Back from the Blind

Perhaps you already know about the wonders of Flexible Spending Accounts. Your employer deposits a chunk of your salary you choose each year and you get to spend it on your medical expenses. The money is not taxed and, in federal employees' case anyway, the entire amount you designate is available immediately so it's like an interest free loan for a year. The down side is any money in the account you don't spend by the end of the year, you lose. It's like a not very amusing game. In December you have to guess how sick you're going to get in the next year and how expensive it will be.

This year, I wildly overshot and so now I'm scrambling around trying to spend up all the money still hanging around my account. Since the pinheads at FSA will not recognize rentboys as legitimate medical expenses, I was considering decorative surgery, but decided to spring for new glasses instead. I picked them up this afternoon.

I assume plenty of you guys are myopic because, you know, so many of you use big words in your comments. Thus you'll understand the thrill of new glasses. Never again will the world look so crisply clear as it does through brand new lenses.

So what did I see, wandering through the Castro, my eyesight all tuned up?

(Of course I didn't think to take my camera, so all images are approximate and swiped from various websites.)

The agapanthus on Market and Noe are remarkably brilliant blue.

The storefront that used to house Earthtones, a fairly charming tchotchke store, is now reopening as a combination wine bar and jewelry store.

What? Is their business plan that customers will get drunk and pop for overpriced bijoux? It seems like an unlikely concept.

Plenty, plenty of cute guys. Reveling in my new found ability to focus, I was looking around absentmindedly and suddenly realized I was staring at an absolutely ravishing boy. Good Heavens.

He had on a lovely olive green sweater, too.

Even as I realized what I was doing, I also saw that he was looking directly through me, invisible as a glass window in his path. That didn't bother me; I had my turn and now it's his. What it did do, however, was make me wonder what it would be like to be young and so very good looking and living in San Francisco. I know, I know, everyone has their own pains and sorrows, rain falls on the beautiful and the ugly alike, blahblahblah. Still, what is like, to turn heads everywhere you go? I'll never know, I'd just be satisfied with his sweater.