I have learned something about myself in my old age: I hate going out and doing things. Fortunately, I live in a time and day in which people can bring me groceries, booze, and medicine. Others bring me just about anything I want to order Ye Olde Frontier Amazon Shoppe.
To entertain myself, my TV carries, in one way or another, just about every movie or show ever made in history. I can hear music from the heretofore unreachable and grimy catacombs of music’s past. Nobody is safe: not Bob Dylan, not Bob Dylan’s son, not Bob Dylan’s friends. I can hear them all. Moreover, anyone I want to talk to (who also wishes to speak to me) is available on my computer box. I call them and up they pop on my computer. We talk and while we talk, I drink some of my home-delivered booze while a movie from 1967 plays quietly on my TV. It’s a good setup.
I recently became aware of the importance of glasses to my overall health and ability to see things like whiteboards, computer screens, and charging trucks. I fretted, for this all but guaranteed a visit to some place where someone would touch my face and watch me look stupid with different shapes decorating my eyeballs. I wasn’t looking forward to it.
“It’s OK,” Burke said. “You can order them online now.”
“Ooh,” I added gracefully to the conversation. “Whoops, be right back – that’s Rolik with our groceries.”
For hours I daydreamed about picking out glasses and then ordering them. I imagined them arriving and fitting on my face as though I was a psychologist in a romantic comedy. All without seeing or talking to people. Grand. I found the website and began eye-decoration shopping.
The problem with buying glasses is that one often wants to see what they look like on their face before plopping down money to buy them. Buy the wrong size, color, style and you could end up looking like a giant in a Disney film or Tootsie.
Fortunately, the app has a ‘virtual mirror’ with which you can virtually put the glasses on your face in a video or in a picture. Since it would not accept any of my pictorial attempts with the crude and disturbing and slightly esoteric complaint that they were ‘having trouble finding a face in this image’ I went for the video. This involved a bright, virtual pair of glasses bouncing around a screen trying to capture my eyes. If I look like this in public, I will be arrested and flogged – and rightfully so. In the end, I have been forced to admit that maybe buying glasses online is flying too close to the online sun. Food, booze, TV, movies, friends – yes. Glasses – maybe not.
The app fails to bring about the romcom therapist look instead settling for the ‘psychopath in 1970s backwoods drama film’ look. But thanks to the internet, I can download and watch that movie right now. Well, I can listen to it.
#1 by Vee on December 6, 2024 - 2:55 pm
Truth be told today’s age really makes you wonder how necessary it is to actually go out and just… do stuff. But the older I get the more I find beauty in doing things the “difficult” way – and I say this as a person who also hates going out and doing things, and as someone who also cannot do three steps without these wonderful circles in front of my eyes, I find visiting the optometrist especially draining lol. But hey, when I want to peacefully read a book at home without having it two inches in front of my face, I guess there are compromises that have to be made.