floaters

Of all the weirdness-es in our super bizarre human bodies, I think floaters rank pretty up there.  I'm talking about those little black dots that drift in and out of your vision, like a pesky little pepper flake somehow hopped his way onto your eyeball for a free ride.

Floaters are technically "deposits of various size, shape, consistency, refractive index, and motility within the eye's vitreous humour, which is normally transparent."  I don't really know what the vitreous humour is, but apparently its made out of some kind of gel, and over time, it breaks down (like most stuff in our body).  The damage it incurs is what results in floaters -- little particles that drift around in the stuff.  What we see is not the speck itself, but its shadow on our retina.

They seem to be the worst, or the most pronounced, when you're looking at a bright sky.  I think I first noticed one in my eyeball one afternoon in college while I was lounging on a blanket in the grass.  Since then, I won't notice them for weeks at a time until one day, BAM, floater.  Then its all I can do but see it there, an unwelcome friend, a houseguest that did not get the memo to hit the road.  I think the only way to remove them is with some kind of fancy procedure and I feel highly uncomfortable with my eyeballs and laser beams coming anywhere close to one another.  (Exception:  if the laser beams were coming FROM my eyeballs, that would totally rock.)  So my tiny flaw is here to stay.

But for all the occasional grief my floater gives to me, no one else seems bothered by it at all.  In fact, it's the weirdest thing.  They can't even see it...[probably because most of my friends don't walk around with an opthalmoscope (except for maybe Janelle in a couple years)].  Nope, it seems I save the harshest criticism and finest microscope for myself.  Let no flaw go unnoticed: large pores, those tiny premature grey hairs, uneven arm lengths, floaters, freckles, toe widths, etc.  There are about a million things that can be wrong with you that no one else will ever notice.  If you are female, you definitely know what I'm talking about.  But friends, it's time for a change!

Now before you take a sledgehammer to your bathroom, I'm not saying we should throw out our mirrors.  There are times when it's good to reflect on who we are, especially underneath that 20 square feet of skin thats wraps us all together.  I'm just saying that when I do find myself in front of that glass, I want to be kinder to the soul staring back at me.  I want to give myself a break, to take a few steps back and see that I am pretty much like the rest of us --amazingly, sometimes bizarrely, but always beautifully -- human.