Contact Lens Nazi.

Remember the now-infamous Soup Nazi from Seinfeld ("No soup for you!")? Well, I just met his optomologist counterpart. At my eye appointment yesterday, the doctor examined me and talked to me for a while; then he clicks his pen, closes the file and says, "Well, I'm not giving you contacts today."

Huh. I've never been refused contacts before. (And I felt strangely desperate, like I was trying to score some presciption drugs and failed or something.) As it turns out, he made a pretty persuasive argument:

1) I went in there thinking it would be cheaper to get contacts ($20 or so a box, vs. $100-200 for a new pair of glasses). However, I was going to keep my current pair of glasses (with my current old-ass prescription) and alternate between my new, updated contacts and my older, less effective glasses. This is the primariy reason why contacts were a no go--he said that going back and forth between the two prescriptions would wreak havoc on my eyes. He said that he'd rather have my new, updated prescription in glasses that I would wear all of the time instead of contacts that I would wear 8-10 hours a day, mostly at work. And regarding the whole "contacts are cheaper" argument...

2) Not, as it turns out, for me. SINCE NOTHING ABOUT ME IS NORMAL, of COURSE the surface of my eye is irregularly shaped. Due to the severity of my astigmatism, I would actually need customized contacts--so in this situation, glasses are actually cheaper.

To make a long story short (something I suck at as bady as Renee does)...the doctor told me to get glasses now, and if I still want contacts I can come back and get those later. But he'd rather have me seeing well ALL of the time with one prescription than seeing well PART of the time and going between two prescriptions.

Harumpf.

PS--my eyesight is so bad that at one point, while asking me to read the Letter Chart with my right eye, he actually said to me, "Your eye IS open, right?", since I failed the test so miserably. And later, during the Depth Perception test, he showed me a series of circles with a dot inside each one. He said that in each group of 4, I was supposed to tell him which one looked different. I said, "Oh, one is supposed to look different?" to which he replied, "Oh, geez." (I guess one was designed to have a 3-D effect or something--but they ALL looked 2-D to me.) He said, "Don't feel bad, they do get harder the further you go," to which I observed that we were still on #1.