Various people have suggested that my grip on sanity is tenuous at best, perhaps because I tend to zone out and mutter at random moments while I wrestle with plot problems, but mostly because of my tendency to risk unnecessary bodily harm. Usually I just disregard their reality and cheerfully substitute my own, but lately my state of denial has been harder to maintain.

Between kickboxing and home renovation and automotive work there’s rarely a time when I’m not decorated with at least a few bruises or abrasions, but I’ve been a veritable paragon of common sense while my back’s been sore. Weeks have passed with my knuckle skin completely undamaged. Even my fingernails have grown out into clean, smooth half-moons. For somebody who usually uses 10W-30 for hand cream with a manicure by Makita, that’s positively unnatural.

So apparently I’ve decided that some injury is required to restore the balance of the universe. Hubby may not realize this, but he has enabled me in my quest for pain.

It all started when I decided I’d like to have an actual bed for the first time in my adult life. Up until recently our mattress and box-spring sat on a steel bed frame. It was sturdy and practical but ugly as homemade sin, and the middle caster was positioned exactly so as to rip your toes off every time you made the bed.

Hubby and I looked at some new wooden beds, but the prices were exorbitant and the designs were boring. I admit I’m a cheapskate, but it seems to me that if I’m going to pay three thousand dollars for a bed that doesn’t even include a mattress, it better serve me drinks and rock me to sleep. Or rock my world somehow, but we won’t get into that.

So Hubby decided to build us a new bed. I designed it, he built it, and we’re delighted with the result in cherry and live-edge maple burl:

It’s beautiful. It’s one-of-a-kind.

And it’s dangerous.

We’ve lived in this house for sixteen years, and my reflexes are finely honed to skirt around the end of our bed in the pitch dark. But now the bed is eight inches longer.

I’m pretty sure if you look at the picture closely, you’ll see my kneecaps dangling from the end posts. I’ve smashed into those posts so many times my knees look as though Guido and Luigi paid me a midnight visit with their baseball bats.

And just because it’s not enough of a challenge to unlearn a decade and a half of habit, I’ve also started a two-week trial of eyeglasses that leave my right eye uncorrected so I can continue to see clearly in the distance, while correcting my left to see clearly up close. If I can adjust to that, I can have LASIK surgery on my left eye and ditch the umpteen pairs of reading glasses lying around our house.

But until or unless I get used to that, my depth perception is screwed up.

So I’m squinting cockeyed at the world while I limp around muttering disjointed sentence fragments and occasionally stumbling over imaginary obstacles on a flat smooth floor.

It’s lucky I don’t go out much. The loony-catchers would pick me up for sure.

Please inject a dose of sanity here.  Has anybody else tried the one-eye-for-distance/one-eye-for-closeup thing?