Waldorf: I never imagined blog titles could be so cornea!
Statler: Indeed, it shows a lack of vision!!
Most of the time, especially when I’m alone, when I look in a mirror, I run and scream.
Hold on, this isn’t a beauty thing. I’ll explain.
If you knew me in real life, you’d know about my eyesight. I refer to it a lot.
It’s pretty bad, but not in the 20/20 sense– because I do have 20/20, or darn close anyway. It’s awful because I have an extreme astigmatism. Mine is not caused by the curvature of my eyes, like most astigmatisms are. Mine is caused by a misplaced nerve.
I’ll be honest, I have no idea what that means. I’m not an eyeball-genius.
All I know is that I can’t wear contacts to fix it and that I can’t repair it without a surgery that people don’t do yet. I also know that, to me, the world to me is very nearly flat. Like a cartoon.
For the most part, if I can focus and I’m not tired, this doesn’t make a difference at all. I’ve lived with it long enough to be quite sure-footed.
For some reason though, mirrors really trip me up. For example:
We’re at a restaurant together. A nice, casual place that is Coca-Cola branded and has vegetarian, low-carb options. There is a mirror to the side of us, as part of the decor. You are sitting across from me and you ask me how my day was.
There’s a 50% chance that I will turn my head and look at you in the mirror while answering the question.
I can’t explain why, exactly, it’s a combination of
- being raised to follow the etiquette of making eye contact with everyone at the table
- the eyesight quirk that makes me believe that the person in the mirror is another person (I saw their lips move!)
- the way my brain doesn’t remember how you or I really look
There’s a video of a Corgi seeing himself in the mirror for the first time. He looks, steps back, looks again, and then runs out the room.
I do this all the time.
Dave is so used to me running into the living room, out of breath, that I’m not sure if he’d even react if there was an actual moment of crisis.
The first time, years ago, he leaped up and asked what was wrong– I explained that there was someone in the mirror, but it was probably just me.
Like a brave soldier, he tucked me safely near an exit with a weapon. Like a ninja, he edged his way into the room.
Two minutes later, he emerged with his adrenaline levels back down to normal, and from his expression I could tell that he had finally heard what I said when I ran out of the room the first time.
“Are you telling me that you were frightened by your own presence in the room?”
Of course not.
I was frightened by the girl who was just standing there, staring at me, like a weirdo.
How am I supposed to know what I look like? There are about a quadrillion more important things in the world.
Even if I did know what I looked like, people in mirrors still look like real people to me. I can’t imagine turning around and seeing myself, staring at me.
Any reasonable person I would leap to a series of unsavory conclusions:
- Angry twin sister who didn’t get to live the happy home life I had and came to retaliate
- Evil clone accidentally created by chemical interactions
- Evil clone created by a company who wants to replicate and extract a certain important part of my DNA
- Robot designed to replace me in my life and gain access to my secrets
If those possibilities don’t make you run screaming from a room, I’m not sure what would.
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http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/07/05/daily-prompt-mirror/
What makes you run screaming from a room? Did I miss some possible explanations to the lookalike stalker?