penance

I don't like small children. They make me twitchy. I don't want any of my own, and I can barely pretend a civil interest in other people's. (Things get better when they're old enough to talk books with me.)

I have ocular albinism. No, I don't have pink eyes. But I also don't have any pigment in the backs of my retinas. Extreme photosensitivity. The yellow face, it burns us. There are also a host of other associated problems, like nystagmus and myopia and generally crappy vision.

I wasn't diagnosed until I was 22. However, this is what I get for being raised in the greenest state in the Land of the Free. Mostly, ocular albinism gets diagnosed when children are still quite small. Which means that the best ophthalmologist to deal with my eyes is the pediatric ophthalmologist in the University's Ophthalmology Dept. Which further means that I have to share a waiting room with small children and Disney movies.

The Disney movies are bad enough. Either they're the new ones, which are crap, or they're the old ones, and destroy my happy childhood memories by being (a.) also crap and (b.) relentlessly misogynistic and phallocentric. (It was The Jungle Book today, which was the first movie I ever saw, at the age of 5. At least I can still love Bagheera and Shere Khan. Last year it was Sleeping Beauty, and I was forced to sit through the bit where Briar Rose meets Prince Whatsisface. Gaah.)

But then there's the small children factor, and the simple truth that a doctor's waiting room is never going to be where you see kids at their best. It just isn't, and I don't blame them for yelling, crying, whining, sassing their parents or any of the other less than charming behaviors I've seen demonstrated in that waiting room. I pitched many a fit of my own when I was that age. But I'm twitchy anyway, because I don't like small children; I'm twitchier became I don't like loud, sudden noises; and I feel like a complete outer space alien freak because I'm the only adult there without small child attached.

It's my penance. I don't know what my sin is, but I know penance when I see it.

looked at the previous post and thought, oh dear ...

Good Christ, I am a bitch, aren't I?

I don't carry on like this in person, my hand to god. (Well, sometimes I do, but I try not to.) The slightly insidious thing about LJ is that since there's nobody there to roll their eyes or tell you to shut the fuck up already, for the love of god, it's easy to fall prey to the illusion that nobody's really out there.

To go all meta for a moment, this is a weird weird Thing (LJ I mean). It's one of those things that I tend in random moments to imagine alien anthropologists trying to explain to their funding committee. LJ is a weird combo of monologue, dialogue, full Greek chorus, and cocktail party.

Anyway, the drops have worn off, my pupils are no longer dilated to 18/19ths of the area of my irises, and I no longer have a headache. Got not even a lick of work done today, and therefore resolve to do better tomorrow. Chapter Six is lying in its den, licking its chops and watching me.