Eye Love Her Still

The pink triangle at the inside corner of your eye is called the lacrimal caruncle, or caruncula lacrimalis.  You should know this.  I married my wife because she had the most beautiful caruncula lacrimalis, bar none, that I had ever seen.  There was a lot to be said for the rest of her, too.  Her sclera were very clear, her iris a unique shade somewhere between smoky gray and Persian green, and her pupil seemed to have a healthy response to changes in light levels.

I could tell she liked me, too.  Even though the light at our time of first meeting was sufficient to read smaller fonts, her pupil remained somewhat dilated.  This was a dead giveaway.

In no time, we were dating.  I can honestly say I do not remember asking her out, but I can remember having coffee with her.  The effect of the caffeine on her extra-ocular muscles was amusing.  Her saccades remained regular, with both eyes making quick, simultaneous movements, but her micro-saccades increased in rapidity and regularity.  It could be said that her eyes were dancing.  I must have been feeling romantic, because I remember having the distinct impression that her eyes were dancing merrily.  Her superior rectus muscles appeared to be particularly affected.

Dating led to an exclusive relationship, and the next logical step was engagement.  Traditionally, I went to one knee, and as I looked up awaiting a response, she hesitated, turning her head at the sound of the horn of a passing train.  For a brief moment, her vestibulo-ocular reflex initiated, keeping her eyes on me, then her eyes focused on the train, and her optokinetic reflex was a thing of beauty.  The smooth pursuit, followed by the flourish of the saccade took my breath away.  At last her gaze returned to me, and the convergence as she focused on me made my heart leap.  She said yes.

A short engagement lead to a small, private ceremony.  We stood before the justice of the peace and exchanged vows, our lenses in accommodation due to our proximity to one another.  At last, the ceremony over, we retired to my apartment to enjoy our honeymoon.

Alone and intimate as we had never before been, I hesitate to reveal what happened.  I will not go into detail.  I am a gentleman.  Suffice it to say, I soon became familiar with her vitreous body, and was pleased to discover she had a fine aqueous humor.

That has been many years ago now.  My wife is growing older, as am I.  Oh, there may be some presbyopia and a touch of arcus senilus.  I cannot complain, however, as I myself am somewhat subject to posterior vitreous detachment.  Still, we are together.  When I look at her, I still see those caruncula lacrimalis I fell in love with all those years ago.

Some Thoughts on Music

I like music.  That's probably a good way of putting it.  I'm no fanatic.  I have a good working knowledge of a broad range of music genres, but I definitely don't get in-depth in any of them.  I have a few favorites I come back to again and again, and once in a great while I find a new artist that I really enjoy, but when the conversation turns to music with a  true fan, I listen more than I talk.

I had a recent experience while substitute teaching.  During a class in which students were expected to work quietly all hour, I played some music.  I was on Pandora, and elected to play a playlist a friend of mine had put together.  It was alternative, and some pretty soft stuff.  Definitely what I would categorize as college alternative.  Heavy on The Shins, Django Django, Fjord Rowboat.  Yeah.  I never heard of them either.  But I was giving it a shot.  I'm open to listening to new music.

A student in the class raised his hand.  I asked him what he wanted.  He said, "Can we listen to some normal music?"  This was in a small town.  The same small town where I grew up, and also the person who put the playlist together.  I asked him what normal music was, and was surprised to hear all the artists that I expected.  Pop music.  Pop music today covers a pretty broad spectrum, but he named artists that I had heard of.  I had heard of all of them.  And that made me sad.

When I was growing up, we had limited exposure to music.  We had a few radio stations that played just a few songs.  We had MTV (they played music videos then).  Sometimes, someone would discover somebody we hadn't seen on MTV or heard on the radio, but not often.  We all listened to the same music because that's what we had, basically.  Buying a cassette tape or an album was a major investment, and taking a chance on someone we had never heard was not likely to happen.

