Venus Cloacina

Go to Costco/Sams Club/WalMart - wherever they’ve got that $58 eye exam. That’s with no insurance, btw. Just $58 cash on the counter, you get your eyes examined.

They’ll give you a copy of your prescription. ASK THE DOCTOR TO MEASURE YOUR PUPIL DISTANCE. If they don’t it’s not a huge deal, you just have to have a ruler around that has millimeters so you can measure it yourself and it won’t be as accurate but being off by as much as a centimeter isn’t a problem.

Make them give you a copy of your prescription - you are allowed to have this, they have to give you it, you don’t have to buy glasses there. If anyone challenges you say you need a copy for your records and you’re not going to buy glasses today.

Go to https://www.zennioptical.com/ and start looking at frames/glasses that you like. If you create an account it’ll let you upload a photo and based on your pupil distance the site will estimate how well various frames will fit you.

Add the frames you like to cart and start checking out - the checkout process will ask you for your RX details that will be written in the boxes on your RX page. It’s pretty intuitive to copy it over but if you get lost use the livechat feature on the zenni page.

Start selecting your glasses details. Your RX will determine what kind of lens you get (go with the one zenni recommends for materials and thickness) but your needs will determine the other stuff. I make sure to get the fancy oleophobic coating because I’m a slimy bog monster. I also get the cheapest pair of sunglasses possible because bog monsters hate the sun. You can get transitions lenses or anti-scratch coating or super lightweight lenses or whatever works best for you. The extras will add up in cost but you gotta do what you gotta do - my life is much better with a pair of sunglasses than it is with some clip-ons for my regular glasses; your life may be better with transitions lenses instead of carrying a second set of glasses. DO WHAT WORKS BEST FOR YOU.

Don’t bother paying the rush shipping, this is going to take two weeks regardless.

GLASSES ARRIVE. WEAR GLASSES.

If the fit isn’t perfect see if the place that did your eye exam will adjust the fit for you. They often will free of charge.

GLASSES. GLASSES. I CAN SEE.

PROGRESSIVE BIFOCALS THAT COST $40 WITH CUTE FRAMES AND NICE COATING.

SUNGLASSES.

FUCK

It costs less for me to get two pairs of bifocals, one tinted and one clear, with special coatings and nice frames than it would cost me to get one pair of single-vision glasses from Warby Parker.

The cheapest frames available for adults on Lenscrafter’s site is $69.95. That is JUST the frames, not the lenses. The lenses are like $200. The anti-glare coating is like $70. THE ANTI GLARE COATING IS FREE AND INCLUDED WITH YOUR PURCHASE AT ZENNI. Just the frames and the coating at lenscrafters costs more than my two pairs of glasses AND my eye exam.

The key difference for me was that while Zenni was utterly eye opening (ha, eye pun), they rarely do sales, and GlassesShop is constantly rolling through a variety of sales. There is almost always a wide selection of glasses on Buy One Get One Free promotion, and the free pair includes the lenses, no matter what add ons are on there or whatever kinda prescription you got, as long as its the less expensive pair. 

They also do weekly specials where rotating selections of frames go on clearance-rate pricing, from $6.95-12.95. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the constant variety of sales, promotions, and discounts they offer, and doesn’t include that, also unlike Zenni, if you have an account every purcahse you make accrues points which can be applied in dollar amount to future purchases, even with discounts/sales/promos also applied.

Like Zenni, GlassesShop lets you upload a selfie to “try on” frames you’re interested in, but they have a much wider selection and variety. They take about the same amount of time as Zenni to craft and ship your glasses, and they’re on par as far as quality and accuracy of prescription goes.

I will always be grateful to Zenni for opening the door for me on the online glasses market, because as someone netting less than 20k a year after taxes glasses used to be a “upon pain of death/causing a car accident from blindness” purchase but have become a “well that’s a great sale and I LOVE those frames… I guess I could do with another pair of glasses, there’s $30-50 in my budget!” kind of thing, and that’s incredible.

But I probably won’t be switching back, as after having made multiple purchases, the only thing I like better about Zenni compared to GlassesShop is Zenni has better cleaning cloths.

Regardless, they’re two excellent, amazingly affordable alternatives to spending minimum of $100 at a brick and mortar glasses store, and I’ve turned into something of a proselytizer for both, because people deserve to know they have these options.

Valentin Winter | Theresa Fractale | Iseris Photography

Corset: @thetailorwitch Shirt: @ixdoxdeclare Jewelry: @alchemyengland

apron was originally napron, but “a napron” was interpreted as “an apron”

newt comes from ewt by the same process

In the opposite direction, nickname comes from Middle English nekename which in turn came from ekename (an ekename -> a nekename) where “eke” was an old word meaning “also” or “additional” (so basically “an additional name”)

ammunition comes from an obsolete dialectal French amunition, which came from munition, the phrase la munition being heard as l’amunition.

the nickname Ned comes from Ed, via “mine Ed” being heard as “my Ned” (in archaic English, “my” and “mine” had the same relationship as “a” and “an”), same with several other nicknames like Nell

The word “orange” ulimately derives from the Arabic nāranj, via French “orange”, the n being lost via a similar process involving the indefinite article, e.g., something like French “une norange” becoming “une orange” (it’s unclear which specific Romance language it first happened in)

in the Southern US at least (not sure about elsewhere), “another” is often analyzed as “a nother”, hence the phrase “a whole nother”

omelet has a whole series of interesting changes; it comes from French omelette, earlier alemette (swapping around the /l/ and /m/), from alemelle from an earlier lemelle (la lemelle -> l’alemelle)

Related to this, sometimes two words, especially when borrowed into another language, will be taken as one.  Numerous words were borrowed from Arabic with the definite article al- attached to them.  Spanish el lagarto became English alligator.  An interesting twist is admiral, earlier amiral (the d probably got in there from the influence of words like “administer”) from Arabic amir al- (lord of the ___), particularly the phrase amir al-bahr, literally “lord of the sea”.

