And Carl Kasell Almost had me Convinced

I come from a long line of total night owls. We all stay up late and love sleeping in. So I just assumed that I would never be one of those people who would get set on a schedule of early rising and start waking up entirely on their own. Well apparently all that genetics nonsense is just a big joke because I, of the family most closely related on the evolutionary scale to bears (due in a large part to our repeated confusion over the differences between sleep and hibernation) have started regularly waking up early without the help of an alarm clock - all bright eyed and bushy tailed to boot! Now what sets me apart from those morning people is that I don't ever actually get up out of bed when this happens; I usually just lay there or go back to sleep for a while. If it happens to be one of those rare mornings where I am not incredibly lazy, I like to turn on NPR and listen to Morning Edition while I drift in and out of slumber. Today was one of those radio days. Unfortunately, it was also Pledge Day for the radio which is always a bummer.

While I lay in bed listening to Carl Kasell seemingly speak directly to me chiding me about loving public radio so much and being too cheap to contribute, I was almost convinced. I was just reaching for my phone (or dreaming about just reaching for my phone - reality and dreamworldsville get very mixed up during these mornings) when their next news story started up.

It was more than one of the normal quick 5 minute stories. It was a little segment. . . all about EYE SURGERY!!* I could have died! It started off with discussion of laser surgery and corneas. Painful for me, but doable. THEN they switched over to talk about the first man who figured out how help people who are nearsighted - which included talk of that round blinky thing that makes you see and a SCAPEL!! And of course, due to my Lazy Disease, I was forced to just lay there making loud humming noises so that couldn't hear the awful, awful words they were saying.

Ira, Carl, Diane, Steve, Renee, Garrison, Neil, Tom and Ray, I want you all to know that I love you and I love what you do. I want to support you with more than my ears and my laughs and my cries and my thoughtful introspection and my screams of fury. I wanted to become a member - and I tried (or, at least, dreamt about trying)! But if there is one thing that I will probably never be able to overcome it is the words eyeball and. Scalpel. Being in the same sentence.


*For those of you who have not spoken to me for longer than five minutes, you probably don't know that I have an incredible eye + vaguely sharp things phobia. To quote my uncle Matt - It's so bad that odds are pretty good that I will be the crazy old lady in goggles.