Last night, at roughly 2300 hours, midway between an abruptly (skunk spray) ended bonfire party and an abrupt standstill in traffic on the highway between said party and our fair city, I was privately lamenting how fast life has gotten. Every cool kid (and adult) now feels the need to be constantly connected to the world around them, having no patience for waiting longer than two milliseconds to find an escape route from a congested road, see what is currently walking down the runway in realtime, or immediately receive and reply to an email or text (whatever happened to talking on cellphones?). It might be of interest to you to know that I do not really have a cellphone myself. I borrow (and share with my man) an ancient non-smart phone from my father for emergency purposes only, paying $16/month to turn on the still foreign-to-me device about four times a month, usually just to check the time. But as my man is now a professional and will be going on business trips and whatnot, he's considering getting his very own smartphone. Call me old-fashioned, but I cannot seem to understand the need for this, at least not with our lifestyles. We've both managed into roughly our third decade without being tethered to the digital world at all times, and I'm really quite proud of this (says the girl with a blog...). And I, for one, have even grown tired of having immediate access to the Internets in my home, as this access is often quite enslaving on those non-motivating kinds of days. Sigh.
Anyway, I was offered a job on the weekend which has led me to consider pursuing a career as an optician. If my resume is anything to go off of, I do tend to gravitate towards medical- and scientific-oriented jobs, but I also, obviously, have an interest in style and artsy things. As an optician, though not a high-paying kind of career, both these interests come into play. And practically speaking, it seems to me to me that this type of professional will remain in steady demand until the day where we can purchase bionic eyes at the nearest corner store. Also, eyeglasses have remained relatively the same over the past few decades, thus symbolizing to me, at least in my skunk- and bonfire-scented moment of pensiveness, a kind of bastion, if you will, of non-digital and tangible real life, where we rely not on an app or a 15-minute laser procedure, but rather a simple piece of equipment made largely from Earth-given materials to correct a physical imperfection. And after seeing, albeit on the Internets (on NOTCOUTURE, specifically), these brilliant Danish-designed and Japanese-made screw-less frames that incorporate good ol' fashioned practicality and, yes, technology (though technology that doesn't make me wish for an isolated cabin on top of the highest mountain), I feel that I can retain my non-conformist ways while still remaining 'cool' and 'in touch' with the times. Until MONOQOOL figures out how to put a GPS or Bluetooth device inside those hinges, that is. Across that line, you do not -...
