I’d like to take the opportunity to state, right now, that I fucking hate my glasses. Let me clarify—I am very fond of my normal glasses, an unobtrusive little Ben Franklin number of delicate wire rims and painfully expensive FeatherLite plastic lenses. I hate the glasses I am currently wearing, which date back to 10th grade (1993 for me) and are unflattering, unstylish, and haven’t been “me” for a good 7 years.
They’re huge, they’re round, they’re wire rims, but wires glazed with some sort of teal and black speckle paint, and goddammit, they’re ugly. At age 15, I thought they were the shiznit, but I was notoriously bad at determining that which flattered me at that age, and honestly, for 1993, I coulda done a hell of a lot worse. At least I didn’t have bear-claw bangs and a crispy perm. Anyway, round-faced girls should not wear glasses with completely circular lenses. It just ain’t a good thing. I look shockingly like I’m carrying a bowling-ball with hair on my shoulders.
For a regular, habitual, and damn-near lifelong glasses-wearer, changing glasses is often a really major step. It is practically like changing faces, since the shape, color, and overall style of a pair of frames can make a big difference in how your whole face looks. My Ben Franklin glasses are just about perfect for my face, I think. They’re subtle and unobtrusive, bronze-colored wire rims which fit the shape of my eyesockets perfectly and don’t really cover much more of my face than that. They don’t freakishly emphasize my bushy eyebrows, like my backup specs do (the frames are situated so that my eyebrows show both over and under the top of the frame—embarrassing from a Groucho Marx perspective and annoying because my oily skin means there are frequently eyebrow-prints in the tops of the lenses—too grody for words). They don’t make my large nose look any larger than necessary by having an exaggerated bridge. They don’t mimic the curves of my pudgy cheeks. My real glasses are flattering, and for that I am just about as thankful as for the fact that under normal conditions, they help me see quite nicely.
Unfortunately, conditions are not normal at the moment. I wrecked my glasses about three weeks ago. You see, they’d had a fancy-pantsy UV-reflector coating on them, which I let the optometrist talk me into the last time I got new lenses, and predictably, the fancy-pantsy coating had gone all bubbly and peely and generally wonky and I could barely see through them. I discovered, fortuitously, that the coating could be gently scraped off with a thumbnail, not harming the lens at all, so I scraped away. Expensive lens replacement averted! Go team Michelle! All was well for about a month (incidentally, and coincidentally, I mow my lawn about once a month, because I am a lazy biznatch). However, I shamed myself into mowing because my lawn was about mid-shin depth and I had a whole slew of company coming in the following weekend. So I hauled out my horrible lawnmower, gassed it up, and sprinted up and down the lawn, knocking back the worst of the weeds and covering myself from head to toe in grass bits, bark chips, grit, powderized newspapers and stinky exhaust. When I got done, I decided to do a spot of weeding in my garden, because I had locked myself out of the house and had fuckall to do until Todd woke up and could let me in. I couldn’t see for shit, either, because my glasses, like the rest of myself, were covered in mowing detritus. So I went and rinsed them under the spigot and let them drip dry, since there was too much grit on my shirt to dry them safely. I still couldn’t see for shit, but I chalked it up to water spots. Weed, weed, weed, lose favorite bracelet, search for bracelet, give it up as a lost cause, weed, weed, sweat, weed, check to see if Todd is up yet. He was, so I banged on the door until he let me in, and absconded to the bathroom for decontamination. After I got cleaned up, I cleaned my glasses properly, and…still couldn’t see for shit. Apparently, the UV coating also contained the “Scratch-Guard” and once it was off, it was open season on my lenses as far as micro-abrasions from yard-dirt were concerned. My Ben Franklin specs are now permanently fogged up from a million-zillion miniscule scratches. The lenses have to be completely replaced.
The specs I had between my Horrid Goggles of Doom and the Ben Franklin glasses weren’t bad, though a tad oversized, but they were broken. In fact, it was their broke-assed-ness that had led me to buying the Ben Franklin specs in the first place. So I had to trot out my awful old highschool glasses and muddle along until such a time as I can get an eye appointment, get my prescription written out, and hie myself to a Lens Crafter and bully them into replacing the lenses in my existing specs, not selling me a whole new pair.
Oh yeah, and I used to have some contacts…got ’em about three years ago, to try, so it was just a trial pair anyway, but I didn’t really like them, but I kept them around anyway, because I thought I might need them for certain costuming occasions (sometimes glasses just aren’t period, you know). After I ruined my Ben Franklin glasses, I dug out my contacts, cleaned them up, and wore them for about a week, then lost the contact for my dominant eye while playing around in a swimming pool. Not being a habitual contact-lens wearer, I didn’t know that they can wash right out of your eyes when you are swimming around underwater. Me being half-blind at a party is not exactly an idea situation anyway, because without corrective lenses my lazy eye gets that much worse, and I kept noticing people to whom I was talking kind of darting back and forth trying to determine whether or not I was looking at them and talking to them. Worse yet, my sister got stuck driving us back from the party, and she didn’t know the way and I could barely see to navigate, and she didn’t have her driver’s license, so it was kind of a stressful ride for all parties concerned.
Anyhooie, I have an eye appointment for the 10th and am taking the whole afternoon off so I can get out to Lens Crafters or whomever and get my real glasses fixed so I don’t have to keep going around looking like some Cathy-loving, cat-sweatshirt-wearing, droopy-dress reject in my 10-year-old saddo glasses.