Contacts

Busy weekend, busy day, busy sunday night.. not much else needs to be said!
so here's a quickie:

From my time here at Iolani, I'd say that I've seen more people wearing glasses than anywhere else in my life. I can't really tell you why we all have bad eyesight, but I do too. But me, I wear contacts. Contact lenses. Something we've been studying about in physics.

Since you unsophisticated people wear glasses, today's lesson is about how to properly put on a contact. While each pair of contact lenses is lightweight, transparent, and looks the same oriented forward or backward, believe it or not there's a very specific way to put them on. First, hands gotta be clean and dry, but moist. Contacts must be inserted, concave side up. Otherwise, as us sophisticated guys know, very painful irritation occurs and vision is severely impaired.



The issue is, the irritation only kicks in moments after you put in the contacts. And your vision is always impaired when you put in the lens, but if done correctly, should cease after a minute. If the lens are inserted convex side up, vision is strangely enough, impaired forever. To the point where one can see better without having them on. But I digress....

So to give you an idea of what life was like, when I confused convex side with concave side:

I woke up, but didn't really wake up, and could barely pry my eyes open to get the contacts in..
I was late, and noticed that my eyes, still tired and closed felt like they were swelling on the way to school. I opened my eyes and realized I couldn't see a thing. Class was pretty fun, having to tap the person next to me to figure out what my teachers were writing on the board. And then Mr. Park put me on the spot, and I didn't even know what the question was...

If you mix up the sign, it's almost as fatal as forgetting a negative sign on object or image distance on a quiz. Almost.

Is it good to be organized?; Seeing is not Believing!

To skip my midlife crisis, go past the dotted line!


Life has honestly become more and more of a mechanical grind. More than it ever has been, I think.

I wake up at a pre-determined time in the mornings, calculated precisely the night (or morning, hehe) before to account for leftover homework, head to school and finish it, and follow my generic schedule. After-school is pretty mechanical too. I have my schedules all planned out, for each day of the week. Mondays are scholarship, then doc!'s room. Tuesdays are cram for violin lesson. Wednesdays are violin lesson, and Thursdays are quartet. Well, you get the idea.

Even the stuff we learn is pretty mechanical. English will always be vocabulary, and analytical essays. Math will be.... math... and physics will be real world applications of math with lots of equations (kind of?)

So, I don't really know anymore. My friends, teachers, and family all seem to believe that being organized is a good thing. Especially after today, when I had a long talk with my dad about "having a sense of direction, of where I'm headed." I don't know though, if it's good to know everything about where I'm headed. Kind of takes the fun and thrill out of things, especially considering that I only get three more years to be a teenager.

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While pondering above thoughts, I had a water glass on my desk...

I quickly noticed an everyday example of refraction--the tendency of light to travel at different speeds through different mediums.

Light travels more quickly through air than it does through water. As a result, it creates a distorted image of a straw:



And here's some guy who saw the same thing I did, but with a straw, because that's normally what people have in water glasses. Comes with some analysis; which is cool, so I don't have to do any~.



So, although the straw appears to be bent from an overhead observer, the picture indicates that the 'real straw' is a continuation of the straw above the surface of the water, just like our brains would like to believe.