Day 532: Blurry

Yesterday, I decided to take a walk without my glasses.  I’m very near-sighted, but I figured I could still enjoy myself and be safe enough, out there.

Before I left, I WAS able to discern that one of these cats was real and the other one was a laptop-screen cleaner.

Before we begin, let’s check out your vision, too:  Can you tell which is which?

Once I was out on the streets, I did misperceive something, almost immediately. From a distance, I thought this might be a bunny rabbit.

It wasn’t, of course. From then on, I think I saw things fairly accurately, although I may have been less discriminating than usual, in my photographic choices:

Because I always wear my glasses on my walks, everything looked new to me. So I just kept snapping away. Also, I had a great excuse, for any photo that might be judged as lacking: Hey!  What do you want from me?  I wasn’t wearing my glasses!

I decided to do something else new. I took a selfie.

I have such lousy aim, when I can’t see.

My vision was good enough, though, to see two butterflies — a white one and one that looked, to me, like a Monarch. I kept trying to capture them, in the next bunch of photos.

 

I believe that this blow-up — of one of the above photos — shows the butterfly I hoped was a Monarch:

It’s very blurry, though, isn’t it?

I kept walking, without the accompaniment of any visible butterflies.

At this point (believe it or not), “I Can See Clearly Now”  — a favorite song written and sung by Johnny Nash* — started playing on my iPhone.

It WAS a bright, bright, bright sunshin-y day.

Thanks goodness, I had no trouble reading THAT.  However, I couldn’t figure out these letters, which I saw minutes later:

Maybe I should go back there, when I’m wearing my glasses, to see what I can see.

Here are more things that caught my near-sighted eye, on my way home:

 

Walking near train tracks is not a smart thing to do when your vision is blurry, so I got out of there, fast.

Hmmm. I can’t see my way clear on how to end this post.

I know!  I’ll show you one more shot of something else I almost misidentified, yesterday:

What does that look like, to you?  I had to squint and get closer, to see it. I’ll tell you this: it wasn’t what I feared at first.

And no matter what lenses I’m wearing, that is a familiar experience.

Thanks to Johnny Nash,* to John G. Wald, to the Minuteman Bikeway,  to those who see as best they can, and to you — of course!  — for reading this, today.

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* From the Wikpedia page I linked to, about Johnny Nash:

for many years he seemed to have dropped out of sight

I didn’t know that before today, but I do know this: There are always connections, when we look for them.