June 7, 2017 COMPLICATED

This whole glasses issue is complicated. On--Off--On--Off--all day long. Not sure if I've ever mentioned that I HATE wearing glasses!! Had 20-20 vision into my early forties and then WHAM--I could barely SEE a block away--NEARSIGHTED. So I've had distance glasses for quite a while. Low and Behold--went to the eye doctor's and now I'm also FARSIGHTED. Being the VAIN person I am--I decided to try contact lenses. Boy are those hard to operate!!!  After several failed attempts, I finally got them in---not sure how I'll get them out--but that'll be another story.  They're great-- BUT now I can't read because the contacts are for distance. Actually had to run to the store to buy READERS so that I could write this BLOG.  Like I  said--it's complicated. If I do well with these--the doctor is going to let me try contact lenses for both reading and distance. CAN'T WAIT. BREAKING NEWS:  This will be the first time in years that I will ACTUALLY be able to see where I'm running and the people along the way.  BABY STEPS. 

Speaking of seeing, I recently finished Jose Saramago's sequel to Blindness which earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. This follow up book is entitled Seeing. In this novel, it is four years later.....election day. It's raining so hard that people are not coming out to vote. After the rain subsides, the people are ordered to go out and vote and the polls are jammed. After the ballots are counted though, more than 70% of them are BLANK. A state of emergency is declared as this incident  brings back memories of four short years ago--when everyone in the community was blinded by a plague that hit the city--everyone except the doctor's wife. Could she be conspiring against the government? Desperate to blame someone, government officials put a police superintendent on the case. What he finds will disturb you and it should. Saramago's satire on government, control, bureaucracy and corruption will have you shaking your head because  it actually resembles our world in many ways. Will the doctor's wife become the fall guy in this world gone mad?  Find out for yourself when you read this 300 page masterpiece. It's  about a 5 mile run--well worth every page as the writing is absolutely flawless.