Friday, January 05, 2007

Entropic Antidote

It’s a long day today for Daniel - I picked up a cold yesterday afternoon, went to bed early with boring drugs and fuzzy socks, and now I’m back at my desk for the duration or maybe just a little bit less, writing follow-up letters about site visits I did not make.  The TheraFlu is wearing off and I have diminishing hopes of staying up late enough tonight to watch the V for Vendetta disk that’s been waiting for me for more than a month (I’m a lazy, lazy renter, which is why NetFlix just adores me).  However, the general malaise and weariness, together with the bright sunny weather and the still-barely-tarnished new year, prompt me finally to type up and post this little story about moving forward and feeling better about it:

Entropy is incremental - it gathers quietly, building up so slow that you don’t notice it till everyting creaks to a stop. How could all that laundry be dirty again? Where did that dust on the television screen come from, and how long has it been there? And of course, who snuck in and fingerpainted my keyboard with fruit juice and hot sauce? (I’d love to blame that on Zach but I’m talking about my keyboard at work here.) The everyday things in my everyday life are a measure of entropy, showing me the gradual disordering of the universe. Leave anything alone for long enough and it’ll fall apart. Keep it with you and use it every day and it’ll happen all the faster, though you might never notice.

All this comes to mind because of my eyeglasses. I’m myopic and astigmatic enough to need them every day, pretty much all day long. I’ll whip’em off to read some fine print, then slide’em back on for the big picture - and I do it from when I stumble out of bed in the morning till I stumble back into bed at night. Those slender, sturdy spectacles hang with me (and on me) through thick and thin. They consequently endure a lot of wear and tear, and as a further consequence, entropy catches up to them with a vengeance. The lenses get filthy and I don’t know how. What spattered my face? Whose thumbprint is that? And of course, how in the name of a benevolent Magneto did they get so twisted out of shape?

This last symptom - the misalignment of templebars, nosepads, and lenses - produces three inconvenient results: First, my specs start slipping down my nose, demanding regular repositioning.  Then, even repositioned snugly betwixt bridge and brow, they don’t offer the correct correction - my acuity drops in direct relation to the increasing impact of entropy.  And, finally: this is a problem I cannot fix on my own.  I like my glasses, and I need them, so I’m reluctant to be twisting them around like some kind of optical cruller.  I’m pretty sure that, if I do, I’ll snap’em in twain before I even realize it.  And since that would suck, I don’t try to restore this particular entropic deficit on my own.  This is one of those unhappy situations where I need outside help to re-establish my initial fully-charged and properly-oriented valence.  What I’m saying, in my obscure countrified way, is that I need to hit up the oculist every so often when my glasses get overly out of whack.

This was the situation in which I found myself a few weeks ago as I sat at my desk enduring a lengthy and dull telephone conversation.  I’d taken off my glasses and was rocking them back and forth on my desk, marvelling at how far they’d gone out of true (which was plenty far, believe me).  This I already knew, from months of regularly repositioning them and squinting.  Opened on my desk, they teetered drunkenly.  I picked them up again for a closer look, and that’s when I discovered how far I’d decayed from my original state of optical grace:

Templebars: eh.  They seem tired, maybe bleached by the sun and sunblock I’m always supposed to wear on my shiny head.  Lenses: oy.  Scratched and smeared and maybe that’s a ring of grime all around the edges where they fit into the frames.  And the nosepads: Hmm.  Had I ever noticed this before? When I got these glasses, those nubbins of plastic were clear.  How’d they turn black?  Photoreceptor cells?  Global warming?  Anti-war protest?  Still on the phone, still “uh-huh"ing at appropriate intervals, I made a more thorough examination. 

The black - or was it dark, dark green? - was on the inside of the pad; the side that rested on my shnoz was friction-polished to a steady glow.  I picked up a paperclip, experimentally unbent it and slid the end along the darkened surface....

Oh god.  It was all I could do not to say it aloud - God, what is that I’m chipping off my nosepads?  Chunks of black plaque started calving off to my desk with each gentle probe of the wire.  Oh yuk.  I know what it is - it’s me.  It’s my skin, my sweat, the dirt from my fingers, the darkness of my tears.  It must have been building up, steady and imperceptible, since I got these glasses - nearly five years now.  And I had never noticed, even as I occasionally cleaned my lenses, that the pads were getting a little fouler every time I stuck my spectacles on my face. 

It didn’t take long before I’d carefully, delicately cleaned off the upsides of both pads.  They were clear again, a manifestation of my own aspirations for myself.  I swept up the pile of dross I’d removed out and put on the specs.  They promptly slid down my nose, but that was okay.  I could go to the optician and get that fixed.  The important thing was, I’d seen how far I’d let things get, and I took steps to correct them.  Maybe no one else can tell that my noespads are clean - I certainly wouldn’t have noticed myself.  But I knew they were clean, restored to how they’d been half a decade before.  I’d turned back the clock.  I’d reduced the entropic quotient.  Apart from the phone call I was still enduring, the cleansing of my nosepads represented sufficient accomplishment for me for the time being.  I was more than happy to call in a professional to finish the job.  Acuity and clarity aren’t always self-endowed, but you gotta start somewhere.