Sometimes the opposite happens.  A foreign word will look like two words, or like a word with an affix.  For example, the Arabic kitaab (book) was borrowed into Swahili as kitabu.  ki- happens to be the singular form of one of the Swahili genders, and so it was interpreted as ki-tabu.  To form the plural of that gender, you replace ki- with vi-, thus, “books” in Swahili is vitabu.  The Greek name Alexander became, in Arabic, Iskander, with the initial al- heard as the article al-.

Similarly, the English word Cherry came from Old Norman French cherise, with the s on the end interpreted as the plural -s.  Interestingly enough, that word came from Vulgar Latin ceresia, a feminine singular noun, but originally the plural of the neuter noun ceresium!  So a Latin plural was reinterpreted as a singular in Vulgar Latin, which in turn was interpreted as a plural when borrowed into English!

The English suffix -burger used with various foods (e.g., cheeseburger, or more informally chickenburger, etc.) was misanlyzed from Hamburger as Ham-burger, itself from the city of Hamburg

“Vestibular sense provides information about where the body is in relation to its surroundings. This is the sense that helps you understand balance, and it connects with all the other senses.

When the vestibular system does not develop properly all other senses will struggle to function properly. Without a strong vestibular sense, kids will have no choice but to fidget, get frustrated, experience more falls and aggression, get too close to people when talking, and struggle with focusing and listening. Because they literally cannot help it.”

“Here are a few ways to support your child’s vestibular sense:

Spinning in circles.

Using a Merry-Go-Round.

Rolling down a hill.

Spinning on a swing.

Going upside down.

Climbing trees.

Rocking.

Jumping rope.

Summersaults or cartwheels.

Using monkey bars.

Skating.

Going backwards.

Swimming.

Dancing.

Wheel-barrel walks.”

Yeeting kids, spinning them, flipping them upside down, tossing them in the air, and otherwise disrupting their balance temporarily, is Important For Their Development, specifically for their vestibular sense.

A few years ago, after a series of cascading injuries and illnesses that rendered me unable to type, drive, or sleep, I briefly became a professional patient. Like all of my professions, I took it seriously. I went to appointments armed with lists of well-researched questions written down neatly on my yellow legal pad, brought in the occasional medical journal article, and compiled detailed descriptions of my array of increasingly bizarre symptoms. My goal was to get my doctors to take me seriously so they would dive into the complexities of my case. I wanted to walk out of every appointment one step closer to determining the underlying cause of my mysterious condition and with concrete strategies to ameliorate my suffering so I could work, sleep, and live my life again. Inevitably, though, I instead was handed the same thing over and over—a prescription for mindfulness.

My primary care physician told me to download guided meditation MP3s from the clunky hospital website; my therapist insisted that I do deep breathing exercises even though they triggered my mysterious abdominal spasms; and the pain clinic declined to do “any interventions” at all, instead vaguely suggesting mindfulness. The pain clinic’s message was clear—after two appointments and a clean MRI, I was being dismissed. From now on, managing my pain was my responsibility, not theirs.

Before these medical problems, I’d had only benign feelings toward meditation. My parents, products of the 1960s, were always dashing off to the Omega Institute and Kripalu when I was a kid, and I meditated briefly in college to impress a boy who’d just returned from a gap year in India. I’d mostly thought of mindfulness as promising evidence that mainstream medicine was becoming more progressive, more open to alternative, adjunctive treatments, and more interested in the patient experience.

The reality, I now know thanks to years of being denied medical care and instead being prescribed mindfulness as self-management, is quite different. For me, the current obsession with mindfulness has become synonymous with my overall feelings of disempowerment within the medical system. In my experience, in clinical settings, mindfulness is frequently disempowerment framed as empowerment, a way of placing responsibility for suffering squarely on the patient herself and a way for doctors to wash their hands of problem patients.

And I say herself deliberately, because data indicates both that women underreport pain and that their pain is taken less seriously when they do report it.

…

Grace Alexander also had an objectively verified medical condition—spinal disc degeneration and cauda equina syndrome, nerve compression in the lumbosacral spine. She was bedridden with her left leg half-paralyzed, partially incontinent, “and in so much pain I couldn’t breathe. The solution was … be positive / meditate,” wrote Alexander. She does use mindfulness breathing techniques to help manage her pain, but those tools weren’t going to reverse her partial paralysis or her incontinence. She needed more aggressive interventions like surgery, medications, and injections to gain back her mobility. The mindfulness rhetoric felt familiar to Alexander, though, who grew up in an evangelical sect and as a child with intense migraines was taught that if she prayed hard enough and had enough faith her pain would go away, “and if you’re not better it’s your fault for not having enough faith.”