Notebook Week Part 1

Here's a pantoum from my notebook, because I promised content, and goshdarnit, I'll deliver!  It's not one of my favorite things I've done, but it's a decent example of how my inner poet has been affected by Gaiman and goths.

A pantoum, according to Poets.org, is "a poem of any length, composed of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first."

Time

Bricked up doors and empty arches

Empty nights and empty bottles

Onward, onward, time it marches

Lovers least of all it coddles

Empty nights and empty bottles

Mark the time as it passes

Lovers least of all it coddles

Left in tears and broken glasses

Mark the time as it passes

For mem'ry of moments now long gone

Left in tears and broken glasses

Inexorably, time moves on

For mem'ry of moments now long gone

Try to better those passing now

Inexorably, time moves on

But only as empty as we allow

Try to better those passing now

Moments precious, moments swift

Only as empty as we allow

Treat them well or have nothing left

Moments precious, moments swift

Onward, onward, time it marches

Treat it well or have nothing left

But bricked up doors and empty arches

I'm Blind and I Can't Even Use My FIngers to Read

"It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too."
- Douglas Adams 

(42nd post - w00t!)






First and foremost, if there are any errors in this post that have escaped my notice, I apologize. I'm half-blind and hunt-and-peck typing my way through this post, because of reasons that will become clear.


The following is me complaining about blood-related things. Don't read if squeamish.
There, my warning-duty is done.
 
Today, I tried to give blood. I've done so successfully three times in the past, and had one unsuccessful attempt, so I was feeling relatively confident in my ability to let them sap off some of my fluids. I even got up early (7:00 am is early during the summer) to get to the bus on time for my appointment. 


I'm currently typing this rather more slowly and inaccurately, because I have two pricked fingers wrapped in medical gauze, and I have the same amount of blood in me as I did this morning. Evidently I'm slightly anemic, and do not have enough iron to be able to give someone else some. Bah. Vegetarians don't need iron, we need cellulose.


But I did get a free cookie out of it, so that's cool. I just need to reschedule my appointment to such a time as I have remembered to take iron supplements. 


Blood-stuff is over. 

Summation: my fingers hurt. Typing hurts. Bah.









Relating to the blindness bit: funny story, that.

I have a super strong glasses perscription, to the point that without my glasses I cannot make out faces at seven feet. If I were glasses-less, I'd have to be about four inches from my screen as I type this, to make sure I could actually read what I type. I'm regularly asked if I'm legally blind. (Answer: not yet, but give it a couple years, I'm sure it will happen eventually.)

My current (read: soon-to-be former) glasses I got off one of those glasses-sites, where they're super cheap and look cool. While I quite like how they look, the site (which shall remain unnamed) did a sucky job on the anti-glare coating and didn't use the high-index polycarbon that I asked for. In short, the glasses are super shiny and roughly half an inch thick at the edges. Not good. Also, they have this unfortunate tendency to fall off my face at innopportune moments


But I was okay with this until this morning. This morning, that tendency of my glasses to fall off was demonstrated, and they fell off and onto the floor. I was even okay with that, because it wasn't exactly unprecedented. 


Then I picked them up and the left side basically exploded into its component parts.

Suffice to say, I had a problem with that.

After I spent several fruitless minutes trying to use an eyeglasses screwdriver and sheer pluck to get the tiny little screw through its hole so the lens would have someplace to actually be, I gave up, called someone who could actually see to come fix it. Had I been able to make out what my father was actually doing to them, I might have complained.


He did get them fixed before my appointment, so that was good. What was bad is that he used superglue to do it. There is now a thin sheen of superglue covering the left lens of my glasses. Not enough to be visible to anyone, but more than enough to make seeing through it nigh-impossible. So I'm half blind until further notice, and reading anything one-eyed is giving me a headache. So. Not fun.