So.

I probably shouldn't even be mentioning this, because it sure feels like I'm about to jinx it, but oh well. I'll live either way.

A friend of mine, whom I've known for a very long time and who has always been a big cheerleader for my writing, is trying to hook me up with an agent.

It's so amazingly preliminary that nothing may come of it, but just the idea of a possibility of being represented by someone who would zealously try to find value in my writing and then try to get it published... well, that's pretty exciting.

I'm not even sure the person's name. I just know that I'm being indirectly pitched, and maybe I'll talk to them. It's gotten me very curious about the whole agent/writer/publisher relationship and how things might change. I wonder if I'll be given notes like, "Can we make the protagonist a lesbian? Better yet, a lesbian trucker?" or "The first chapter is very good, but every chapter after that, up to and including the final chapter, will probably have to be rewritten."

I'll let you know what happens. If I were an agent, though, I definitely know what my business card would say:

 

Omar G.
"I Fuckin' Represent."

 

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Remember way back late last year when I was hemming and hawing about whether I should get LASIK, that cool laser surgery where they saw open your eyes, blast it with lasery goodness and then stitch you back up with drier, but more effective eyesight?

Well, I long ago decided to have the procedure done. I had a free consult with the delightful Dr. Wong two months ago. I got really busy with LCP recently, but Wednesday I finally took the first step toward a more technologically advanced eye future. I got soft contacts.

I've worn hard contacts since my early teen years. What Dr. Wong told me (after he giggled at my prescription and held up the middle finger and asked "how many am I holding up? Heh heh." No, not really. He's cool. He didn't do any of that.) was that I have to wear soft contacts for a month so my eyes will reshape off the hard ones. Then I have to wear glasses for a week right before the surgery.

You have to understand about these glasses: They're huge. Look:

Yeah. Exactly. And I have to walk around in those for a week. See how they're at the edge of a table? What you can't see is that the weight of them is tipping the table so it's almost falling over. And you can see how they capture all available light and suck it through their all-consuming lenses.

As you can imagine, I never leave the house with them. I won't even leave my bedroom with those things on. They're purely functional and have a negative cosmetic value. I suppose I could fry some ants out in the sunshine with them, but other than that, I prefer they stay locked in a drawer when it's not bedtime.

But today was the soft-contact phase. I got fitted with these huge, clear contact lenses and they felt all squishy in my eyes. These are temporary lenses and it turned out they didn't have my exact prescription in stock.

The soft contacts feel pretty great comparatively. And one chronic problem I've had for years -- my reddish, always-irritated eyes, suddenly look clear and white. It's amazing. All that from just switching to soft contacts. No more accusations of pot smoking all the time.

So I have nearly good vision. But when I wear the new contacts, words are a little blurry. Which makes it difficult to see small type on a screen. When I got back to work after my appointment, everything on my computer screen looked a little fuzzy. I blinked hard. Still fuzzy. I wanted to cry all of a sudden. A whole month of having to strain at the computer screen?

I'm tying this with my eyes closed right now. It sucks. I e-mailed Dr. Wong and told him the situation. He said my eyes will change a lot in the next week and to just see if I could live with it.

It's horrible! I can see stuff far away. I can drive. But the one thing I do most, the reading and the writing by computer, is the one thing giving me trouble. I'm hoping this gets resolved in the next week or two because if you e-mail me, I'm not going to know what the hell you're talking about. Commas look like periods. Dashes look like human embryos. Every word looks like it just came out of the lint trap in my dryer. I thought somebody was proposing to me and it turned out to be an amazon.com invoice.

So bear with me for the next few weeks. Once my eyeballs are singed and cauterized, I'll feel much better, promise.

 

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LCP shows tonight and tomorrow. Go check them out, seriously.