Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Curling up in a ball on the floor doesn't work with glasses

So, in theory, the next post should have been "The line of Theia and Hyperion" and I am about 14 hundred worlds into it, but Helios sleeps around enough that there's some serious branching there, and when he does he has a habit of having multiple kids with whoever he's sleeping with, and then some of those kids will go on to have multiple kids, and did you know that the Minotaur had an actual name? Presumably given to him by his mother because his father was a bull and his mother's husband was probably not too happy being cuckolded by a bull.

Anyway, the story of Glaucus while clearly quite distinct from the story of Moria, has enough parallels that I'm sort of hung up on how to tell it and explain the parallels in a way that sounds less glib than, "Snakes know all about resurrection," which they do because they stole that plant from Gilgamesh and then... wait, wrong mythology.

So, onto the point of this post: curling up into a ball on the floor doesn't work with glasses.

Seriously, it doesn't.  You have to curl up on your side, the human body is not designed to curl up into a ball on its back.  It would look silly and be both uncomfortable and unstable and defeat the entire purpose of curling up into a ball on the floor.

But the problem is that if you're wearing glasses they have this part that goes over your temple.  This part is, in fact, called the temple.  Glasses, provided the are neither broken nor customized, have two of these, just as your head has two temples.  One on either side.

So when you curl up into a ball, you're on your side, and thus your head is on its side, and thus the temple of your glasses is pushed into the temple of your head which is just uncomfortable and more than that can knock the glasses out of proper alignment which is the kind of headache you just don't want to have to deal with.

So you've got to take your glasses off before or soon after you curl up into a ball on the floor, but then that becomes a problem because it becomes a distraction.  You've got to keep track of them.  If you put them on the floor you need to make sure that you don't break them when you eventually get up.  And if you don't put them on the floor then you probably put them in a strange place, the kind of place where if you don't remember them you'll probably be unable to find them.  And since the things you can reach from the floor tend to be things like seats and couches and the sorts of things people might sit on, they're in danger if you don't retrieve them as soon as you get up.

And so it just doesn't work.

Sure, you can physically curl up into a ball on the floor.  But the glasses will destroy any utility that might have had by being a constant nagging distraction.  Or, if you left them on, a constant nagging discomfort which is distracting.

The point here being: curling up in a ball on the floor doesn't work with glasses.

It just doesn't.

5 comments:

  1. Try hiding under the covers/pillow, or hugging your knees while seated and rocking (it's surprisingly soothing).

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  2. I don't curl up on the floor that often, but the glasses problem happens whenever you lie on your side. Which means, since even if you start out sleeping on your back you're probably going to end up on your side before long, that there is a strict division between ready-to-be-awake and ready-to-sleep. Occasionally this is annoying (mostly when sick in such a way as to be unsure whether I want to read or sleep), but I think it's helpful more often than not. Since there's such an obvious marker of "Okay, I'm awake now", it's possible when half-asleep to force yourself awake if you can manage to put on your glasses.

    (It's just occurred to me this might not be true if you don't need glasses full-time. I was too young to remember what that's like, so I think it's an understandable oversight.)

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    Replies
    1. Definitely it applies to sleep too. It used to be I could go from watching something to going to sleep on my couch, it is no more. At least not without finding a place for my glasses first.

      And it means that if you do fall asleep in glasses you stand a good chance of messing them up.

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  3. My glasses are perhaps a bit more robust than some others people are talking about; I've never had any trouble from falling asleep in them. I'm another person who's not terribly useful without glasses (I can focus a few inches out, and avoid walking into people by avoiding all the blurs, but I wouldn't want to try to cross a road).

    That said, the sideways discomfort is there for me too.

    Getting onto a flat surface and repeatedly curling/uncurling works for me.

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  4. It's because fetuses don't wear glasses, right?

    Would some kind of weirdly-shaped or -configured pillow help?

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