying to drive and not being able to drive well, or crashing into things
-Fear of zombies (don't ask)
-Fear of being unable to see

And now, for the one I just discovered, the fear of being lost in a cave! With bonus fear of being unable to breathe!

Actually, this is another reoccurring one, I just finally translated it. Following another cave dream. Maybe I got this one from a movie of Tom Sawyer. I'm not afraid of caves. I went spelunking once and had great fun. I'm not claustrophobic. I actually like small spaces and will be the first one to leap under a stage we set up to do something. But I am afraid of going into a tunnel, like of snow, and having it narrow to a point and being unable to move, to get my arms from my sides, or to try and wiggle back out backwards while hoping the whole thing doesn't collapse and trap you. And, apparently, I'm afraid of following a tunnel in a cave to have it dead end as your candle is going out. And the bonus points, I'm afraid of diving into a tunnel of water only to have it never resurface and your air run out. I know I had a few dreams about that.

How do I get these fears? I blame movies. Dang zombies.

Defining My Role

David came up with an idea for a quick-play role-playing game. Think Dungeons and Dragons, but without the three hours of trying to choose if I want to be a race that is good for a shaman or a race that is cool. I have an odd tendency toward half-and-half races, like half-elf or half-orc. I presume this is because I'm a third culture kid and have never really felt that I belonged anywhere. Or really felt the need to.

Anyway. A version of role playing without memorizing the character sheets, looking up things in handbooks, agonizing over race and class, trying to organize a party that has all essential character, and rolling lots of dice to tell us, in a numerical value, exactly what we are good at.

David's idea was something like this:
Story: A group of people go to a coffee shop or some other gathering place. We were heading to Smokey Row the night we thought this up to meet with some friends to play games. (I thought a night of playing games would be wasted on Phase 10 and wanted to role-play, which is rather how this got started.) This group of people gets sucked into an alternate world which they then have to work their way through and cope with. David was thinking fantasy, so it'd probably be due to a portal or magic or something. I was thinking sci-fi, so alien abduction.

Mechanics: The Dungeon Master, that being David, would be a benevolent (or at least neutral) deity who controls the whole thing and tells the story. Our characters would gain skills as they interacted with the world and role-played (like if Shane kept sneaking behind trees, he might get better at it. If I kept throwing rocks at chickens, maybe I'll get better at that).

And... that's it. I wasn't really for this idea, largely because it seemed very susceptible to what I termed "brain vomit" where David could make up anything and in a pinch might put out idiotic things, like talking hats or chickens that could throw rocks back. Maybe it seems I don't have a lot of faith in David's storytelling abilities, but 1) I've never read much that he's written, and 2) he's as stubborn and contrary as the old guy in Up and might do those things just to spite me.

I'm fine with a quick-play role-playing idea, but I rather like the idea that even though a lot of elements are invisible, they still exist. Maybe you don't start with a character sheet, but something defining all learned abilities and your level in them still lurks in the background, at least until later levels. The players might not know anything about the world, but it has rules and scope and isn't just a barren wasteland that gets filled in with said scary chickens in talking hats as we run into them. Best example I can come up with was the Wheel of Time world. It was complete. Things in the first books were referenced that we didn't come into contact with much later books, but when we did, we knew about them and knew they were there. They had existed from the beginning.

Obviously that takes more prep work and David just wanted to get going.

We played Phase 10.

I'd like to point out that to start our bumbling 21st century selves into his new world, we'd get a little bit of a starter. David asked for a short list of strengths, weaknesses, and then maybe our goal in life.

I started my list, even though we didn't play it looked like this:

Strengths
1.
2.
3.

Weaknesses
1. Acrophobia
2.
3.

Goal in life:

Yeah, that's all I could come up with. Oh sure, I could probably brainstorm a LOT more weaknesses. Lack of tact? Inability to read social situations? Stubborn? Myopic? Toxiphobic? Mistrust of all authority figures? Check, check, check, check, check, check. Or is that last one a strength? But I don't know if those are the types of things that would transfer to a role-playing game well. I'll obviously role-play as stubborn and lacking tact. Because, honestly, my roles never differ much from myself. I'm a bad actress. But like myopia? At least I know I have an almost overwhelming fear of heights.

Strengths is kind of similar. I have a mild ability to understand computers, which might help me in my sci-fi world, but won't in David's fantasy. Anyway, most of my generation has that ability and Shane is actually in IT. I've had grand ideas about learning disaster preparedness, Krav Maga, ham radio, gardening, and so on, but I haven't actually done a lot of these things. Ability to run for an hour or so? That could be helpful, I guess, but I can't run fast, which seems the important part. I have no self-defense. I couldn't define what plants are edible. I probably don't have enough mechanical understanding to decipher a wildmill, much less the Six-Fingered-Man's life sucking devices. Even if we switched to sci-fi, I don't know how to pilot an aircraft (another of my dreams) or speak another language or first aid or a lot of things. I probably couldn't get my phone out of Chinese.

And if you find my life goal, could you let me know? I'll come and collect it.