❧
It's been weeks since I've received a regular exchange of e-mail. That's much different than it has been in the past. An infrequent post from a couple of friends that I know face to face happens once in a while, but for the most part that aspect of my life has gone the way of all good things.
I originally bought an internet account for the specific purpose of subscribing to e-mail discussion groups. Doing so was the only way I could get more information on neurolinguistics programming without traveling. There aren't many books on the topic or weren't back then. Not many of the local or regional libraries had them at all. I was obsessed by the subject for a long time. I needed to know more and more about it. The arrival of the world wide web and e-mail groups solved all my problems in that regard.
By communicating regularly with people from all over the world about NLP and hypnosis I soon began attending seminars that were taught by people who were even more obsessed than I was. Eventually, after there was nothing new to learn I burned out on it, and all the king's horses, and all the king's men, couldn't put that Humpty Dumpty together again.
The last e-mail group I participated regularly in was about the Gnostic Gospels. More specifically the Gospel of Thomas. It was the only one of the gnostic library I got fired up about. I guess it took about seven years for me to lose interest in communicating with others about the meaning of Gnosticism. Most of the people I wrote with were not mystics, and a lot of them were just lapsed Catholics.
I think maybe I kept writing with them because I know so little about Catholics, but eventually my curiosity petered out. They might as well be Muslims or Buddhists to me anymore. Religious nuts all have something in common that outs itself eventually. I oughta know. I was a religious nut myself for much of my life. Now, it seems, that aspect of my life only lives on the back burner, and the power is off.
When I kept my appointment at the Eye Clinic at the VA a beautiful woman was the nurse or technician whose job it was to bring my clinical history up to date and check the current condition of my eyes. I found it difficult not to flirt with her, and I wasn't totally successful at that. It wasn't too difficult though. She was very professional in a personal kind of way.
After she set me up for a new pair of glasses, she put the regular drops in my eyes to expand them for the surgeon to look at my cataracts, and asked me if I had any questions. I did. I also had the comments I've written about here that I wanted to express. I asked her all about cataracts and whether anything could be done to reverse them by diet or exercise. She told me, sadly, that there wasn't.
It's a part of the aging process, and that if a person lives long enough they'll get them. She provided me with several examples of how cataracts develop differently in different people. Then, she told me that mine was apparently the kind that grew slow. That's when I asked her if the doctors were waiting for me to get old and die so they wouldn't have to do anything. She laughed delightfully and explained why they were holding back.
This part of her explanation was very interesting to me. She said I wasn't blind enough to risk surgery yet because my worst eye could be corrected to 20-25 with regular eyeglasses, and concluded that the other optometrists I'd been seeing were probably trying to sell me something.
That's why when I was shuffled to the surgeon for his part of the appointment. I was surprised when he agreed to do the surgery to replace the lens in my right eye. He told me, sort of in keeping with what the nurse had just told me, that after he removed the cataract that I probably wouldn't need to wear glasses.
There was something interesting about my visit to the eye clinic yesterday than my previous visits. All the personnel looked like movie stars. Literally. I've already stated that the nurse/technician was a beautiful woman, but the surgeon himself could have made a living as a magazine model.
The woman who measured my eyes for the right size lens was one sexy lady. None of them got too personal. They were all professionals, but not only were they all pretty, the news they gave me about my eyes was happy news. Even the older optometrists looked like the doctors on TV. Maybe it was because it was Thursday. The day of the week I was born; Thor's day.
The grocery store I bought the commercial LifeWay kefir also had an olive bar. It was a separate walk-up counter where you served yourself and they charged you by the pound. The last time I was there I bought a variety of olives in order to find out if there was any particular kind I liked better then the others.
I discovered from that purchase that I liked a Greek variety that still had the seed in them. So, yesterday I bought a container of just that kind. I didn't know the name of them. It wasn't hard to pick them out. The other olives were either black or green. I like most kinds of olives, but these are simply delicious. It's a good thing no local store carries these spiced Greek olives or I'd get fat on them.
❦
