Eye Doctor's Appointments

"Chelsea?"

I stopped flipping through the magazines and looked up.  About time.  I stretched out my cramped legs and followed the nurse through a maze of hallways to a room in the back corner.  So small, yet so much equipment.  There were rows of lenses stored in a red velvet organizer.  Everything still familiar from the last time I came here a year ago, I sat down on the plastic green chair.

After a near-sighted vision test and a colorblind test, I heard exactly what I had been dreading.

"We're going to be dilating your eyes today," the nurse said.

Ugh, well might as well get it over with.

I saw her twist open three different colored bottles of eye drops. Two fingers painted bright red approached my eyes.  Pinching into my skin, they pried one eye open as I watched the first drop get squeezed in.  A burning sensation spread throughout my eye, and I tried to blink away the pain, but another drop fell in before I could.  I squirmed with discomfort, my eye begging for relief.  Eye drop tears were flowing out of my eyes, but the nurse kept going.  She squeezed one  drop from the last bottle, but most of it bounced out of brimming pool of eye drops already occupying my eye.  The fingers lifted themselves away from my eye, and I shut them as quickly as possible and dabbed at the tears with a tissue.

Still recovering from the experience, I heard a cheerful voice say, "Now the other eye!"

Internally groaning, I lay back down and faced another series of eye drops with the prying fingers.  I waited for twenty minutes for my pupils to dilate.  Towards the end, my near-sighted vision got so blurry that I just sat around, checking on my pupils every once in a while to see them slowly cover up my irises.

I heard a knock on the door and my doctor walked in.  The first round of tests was reading the letters from the far wall.  He gave me a black spoon to cover up my left eye, and turned on the projector. I started to second-guess myself after the fifth line. I switched to my left eye and everything got a little blurrier.  Since I just finished reading the letters with my right eye, I didn't forget them now that I'm reading them a second time.  So do I just read the letter as "F", the way my left eye sees it, or "E" how I remembered reading it a half second ago?  I'll read it as F and hope the doctor doesn't think I have short term memory loss.

The appointment continued without any other qualms from me.  And the usual conversation followed when we finished.

"Your vision has not changed.  Here's your prescription.  And don't forget your sunglasses on your way out."

"Thanks!"

I had been waiting for this moment.  These were the rare (and awesome) shades I could only find these at my ophthalmologist's office.  They not only had 100% UVA and UVB protection, but they also fit snugly on my face.  It was always a great way to end an eye doctor's appointment, feeling invincible as my dilated pupils faced the glaring sun.

What's Happening to the Adélie Penguins?

About 150,000 Cape Denison Adélie penguins are presumed to have died since December 2010 because of a giant iceberg blocking their access to food.  A study says that the B09B iceberg latched onto the Mertz Glacier Tongue and now extends the Common Wealth Bay by 1,120 square miles. The penguins are forced to travel an extra 37 miles in search of shrimp-like krill, fish, and squid.  The greater the distance the parents have the walk, the harder it is for the chicks to get their nutrients.  One co-publisher of the study, Chris Fogwill,  observed a lot of penguin casualties: "We saw a lot of dead carcasses, particularly the young, which was terrible to see."  The authors predict that the Cape Denison colony will disappear in 20 years unless the iceberg relocates.

However, not all researchers are convinced that the Adélie penguins have died; there's no concrete proof.  Michelle LaRue said, "Just because there are a lot fewer birds observed doesn't automatically mean the ones that were there before have perished.  They easily could have moved elsewhere, which would make sense if nearby colonies are thriving."  As for Fogwill's observations, LaRue counters that Adélie penguins always have dead birds scattered around because the carcasses decompose slowly in Antarctica's cold and dry climate.

It wouldn't be the first time Adélie penguins needed to immigrate to new feeding grounds. In 2001, an iceberg grounded in the southern Ross Sea, forcing them to relocate to nearby colonies until the ice broke up.  The Australian research team suggested the Cape Denison penguins joined other thriving nesting sites in the Commonwealth Bay, similar to the situation the Adélie penguins' faced in 2001. They noted patterns of abandoning and emigrating to other penguin colonies, evidence of the bird's adaption the changing ice conditions in the past. Although this theory sounds the most plausible, scientists still know little about how they migrate between colonies. The Adélie penguin population in Antarctica has only recently become tracked by satellites.

No one knows for certain what happened to these birds, so it's best not to jump to any extreme conclusions until further evidence surfaces.

Getting Enough Sleep?

"Darn it! It's 12AM again?  How does this even happen!"

I look at my planner.  One more assignment left.  I do a mental calculation in my head of how much sleep I'll get if I go to bed right now--6 hours.  Seems pretty decent for a teenager, right?

