penance

[truepenny]

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.

Comments

[renenet.livejournal.com]

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

It's a lifetime of sins, many of which you may not have committed yet. I believe that we are sometimes allowed to glimpse our own personal levels of hell, as sort of a sneak preview of what lies ahead. For instance, for the first three years of college my box in the campus mailroom was in a little alcove apart from the majority of the boxes and right outside the video game room. Every day I was treated to the most horrifically annoying noises from the games--noises worse than any arcade in any other location that I have ever been within earshot of. And I knew by the end of the first semester that I had discovered one of the secret torments that lies before me personally in hell. Currently, the back loading dock entrance at my workplace gives me fits. I despise it and dread entering the building that way. It, too, awaits me in the afterlife. I think this particular waiting room may be one of your own personal levels of hell. It sounds thoroughly nasty enough and fits the pattern above. I'm very, very sorry.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Anya. That won't keep me awake all night.

[renenet.livejournal.com]

Hey, six or seven days, that's all you really need to get over eternal hell experiences.