Freedom Fridays
This photo was generated using OpenAi’s DALL·E 3 engine and edited in Photoshop 25.7.
Yesterday I went to the dentist and the eye doctor, on the last weekday before I start working full-time at my job. Not the best use of liberty, but very practical, which seemed to alleviate my guilt for these months and months of Freedom Fridays. I called them Freedom Fridays, but they were supposed to be the days I spent working on my other career, journalism. I imagined myself zooming off to press conferences and four alarm fires, microphone at the ready. I’d arrive at the scene before anyone else, perhaps rescuing a wailing baby before scoring an exclusive with the senator who was about to announce retirement due to massive corruption. Instead, I often spent Fridays sleeping in.
Visiting the dentist was a particularly stressful occasion, because I had avoided going to the dentist for three years. I was worried the dentist was going to be horrified and angry at me, scolding me for not making my regular appointment. In fact, he turned out to be viciously sarcastic instead. I enjoyed my revenge, though, as I didn’t have a single cavity. Take that, I thought as I stepped out onto the busy street, baring my teeth in pleasure as I ran my tongue over the now shiny surface.
I hadn’t seen an eye doctor in quite a while either, so I was a little nervous about the whole thing. Along the way, I pictured a bitterly sarcastic optometrist who would claim victory by telling me my eyesight had gotten worse, my reward for not having visited for over a year.
Actually, my eyes were still exactly the same, and the optometrist was warm and solicitous. The only difference in my vision was that now I occasionally saw little bits of nothing in my line of vision. She called them floaters, which could be cells floating around on the surface of my eye. I imagined them as helpless lifesavers, floating aimlessly around the sea of my eyes. There wasn’t anyone being saved by the lifesavers, they needed to be saved themselves.
To make sure the floaters weren’t a sign of larger problems, the optometrist wanted to dilate my eyes, a process I’d been through before, and which yielded only hazy memories. She first dangled drops of anesthetic into my eyes, then stinging drops into the eyes that I could no longer feel, then "turbo" drops because I have dark eyes.
Then she gave me my trial pair of contact lenses to put in, warning me to be careful since I could no longer focus properly, nor did I have much feeling in my eyes.
I then waited for fifteen minutes, during which I impulse bought a pair of rather large square glasses. The girl who helped me said,
[disdainfully] "You wanna buy these?"
[hesitantly] "Well, I think they look ok, I can't really focus enough to see."
[even more disdainfully] "You don't want smaller ones?"
[apologetically] "Well, no, you know how the peripheral vision is shot when you have small glasses..."
[aggressively] "Put them on."
I put on glasses, she stared at me for a moment.
[even more aggressively] "Are these your backup pair?"
[even more apologetically] "Yeah, they're just my backup pair."
[decisively] "Ok, they'll do."
As I paid for my very ugly glasses. I pictured all the looks of disdain I was going to receive, seeing them all with my crystal clear vision.
About ten minutes later after the dilation drops had kicked in, the optometrist pulled me back into a darkened room, turned away from me and placed something on her head, and swung back around. She was now wearing some sort of skeleton of a miner's hat, with not much protection, but a very bright light on the forehead that she shone directly into my massive blurry eyes. She then pulled out a magnifying glass which she trained onto my eye, intensifying the gleam of the light until my eyeballs felt about to burst into flames.
After learning that my retinas in fine condition, I was let loose on Market Street at midday lunch hour, with eyes that not only could not focus on anything, but were now completely squeezed shut against the light. Sunglassless and confused, I made my way down the street like a newly emerged mole going above ground for the first time in her life.
