Myopia, genetics, and the joys of being kikay

I started wearing eyeglasses when I was thirteen, with a very light prescription to correct slight astigmatism. The approach did not work, as I, decades after, am now saddled with a diopter of -6.00 in my right eye and a little bit more for my left, both eyes with a far higher grade for astigmatism than when I started, and with an even higher grade for nearsightedness to boot. Take off my glasses and I am almost blind; all I can see are colors, but not boundaries between colors, and everything looks like an undulating blob to me. Without my glasses, I look at my sister twenty feet away and I mistake her for either a very tall plant or a strange floor lamp. She, on the other hand, equally blind, must mistake me for either a doorpost or some thin piece of furniture.

Just to give you an idea of what we have to deal with, blur the rightmost image three more times, and that's what we see at a twenty-foot distance. Compare that with the normal vision shown by the leftmost image.



It's annoying at best, and exasperating at worst. Also, it's not very convenient to need glasses when I am watching TV while lying down, or when I have to stand outside under an umbrella or an awning while the wind is driving rain into my face and spattering my glasses with water. The worst is when I'm carrying heavy things with both hands while it's hot and my glasses are sliding down my sweating nose and I can't push them back up with my hand so I have to walk the rest of the way with my entire head turned up, my glasses tottering on the tip of my nose.

It runs in the family, this cursed, inconvenient blindness. Da started wearing glasses in grade school, I at thirteen, my brother at ten, my sister at eight, and my other brother at thirteen. Ma, who has been having splitting headaches since time immemorial has always declared that her eyes must need prescription glasses of "one thousand," yet she is the most clear-sighted of us all. When I used to go to Sunday mass with all of them, we would sit side by side on a single pew, a row of tall, thin, quiet, bespectacled, somber-looking people who stood up and sat down and kneeled like robots, plus one plump, non-blind woman who sang and prayed and mumbled and cried in turns who stood up and sat down and knelt with a passion. Bad vision must have made stoics out of us. There must be something in church we could not see and thus could not move us.

For a time, we wore contact lenses -- Da when he was in the United States, I when I was twenty-three, and my sister for about a year, just recently. Da has had LASIK surgery since then, and is now living the life of a normal person. The rest of us are back to wearing glasses. I am not qualified for LASIK because of my high cylinder, I have gotten allergic to contact lenses, and thus I have no choice but to wear glasses. I am pretty much resigned to my lot. I may be blind, but I get by. But it doesn't mean that I have to have the same kind of glasses as everyone else.

Thus I emerge with a new collection: vintage "cat's eyes" eyeglasses.


Such spectacular spectacles! Can you blame me if I have been buying them like crazy?


They don't make them like these anymore. Finally I can stop looking so generic. And finally there is something I can collect -- besides books and fountain pens and fountain pen ink -- that will actually show on my face. Shopaholic meets kikay. (Or is that redundant?) Life is fun and pretty, thanks to fabulous well-kept eyeglasses from the fifties, and an Ebay seller with equally fabulous taste!

More posts as my new glasses begin to arrive, a few at a time. And I just found out something very interesting which is now making me appreciate my fledgeling collection even more. There is history in the wings, and a story here somewhere. Do you see it?