SMOG (smithblog): Sight for Sore Eyes

SMOG (smithblog): Sight for Sore Eyes: My most "visionary" entry yet!

Sight for Sore Eyes

Note: It’s been almost six month since I’ve published an entry to this blog.  And I’m going to get back at it in the most Kardashian-esque way possible … by becoming a shameless endorser.  Enjoy!

At some point in the second grade, I started periodically coming home from school with blinding headaches.  I can remember writhing and crying in agony on my parents’ bed praying for the pain to stop.  I can be a bit of a drama queen, so I’m sure I overdid it significantly, but still, it hurt like hell.

Over the course of the school year, these episodes became more and more frequent.  It didn’t take Dr. Oxley, the family optometrist, too long to realize that a combination of a desk in the back of the classroom and rapidly degenerating vision were causing the grief.  On the second to last day of school, I put on my first pair of glasses.  Oversized with bulky, brown plastic frames – they were NOT a model of high fashion.

For the next 28 years, my life became a never-ending cycle of increasing prescriptions and thicker lenses, then bifocals, then soft contacts, then disposables and, finally, in my early thirties, when my eyes could no longer handle the strain of the slick ribbery discs anymore, it was back to glasses nearly full-time.  While my latest pair of specs are a bit more stylish than those of 1984, they still provided all the same dilemmas – smudges, grimy noseguards and poor grip in any sweat-inducing environment.

But that all started coming to an end on Tuesday, March 13, 2012, when I placed a call to the folks at Clear Choice Custom LASIK Center (along with a few other clinics) to inquire about corrective surgery.  You can imagine my surprise when they were able to get me in for a pre-op consultation two days later and then scheduled my surgery for March 23 (three days ago as of this entry).

On the day of my surgery, I woke up with 20/475 vision and by 2:30 p.m., was 20/15.  Walking out of the clinic that afternoon and being able to read the street signs was one of the most euphoric experiences of my life.

So here comes my sales pitch, directed primarily at any of my 18 loyal readers who are considering LASIK surgery:

Do it.

Here are a few of the things I did this weekend that I have literally NEVER been able to do without the aid of corrective lenses:

• Drive a car
• Mow the lawn
• Watch my kid and dogs romp around at the park

I spent the better part of Friday night lying in bed staring at a door frame outside our bedroom, admiring the sharp, crisp edges and angles.  Dorky?  Yes.  But don’t knock it until you try it.

Nevertheless, I don’t want to totally oversell it, so I’ll lay out some of the pros and cons I’ve experienced to help provide a more balanced viewpoint:

Cons

• When the anesthetic wore off after the surgery, the burning sensation in my eyes was almost unbearable until I was able to get into bed and keep them shut for a few hours
• I’ll have sensitivity to bright lights and some dimming of vision in the dark for the next week.
• I’m experiencing a lot of dryness and abrasiveness and, along with a week of prescription medication, will need to apply artificial tears for the next few weeks.
• I’ll have periodic blurred vision during the healing process.
• I have to tape these dopey protective shields over my eyes when I sleep to ward off the impulse to scratch, rub and squeeze.
• I have to wear sunglasses outdoors at all times for the next seven days, which looks pretty stupid when it’s gray and rainy outside.
• I have to be very cautious to keep foreign substances out of my eyes.  This includes showering (and drying off) with my eyes shut for the next week, which is not easy when you have my level of (un)coordination.

Pros

• I. CAN. SEE.

You’d be surprised at how drastically that one Pro outweighs all the Cons.

So, as I said, do it.  But don't be afraid to shop around.  There are clinics everywhere that provide the service.  I only have three pieces of advice:

1. Don’t make a decision based on price.  Cheaper probably isn’t better, but that doesn’t mean the most expensive is your best option either.
2. When you make your initial calls, ask a lot of questions.  This will help you set a comfort level.  Do the same if/when you go in for a consultation.
3. Ask around.  You’ll be amazed at how many people you know have had a LASIK procedure.  Two of my neighbors had theirs done at Clear Choice and gave rave reviews.  This did wonders to ease my nerves before my surgery.

