I just took a 1.5 mi walk in my neighborhood, and boy are my eyes tired!
(I'm typing this with my eyes closed again and can barely stand to look long enough to make sure I'm in the right field, so pardon the typos & general lack of proofreading for coherence)
I told Tony I wanted to walk to the library just to get out, it's a little less than a mile from our house. "Don't go there, it's too far!" he says. So I went to the dry cleaners that's like .8 mi from our house instead :D (with dry-cleanable items, not just for a larth) He was right about one thing, though -- the walk to the dry cleaners is MUCH prettier than the walk to the library, and a lot less busy/eye-stressing.
You guys, it is AMAZING. I don't have the vocabulary to express what this has been like the past few days. I have hand gestures, lots of emphatic waving and pointing and gesticulating, but not words. I told Tony last night that I never understood the big deal in drawing classes when the teachers taught about perspective and how to achieve it by drawing the two lines drawing closer to a point in the center that was your focal point off in "the distance." That's how I normally see things anyway, two lines angled toward each other until they meet in the middle of the field. And shading, shading was never that difficult either. In short, the world was flat, so why all the fuss?
But now I actually have something of a z-axis. The road isn't just two lines angled blah blah blah, the road goes OUT, it goes AWAY. And in the car, the trees as we pass them are COMING AT ME. As I pass houses, the trees in front of them move between us, and I sometimes walk back & forth to watch the relationship. And there's so much more of it, too! Which is why I'm glad I didn't go the busier route, it's still a LOT to take in.
Yesterday Tony had to go back to work, but my mom was able to take off, so we went out to lunch and we made my first foray back into the real world. One of our stops was at an embroidery shop, lined with veritable rainbows of every fiber and weight of yarn. I slowly made my way around this table of needlepointing ladies looking like some kind of spaced-out tripping idiot, with my baseball cap and my sunglasses indoors. I could see them looking at me funny (from the corners of my eyes, no less!) and eventually explained myself. At which point they all congratulated me & wished me luck, but I know I still walk around new places like a wide-eyed gape-jawed alien.
And it IS all new to me! Even going into the grocery store the other day, I couldn't stop marveling at how TALL the building was -- all 2 storeys of it! Everything's taller, everything's grander. But oddly, everything is also smaller, more compact. My mom asked how she looked to me, and I said "condensed." Now that I have a wider area I can see, my brain is compacting more data into the same space. And that's the other thing! I can see FARTHER AHEAD NOW. It makes me wonder what I saw before and didn't even think about itk, but I know what I didn't see: farther ahead. It's FASCINATING.
OK, that's probably enough for now. At this rate, I may have to draw some simple pictures to explain the differences between before & after, but I'm resting my eyes after my strenuous walk in the flowering neighborhood, with the undulating hills and the sidewalks that disappeared as they went AWAY. I'm grinning just thining about it, as I grinned almost the entire walk.
I did notice one small drawback: photos are disappointing now. Photos are no longer exactly how I see the world. They're smaller, less vivid, and definitely more flat. I'm saddened by this loss, and I wonder how it will translate to when I start taking photos again.
I told Tony I wanted to walk to the library just to get out, it's a little less than a mile from our house. "Don't go there, it's too far!" he says. So I went to the dry cleaners that's like .8 mi from our house instead :D (with dry-cleanable items, not just for a larth) He was right about one thing, though -- the walk to the dry cleaners is MUCH prettier than the walk to the library, and a lot less busy/eye-stressing.
You guys, it is AMAZING. I don't have the vocabulary to express what this has been like the past few days. I have hand gestures, lots of emphatic waving and pointing and gesticulating, but not words. I told Tony last night that I never understood the big deal in drawing classes when the teachers taught about perspective and how to achieve it by drawing the two lines drawing closer to a point in the center that was your focal point off in "the distance." That's how I normally see things anyway, two lines angled toward each other until they meet in the middle of the field. And shading, shading was never that difficult either. In short, the world was flat, so why all the fuss?
But now I actually have something of a z-axis. The road isn't just two lines angled blah blah blah, the road goes OUT, it goes AWAY. And in the car, the trees as we pass them are COMING AT ME. As I pass houses, the trees in front of them move between us, and I sometimes walk back & forth to watch the relationship. And there's so much more of it, too! Which is why I'm glad I didn't go the busier route, it's still a LOT to take in.
Yesterday Tony had to go back to work, but my mom was able to take off, so we went out to lunch and we made my first foray back into the real world. One of our stops was at an embroidery shop, lined with veritable rainbows of every fiber and weight of yarn. I slowly made my way around this table of needlepointing ladies looking like some kind of spaced-out tripping idiot, with my baseball cap and my sunglasses indoors. I could see them looking at me funny (from the corners of my eyes, no less!) and eventually explained myself. At which point they all congratulated me & wished me luck, but I know I still walk around new places like a wide-eyed gape-jawed alien.
And it IS all new to me! Even going into the grocery store the other day, I couldn't stop marveling at how TALL the building was -- all 2 storeys of it! Everything's taller, everything's grander. But oddly, everything is also smaller, more compact. My mom asked how she looked to me, and I said "condensed." Now that I have a wider area I can see, my brain is compacting more data into the same space. And that's the other thing! I can see FARTHER AHEAD NOW. It makes me wonder what I saw before and didn't even think about itk, but I know what I didn't see: farther ahead. It's FASCINATING.
OK, that's probably enough for now. At this rate, I may have to draw some simple pictures to explain the differences between before & after, but I'm resting my eyes after my strenuous walk in the flowering neighborhood, with the undulating hills and the sidewalks that disappeared as they went AWAY. I'm grinning just thining about it, as I grinned almost the entire walk.
I did notice one small drawback: photos are disappointing now. Photos are no longer exactly how I see the world. They're smaller, less vivid, and definitely more flat. I'm saddened by this loss, and I wonder how it will translate to when I start taking photos again.