Misconceptions, natural and otherwise ...

Despite the name, this site and blog will not be about the need for corrective eyeware. When I set up my blog, I was determined to use a black background, and on getting to customize some part of the look and feel of my page. On Wordpress.com, that limited my options. One template generally appealed to me, but had an annoying quirk - the font face was very small. I tried setting the font in the posts to a larger size, and found that I couldn't, because the letters would then overlap, one line over another. What resulted was unreadable. Instead of switching to a different look, though, I decided to change my thinking about the blog.

Small text becomes terrible for a lot of people when they have to read long passages, so I decided to make my commentary brief, and focus more on the images, on the visual media content. The name of my blog, then, in part, is a joke about the supposedly eyestraining quality of the text, and the bit of folklore that holds that eye strain causes myopia - as if I were pushing my readers into nearsightedness. As for Midnight - night photography sets nicely against a black background, much more nicely than it does against brighter backgrounds, the glare from which tends to wash out a lot of the finer detail. If I was going to give up something to hold onto that blackness, why not get as much as I could out of what I had held onto, I thought. By something like a process of free association, then, I came to an idea of what the new blog was going to be about, and it was a good fit for me, given a personal quirk of mine.





I have been known to suffer from insomnia, and have allowed myself to enjoy the experience.

I've decided to start a blog about the night and all that comes with it. Imagine this - You aren't going to sleep and what work you've been able to find wouldn't usually be thought of a being conventional. There is no office that you have to be at, in a few hours, and so there's no real reason to fight this. Instead of laying down and suffering, you decide to go out and explore a world that circumstances have put you in a position to discover.

People are out drinking and maybe you join them in this - in moderation. No beer for you. You much prefer wine or liqueur, which you enjoy with some tapas, looking longingly at some of the dishes you'll have to abstain from, because you are a Sephardic Jew (half of you is, at any rate), religion makes its demands, and you're still sober enough to remember what they are. You look out on the darkened city, taking in the transitory moments of beauty the moonlight reveals as the moving shadows it casts vaguely reveal forms that you can't entirely discern, off in the distance.

The night isn't young, but you still can't sleep and remember that you had a very light dinner, barely a meal at all, before you rushed off to do something. No need to rush, now, you think, and so maybe you seek out an all night restaurant, one that serves Spanish food, because there's nothing in the world that's better, especially when you're up at that hour. There's something very right about paella at midnight. Perhaps there is a tiny amount of lobster in it, the symbolic presence of a little ritually impure luxury in an otherwise humble dish, but your choices at that hour are so limited that you're sure that G-d will understand, and so you embrace your resignation with pure delight.

You had bounced from club to club during the night, wanting to enter them all, and would have, if only your finances would have allowed, but instead, did as so many of the poor will, lingering on the street as the music softly drifts out, before moving on. Sometimes Latin, sometimes Jazz and a little poetry along the way, in little snatches. The meal finished, you go out again, this time daring to buy a ticket and fully enjoy a show.

You enjoy the show a little too much, but do so in peace, leaving as that club finally closes, mildly intoxicated, wandering out into a night that is long from being over. It is a strange, dark morning that follows before dawn, as more and more people go to off to sleep, a morning made stranger by your condition, which the few shots of tequila you've just enjoyed have done nothing to alleviate. But you are well, if slightly bewildered, and as the eastern sky starts to show those faint signs of light, you know that you will have a story to tell, one that is told from the point of view of somebody who on a shadowy night, couldn't be entirely sure of what was real or what was not, but had certainly encountered something unusual.

Imagine that night, and you might have an idea of what my blog will be about.





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