I’ll close by recommending that you at least consider the folks at Clear Choice – at least if you’re in Northeast Ohio.  They’re friendly, they’re experienced and their clinic includes a little “café” that is always stocked with complimentary fresh drinks and cookies.  Here’s how you can find them:

Clear Choice Customer LASIK Center
7001 S Edgerton Rd, Suite D
Brecksville, OH 44141
(440) 740-0400

http://www.clearchoicelaser.com

Trust me, once you make the decision, you’ll “see” why I’ve made such a fuss. (nyuck nyuck)

A Jobs Well Done

Today’s Internet has been flooded with tributes to Steve Jobs, from one sentence tweets to pages-long homages.  There’s no questioning his brilliance.  He brought modern technology to the masses.  He made complexity simple.  He made “nerdy” pursuits fun. 

But I think, most importantly, he introduced beauty to an unbeautiful world.  Here’s how I know:

For Father’s Day, my wife bought me an iPod Touch.  Frankly, I didn’t need it – I already had a Droid 2.  But, as soon as I tore off the wrapping paper, I was hooked.  Even the box was stunning in its artistic simplicity.  And, the iPod itself was dazzling!  It was gleaming silver.  It was sleek.  It rested perfectly in my hand.  In a word, it was gorgeous.  I liked to look at it as much as I liked to actually use it.  My Droid – ugly and clunky – immediately went to the wayside, used only for the occasional phone call or text message.

Unfortunately, one day later, the Touch fell onto a concrete floor.  It was still functional, but shattered – the screen barely legible under a spider web of cracked glass.

Getting it repaired took a few days and, when it came back, we made sure to eliminate future breakage risk by covering it with a heavy-duty rubber case.  It was now protected from the inevitable mishaps of its clumsy owner.

And I immediately loved it less.

It was like covering Aphrodite with a burka.  The iPod still functioned as it had before.  The apps were the same.  The screens were the same.  But the experience wasn’t.  It was heavy.  It was bulky.  It was inelegant.  It was disappointing.

Don’t get me wrong – I still love my iPod and am incessantly tinkering with it.  It’s fast, it’s got the best app store on the market and it has great multimedia capabilities.  It’s the best PDA I’ve ever owned, even without the cellular capabilities of a smartphone.

But it’s no longer a thing of beauty.

And, that, in my opinion, was the genius of Steve Jobs.  From the first iMac to the latest iPad, the Apple products that bore his mark of leadership were as well suited for display on a living room credenza as they were in an office cubicle.  Think about it … when’s the last time someone came up to you to show off their hip new BlackBerry or HP Pavilion? 

Jobs insisted, sometimes militantly, that form be inherently married to functionality.  No innovator in recent history – from Ben Franklin to Henry Ford to Bill Gates – understood this better than he did.

And I’m not sure anyone ever will.

Blow Up the BCS!

I like symmetry.  It’s why I was a mediocre architecture student – great engineer, terrible artist.  But sometimes my boring, balanced view of the world can come in handy.  And that’s why I think I have the solution to fix the mess that has become of I-A (Bowl Subdivision) college football.  And, since it’s somehow been consuming me for the past few days, I guess I’ll commit it to writing, even though I know there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell anything like this would ever come to fruition.

• There are currently 124 (or so) teams in I-A.  Add a few worthy programs from I-AA (Appalachian State, for example) to round it out to a nice even 128.
• No more conferences – they’ve become a mockery anyway.  Instead, to borrow from Ohio high school football, align schools into eight geographical regions and assign 16 teams to each region.  Then break each region into two eight team divisions (or “districts”).
• Follow the Minor League Baseball model and further break everything into a top-level and secondary level (like AAA and AA in MILB), so you have 64 schools in 1-A-1 and 64 in I-A-2.  In Season 1, schools would have to be assigned at the discretion of some sort of ranking committee.
• In an 11 game regular season, schools play everybody in their region, as well as a few outside of it.  1-A-1 and 1-A-2 schools would never play each other (no more cupcake games!).
• The top teams from each district play for the regional championship, with these winners advancing to an eight team playoff to determine the National Champion.  In other words, there would be TWO postseasons, one for 1-A-1 and another for 1-A-2.
• More borrowing – this time from European soccer: At the end of the season, the last place team from each 1-A-1 district is relegated to 1-A-2 the following season and the first place team from each 1-A-2 district is promoted.  The geographic alignments at both levels would mirror each other making it a seamless swap each year.