Wrong.

According to Nationwide Children's, in a perfect world adolescents should be getting 9 hours of sleep a night. 9 hours.  How do they honestly expect us to do that?  Say you want to wake up at 6AM; then you would have to go to bed at 9PM. Many of us have after school activities or sports after school, getting home from 4-7PM, leaving us with around 2 to 5 hours for schoolwork, family time, hobbies, relaxing, and some dawdling in between.

An AsapSCIENCE video explained that in a study where a group of people only slept 6 hours of sleep for 2 weeks, they showed a similar reaction time to a person with a blood alcohol level of 0.1%, which is legally drunk.  That
sounds is pretty frightening because 40% of Americans are getting less than 6 hours of sleep and probably driving to work.

Well, against all my science instincts, I'm want to disagree. As a practically nocturnal person, I would like to prove this wrong. I want to say I am perfectly fine after getting 6 hours of sleep. But sadly, I'm just in denial.  I misread the signs.  When I randomly walk into furniture, I don't think twice about it because it happens so often.   I've never considered it as one of the side effects of sleep deprivation: slower and less precise motor skills. Another one is impairment of judgement, especially about sleep, which begs the question: where do I draw the line between just clumsiness and actual lack of sleep and how do I know that I'm actually make the right choice?

After reading a lot of articles about sleep to write this, I'll have to admit that sleep deprivation is the culprit.                                                                        

But there is some good news! Even if you don't sleep as much, you can still make the most out of it.  The National Sleep Foundation conducted a poll that has shown that exercise improves the quality of sleep.  Even something as little as a 10-minute walk counts.  So even if you don't get 9 hours of sleep because your working on the last bit of those Gov notes, you can still try to get some quality sleep.

Bilingual Culture

I grew up singing the ABCs with Elmo on Sesame Street, solving puzzles with Steve on Blue's Clues, and following Dora the Explorer on her adventures.  English was my first and only language.  That is, until my first trip to China.

I was five years old when my mom took my sister and me to visit my grandparents.  On the first morning, I scampered to my grandmother's bedroom in my favorite purple T-shirt with butterflies.  She was intently watching the morning news, but when she saw me, she flipped the channel to a cartoon about a family of ants.  I didn't understand anything the ants were saying but I was excited to point out to my grandmother what was on the TV.

I jumped up to the screen and pointed at the baby ant.

"Ant!" I exclaimed.

My grandmother looked over at me with a really confused look on her face.

"Ant! Ant!" I stubbornly repeated with frustration .

My sister chimed in with her gibberish, and my grandmother furrowed brow relaxed. (My sister probably came in when I was watching the ants eat their oatmeal.)

It never occurred to me that my grandmother couldn't understand what I was saying. After awhile, I became more attentive to the conversations around me.   Of course I didn't understand anything since I didn't have Google Translate handy, but I absorbed the enunciation and inflection of the sounds.   I was intrigued by this new language.

After this trip, my parents decided to teach me Chinese.  I learned the basics of pronunciation, like the alphabet, four main tones, and pin yin (your best friend in learning Chinese).  My vocabulary grew as I frequently conversed with my mom.  As for the reading and writing, I learned that in Chinese school.  Up until seventh grade, I took classes for four hours every Sunday with lengthy assignments of at least ten pages of homework.  Although I never looked forward them, those classes taught me the communication skills and vocabulary necessary to live in China for a month.

The most complex character--56 strokes.

Now, four years later, I've retained my ability to read some news articles, speak fluently, and understand it.  I learned how to write some fancy characters, which by now I've probably forgotten up to 90% of them.  The most important part to me is being able to speak it, which I am so accustomed to doing as soon as I enter my home.  It comes to me naturally.

I mostly speak to my parents in Chinese--but more often Chinglish.  A typical after-school conversation with my mom usually goes like this:

"Hi Mom!  你能来接我吗?  十五分钟.  At Conestoga.  Thanks.  Bye."

When my friends learn that I can speak Chinese, they ask me to translate all sorts of odd words.  One time, this boy whipped out Google Translate on his phone and started asking me to read the obscurest Chinese characters that he translated from English.  He probably didn't even know if I was pronouncing them correctly or not.

Sadly, I'm guilty of this too.  When somebody opens up and says, "I know how to speak Chinese," I get extremely excited.

I then follow up with, "Can you say something in Chinese?"  and nine times out of ten I get tentative a "你好?" back. Once I received a "我是一个苹果", the most creative response.

It's these small things in addition to connecting to my heritage that makes me glad that I learned Chinese.  English and Chinese are fundamentally different languages and they represent the different parts of me.