My hobby is apparently having a negative effect on my eyesight. Not that hobby. I'm talking about computers.

I work on one all day. I often spend evenings in front of one. I know video games, chatting, blogging, and surfing the net are not the healthiest, but I never really considered them "harmful" per se. The warm, glowing, warm-glowingness of the monitor's warm glow is hastening my ocular decripitation, apparently.

I had noticed in the past couple weeks that I was squinting a great deal. As I sit here, a glance over to the digital clock on my cable box, a scant 10 feet away, reveals that it is starting to get blurry. Driving at night, I found, has become more troublesome, the roadside lights and those of other cars smearing together. I have to be practically right on a roadsign to make it out with certainty. Not good. Driving home from work was where I perhaps noticed it most, especially being that it is almost winter now and the sun has set before I leave the office. After staring at a screen all day, I have been finding it quite difficult to focus past the hood of the car. Unsettling.

More disturbing, to me, was a trend I made note of awhile back. Sitting on my couch with the 360, pimping hoes and inciting gang wars, or blasting little Stormtroopers to their constituent blocks, I found myself leaning forward more often than not, straining the hell out of my neck. I went so far as to pull my couch forward about a foot just to make the experience more comfortable. The final straw was perhaps last evening, as my cohorts and I crept across the campus of the fictional Las Vegas University hunting terrorists. I found myself squinting to read the somewhat smallish text and straining to see the enemies of freedom hiding behind cover. Granted I don't yet have a high-definition set, but still, this situation is far from optimal.

I went in to have my eyes checked today. I was overdue by at least six months (maybe more like a year and six months--my memory is failing). I am, unfortunately, not accustomed to being proactive about my health. I have a tendency to visit professionals only after I am noticing a problem. Hopefully I can change this habit, but I'm straying from my point.

I had my eyes examined and fortunately they are healthy (she even showed me the picture of the back of my eyes, pointing out the optic nerve and arteries, which was cool). But, my prescription has changed. The opthamologist suggested that working at the computer so much was likely what was causing my prescription to change. She said I was working the muscles so hard to view up close that my eyes were having a hard time relaxing in order to focus at a distance (hence the troubles seeing while driving). I got the standard advice about letting my eyes relax and focus on something far at least once an hour and should have a new prescription in about a week.

So, okay, I'm not "going blind" per se, but it is still troubling to think that my work and hobby are negatively effecting my ability to see. It is unsettling to read a book for an hour and find that when looking up you can't focus on the wall not too far away. Hopefully I will be able to remind myself to give my eyes a break and maybe not spend so much time in front of this infernal device.