Think about it, by getting rid of conferences and the BCS, you eliminate the “no respect” complaints of programs like Boise State and TCU.  Schools would earn or lose respect and championship opportunities based entirely on their on-field performance and never because of conference affiliation or biased polls.

Plus, with this setup, you’d still have 32 1-A schools playing at least one postseason game, meaning you could theoretically maintain some sort of Bowl system, albeit with the elimination of many second-tier games (Who cares about the New Mexico Bowl anyway – besides gamblers?).

I’m sure someone with more smarts than me could easily start poking holes in my idea, considering I came up with it in about 15 minutes.  Nevertheless, with the system’s current mess, I haven’t seen anybody else bring anything to the table (aside from some terrible ideas over at ESPN.com).

Until I do, I’ll be busy doodling nice proportional squares and circles in my notebook.

Partisan-patory Government

I was channel surfing yesterday and landed on one of the cable news stations (I can’t remember which one), which was playing rapid-fire sound bites from politicians discussing the recent U.S credit downgrade.  First a Democrat blamed the Republicans, then a Republican blamed the Democrats, then another Democrat blamed the Republicans, and so on.  Some liberals have actually referred to it as the “Tea Party Downgrade.”

Then, when I did my morning scan of Yahoo! News today, I noted that two of the top five Most Popular headlines were "White House adviser blames tea party for downgrade" and "GOP candidates slam Obama in reaction to S&P downgrade."

To all that I say, listen you idiots … you’re all complicit.  Democrats and Republicans.  Conservatives and liberals.  Our current financial mess is the fault of ALL OF YOU.  It doesn’t matter who’s in the White House, or who controls Congress, or which political movement is carrying the momentum today.  You couldn’t cooperate, so you ended up making a panicked short-term deal at the 11th hour that is pretty lousy for everybody.

Democrats: We cannot remain solvent without making difficult decisions about the social safety net.  I don’t want to hear another liberal politician state “we won’t reduce the debt on the backs of children and seniors.”  It sounds noble, but it’s unrealistic because our current systems are so archaic.  Take Social Security as an example.  Seniors ain’t what they were in the ‘40s when life expectancy was 63 (Isn’t 60 the new 40, or something like that?).  We simply haven’t adjusted for the times.  So stop poo-pooing Republican proposals.  From what I’ve seen, many of the changes are long-term and wouldn’t impact the people with a current stake anyway.

Republicans: Tax increases won’t destroy the economy.  The economy has been faltering for the better part of 10 years, a period of relatively low taxation.  Our country’s economic golden age came in the ‘50s, when taxes were generally higher.  Getting back to that isn’t rocket science: close loopholes and make income taxes more equitable.  And if you really want to use low taxation as an economic engine, find a way to offer big breaks to companies that keep jobs in the U.S.  If CEOs complain that taxes are hurting profits, tell them a simple solution would be offering better products that more people will actually want to buy.

Of course, that’s oversimplified.  Effectively governing hundreds of millions of people is complicated business.  Nevertheless, I don’t understand why every issue facing our nation becomes another round of rigid disagreement and, ultimately, finger-pointing.

I have friends across the political spectrum.  Sometimes we disagree on stuff.  Sometimes we debate.  However, I can’t recall a single time where one of those debates didn’t result in each of us coming around – at least a little bit – to see the other’s point of view.

It’s called compromise, and last time I checked, it’s not an evil thing.  Consider trying it sometime.  You might be pleasantly surprised by the results.