Today, things can be different.  Sure, the radio stations all play the same bands over and over, but we have access to the internet.  We don't have to listen to Adele four times in one hour, to fun., to Maroon 5, to Lady Gaga, to Justin Bieber, and then back to Adele again unless we want to.  We have access to Pandora, to Grooveshark, to Rhapsody, and to a hundred other stations and free music venues.  Such a broad range of music. Music from the past and the present.  All for free.  Finding a new artist is so simple, and if someone else suggests a new artist, the whole album is usually available to stream.  If it really suits the listener's taste, it can be downloaded to an MP3 player.

So when the student wanted to listen to "normal" pop music, I was saddened.  He was still listening to what the music executives and radio programmers wanted him to listen to.  Such opportunity to broaden his musical taste, and it was wasted on him.  I can't say I wouldn't have been the same at that age.  Appreciation of new things, different things, is not necessarily encouraged in a small town.  A person has to carefully choose how to express individuality in a small town or risk ostracism.  But that shouldn't impact musical taste.  Not with the opportunities available.  Listen to everything with an open mind.  Give it a shot.

It's That Day

February 14th.

So many of these days in the last 45 years.  As a kid in school, I remember the boxes we made, the cards we filled out for ALL our classmates.

I was a romantic.

I picked the best card for the girl I had a crush on at the moment.

I always had a crush on someone.  I learned the word "unrequited" at an early age.

I rarely had a girlfriend on Valentine's Day in high school.  I just wasn't good at keeping a girlfriend.  Usually my fault.  I wasn't really good at keeping a girlfriend ever.

Then I met my wife, and it just seemed right.  I was 29.

Over the last sixteen years of Valentine's Days, we've never really had a very romantic one.  For fifteen of those years, she's worked as an accountant.  Eighty hour work weeks during tax season don't lend themselves to big Valentine's Day plans.  We've bought cards for each other and forgotten to give them to each other.

But that doesn't bother me or her.

We still kiss every time we say good-bye.  Every morning, and other times, too.  We hug a lot in passing.

Flowers will wilt.  Chocolate is eaten.  Gifts are nice, but even nicer are the nights when she comes home at nine or ten in the evening, eats the meal I've kept warm for her, sits at the table and tells me about her day.

Then she sits next to me on the couch and falls asleep with her legs across my lap.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Duck, eggs!

My father buys eggs for my family.

He's my egg connection.  Up until recently, we have always bought our eggs from the grocery store.  But then we started feeding my children boiled egg whites for breakfast, and our egg requirements increased.

By the way, the egg whites only thing for breakfast, while the healthier option, is not a choice my wife and I made.  I have picky children.  They won't eat the yolks.  But they will eat the whites, and that's okay with me.

So we boil five eggs for breakfast every morning:  one for each child, two for my wife, who has one for breakfast and one as a snack through the day, and one for me which I eat for lunch.

But all this is apart from the main point, which is that my dad buys our eggs. He buys ten dozen a week from a lady who raises chickens at her farm.  He's a good customer.  This lady also raises ducks, apparently, because she gave my father a dozen-and-a-half duck eggs gratis.  My family received nine of those eighteen eggs.

My reaction was simple:  free eggs.  Cool.  My family, strangely enough, also seemed to be okay with that.  Logically, duck eggs shouldn't be that different from chicken eggs.  Logic, however, doesn't always enter into our gustatory decisions.  This time, it did.

My wife boiled the duck eggs yesterday morning for our breakfast/lunch.  When she came upstairs, she told me that the duck eggs were floating.  I thought about it for a second, then said, "Makes sense."

If you laughed, smiled, smirked, or even were just mildly amused after reading that, thank you.  I like you.  You got it.  What I did there was set up a logical naturalistic fallacy.  What your mind did, or in my opinion, should have done there was follow through the naturalistic fallacy:  Ducks float, ducks have eggs, duck eggs should float.  And then you recognized the false logic behind that statement and were amused.  I hope.

I love my wife.  She got it.  I love my mother.  She got it as well.  And they both laughed.  Some of you may recognize a similar naturalistic fallacy from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, except being British, theirs was much more complex.  But it still involved a duck.

P.S.  You may be wondering how the duck eggs were.  I will be eating the remaining four.  They are not bad, but it is very difficult to separate the yolk from the white.  They are also slightly different in texture.  A little "tougher."  This doesn't bother me, but my family can be picky.  I'll eat just about anything.