In which it takes me a while but I eventually realize what's going on

I was driving to work the other day when I noticed that my cell phone screen was looking pretty bad. It was all darkish and picky so I had to hold it at just the right angle to see the numbers clearly. I had just dropped it on our concrete steps a few weeks before, and I guess it hit at an angle that messed with the liquid crystalness of it.

Then I noticed that my watch was doing the same sort of thing. There was a nick on one side of the face, and it was all shadowy radiating out from that. I know the watch has been dropped too, but not recently, so I decided Bob had probably done something to it when he borrowed it for his class on one of these Tuesdays.

I was pretty disappointed to have all my electronics going all obsolete on me all at once, but whatever.

Then another day on the way home from work, I saw that the phone actually looked just fine. I figured that the dropping must have jarred it in some sort of way that was subsequently un-jarred, or possibly that the liquid crystals had evened back out.

Or something.

Also lately, I've been seeing a lot of cars where the rear - or even front - windshield defrost surface, or something, is all shimmery shadowy in either an egg crate or a wavy-stripey kind of pattern, like it wasn't applied very well and was losing its transparency. I saw enough of it, including a bit on my own rear windshield, that I began to wonder if there was some component of the tropical heat that was causing the things to look like that. Is global warming to blame?

Maybe everything in the world is wearing out, all at once. Doesn't it sometimes seem that way?

Of course, I did eventually realize that I had started seeing all of these things around the same time that I started using the polarized clip-on sunglasses that came with my regular glasses.

Duh.