The RIGHT column, imbecile! RIGHT!

My job is annoying me. I like it well enough when I'm there, it's just little things that patients do annoy me way more than they should.

Here's a tip for my ever-so large constituency of loyal readers: when you are at the eye doctor's office and you have to use the accuities machine (the thing with the bar you put your forehead against, like the thing you use to look at roadsigns at the DMV) please listen closely to the person conducting the test, and if she says "read the smallest line you can see in the right-hand column," read the smallest line you can see in the right hand column. Do NOT use the left hand column, do NOT start at the top and read down, and do NOT read from right to left. Oh, and don't come into the office and expect us to give you contacts if you haven't had an eye exam in three years. My office only gives out contacts if you've had an exam within a year--that varies, but we need to know we won't blind you by giving you something your eyes can't handle. And yes, this applies if you're wearing color contacts, even if you don't have any Rx in them. They're still a medical device that comes into direct contact with your eyes (they're called contact lenses for a reason) and your eyes have to be healthy in order to wear them. There's a lot more that can be wrong with your eyes than needing glasses.

Oh, and that one condition? It's "astigmatism," not "a stigmatism." And it's not "a stigma", or "stigmata". Yes, people call it that, and while it's funny, it makes me want to smack you in the forehead like those V8 commercials.

In other news, my brother is an ass. My parents and I are visiting him over the weekend, and his intellectual condescension is getting really obnoxious. He makes me feel incredibly stupid. I keep trying to nurse my self-worth by telling myself that, after all, my IQ is supposedly higher than his. But it doesn't stop there--he manages to find something he doesn't like about the books I read, the music I like, the clothes I wear, the way I laugh, my glasses, my skin, my hair, my build...it never ends.

However, my dad bribed me out of acting terribly annoyed at everything at large this morning (I had a pre-noon relapse into moody teenager mode--after all, being around mon frere makes me feel like the least popular kid in high school again) by saying we'd go by Beowulf's town on the way back home. So I suppose it's worth it.

I've also been having migraines in the past few months, which I've never done before. Today's ended up just being a medium-strength headache that two Advil knocked out, but it was accompanied by a light sensitivity, and yesterday's was light-sensitive and nauseated, but I headed it off by going to bed early. Sleep remains the best thing for a migrain, apparently, other than supposedly snorting hot pepper. The idea behind the pepper is that it short-circuits the brain's pain receptors by being incredibly ouchie. I suppose it's similar to biting your tongue when you stub your toe.

I'm not in my normal time zone, so I'm getting really sleepy. Maybe my next post will have more of a point.

Oh, btw, thanks DBB, I'd actually been thinking about reading some Ayn Rand sometime soon. Honestly, I haven't even gotten around to reading anything on that list; my mom derailed me by finding a few books by Madeleine L'Engle that I hadn't read.