Find the Words I Made Up!

It has been over two years since the last time I went to the eye doctor. I went last week, but since I had put off going, the cornea in my right eye is so deformed that presently the doctor can't prescribe a new pair of contacts for me.  Since my vision is so bad, I have to wear hard contacts, and one of the consequences of that is when the contact gets old and degrades a bit and becomes warped and causes the cornea to take that warped shape in kind. Fortunately, the cornea is a tough little piece of tissue and can heal itself pretty fast. So for the time being I'm wearing a soft contact (which doesn't correct my vision maximally but does an alright job) in my warped right eye and my regular hard contact in the left. This makes for a fun adventure of remembering what solution goes with which contact every morning. At any rate, you'd think that I'd be more cognizant and responsible about all things vision related. I have had to wear a pair of some kind of perscripted, vision correcting lenses since the second grade. That just means that I've accumulated more than my fair share of fine pieces of nerd gogglery.

Sports were a big part of growing up, as it is for a lot of people. So, when I got that first pair of glasses, my parents also purchased a pair of fine Rec Specs for me. This conjures up images of such 80's immortals as Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Eric Dickerson, Chris Sabo, Horace Grant, and Kurt Rambis. Without doing any further research, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that no one ever gave 6-time Pro Bowl running back, Eric Dickerson any crap for looking so goofy. Unfortunately, no one ever extends that type of respect to a chunky, little half-filipino kid such as myself. Not too many sixth graders get the privilege to play basketball in a uniform seemingly cut from a cheap, maroon leisure suit, but that's precisely what playing CYO basketball for the prestigious Incarnate Word Academy Warriors was like. This uniform and Rec Specs makes for an extraordinarily unfortunate combination. But now I think I finally understand why the coach in junior high would encourage me to cover my man like a "cheap leisure suit." (This is in contrast to his other catchphrase where he'd let me know that I had been "faked out of my lingerie.")  For all that Rec Specs do to improve your vision, I actually must admit that they didn't do anything for my game. I had the CYO game of my life in the fifth grade when I played sans visio correctio (read: blind, like looking at an impressionist painting from way up close). I was having an incredibly bad morning the day of the game. I had lost the Rec Specs and was fresh out of deodorant, so, being the incredibly intelligent young man that I was, I wore a lot of cheap cologne to the game. In fact, upping my noxious effluence factor may have been part of the reason that I was getting good looks at the basket that game, ironically. But shooting blind, I had the highest scoring day of my CYO career. This was when I learned that looking good and smelling good are paramount in the pursuit of playing good. May that be a lesson for all of you in the future.  (As an aside, LeBron James admitted in an SI article recently that up until this past off-season when he had eye surgery to correct his vision problem, everything on the court was kind of a blur to him. Also, while in school, he would have to sit in the front of the class to see the blackboard; always eschewing goofy eyewear in order to look his best at all times, on and off the court.)