So, like, can you see all those leaves, like, every day?

Many of you will know that about a year and a half ago, I broke my glasses. That is, I broke the back-up pair, the wire-frames that I hardly ever wore because they sat on my nose slightly funny. I had been wearing them because I had previously broken my horn-rims, the ones I really liked, by falling asleep on them on a trans-Atlantic flight back to Rome.

I was walking home from the grocery store, it was winter, (or, as I like to call it in Italian, "winter") and it was pounding down rain like it was making up for the arid months of summer, and a gust of wind grabbed the stick of my umbrella and smacked it right into my face. The glasses I hated stayed on, but one arm was skewed in the wrong direction. I bent it back when I got home, but a few days later, the arm fell off. All my efforts with the crazy-glue bottle have come to naught, and I haven't worn glasses as a regular thing since then.

In the meantime I got cancer, had treatment, and am trying to get myself put back together, but haven't done anything about the glasses. My art teacher has bugged me the entire time to get a new pair, but bloody hell! What do people want?! I got freaking chemotherapy in a freaking foreign country where I don't speak the language well enough to ask for the right things at the hardware store!

And anyway, I have needed a new prescription for a long time. I'm deteriorating. There was a time when I could just say, "Oh, I'm near sighted" and leave it at that. But over the last five years it has become, "Well, I was near sighted, which meant I couldn't see things further away than the end of my arm, but now I seem to be also far-sighted, in that I can't see things closer than an arm's length with my glasses on." Which is way too much to say in the time slot usually allowed me at dinner table conversations.

It became annoying at Mass, when you want to look at the pretty vestments and choreography going on in the sanctuary, but need your glasses for it, but then when you glance down at your book to see where you are, you can't make out the print. Eventually, I just compromised by not paying the slightest attention to anything at Mass and just staring blankly at the big Baroque blur.

Anyway, I had fricken cancer. So who gives a damn about my eyesight?!

What some of you may not know is that I am a regular reader at Cracked.com, which is often amazingly hilarious and frequently very interesting and factual. I and other Cracked readers will often surprise our dinner table companions with the same obscure pieces of true-but-unknown information about a wide array of topics, thereby creating a kind of password effect. A wordless glance that says, "We can all be cool here, I won't out you if you don't out me..."

This was funny over there today about being sick and getting a diagnosis or the right medication.

And I totally remember this reaction the first time I got glasses:

You had no idea that life had better graphics available. You've been playing the 16-bit world this whole time, while everybody else was running quad-core realities hooked up to an HD screen. The only downside to this whole experience is dodging the errant punches from your friends and loved ones as you incessantly inquire as to the amount that they see this shit for the next several months:

"Did you see those leaves? What? You can always see those? No, man, I mean: Can you see that, like, a tree is made up of a billion different leaves from all the way back here? Holy shit! Look at that gravel! It's not just gravel; it's a thousand different kinds of rock! Do you see it?! No, man, do you really see it?"

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