One week. One week is all is takes to get those shiny
marks in the sides of your nose from the bridge of glasses. One week is all it takes to develop a weird
facial tic to scooch your glasses back up your nose. Just one week to discover that if you wiggle
your glasses up and down, it looks like an earthquake. (Yeah.
It’s pretty cool).
As a long time wearer of
contacts, I haven’t worn glasses for an extended period of time since…probably
around 7th grade. And this is
for a reason- I can’t stand them (please picture Lina Lamont from Singin’ in the Rain saying that). But unfortunately, due to circumstances
totally beyond my control (I totally could have controlled it), I dropped one
of my contacts, couldn’t find it, and didn’t have any access to new ones for a
week. And that week, was this one. And this is my story.
Raindrops are falling on my head…and my lenses…
This is a tricky area to
navigate with glasses. If you don’t have
an umbrella, a hat, or some sort of brim, you’re in trouble. Rain on glasses is just as obstructing as
rain on a windshield, except windshields have windshield wipers. Glasses don’t. The result are very smudgy and streaky
lenses. The way around this (besides
inventing glasses wipers- and someone should get on that) is to use an umbrella. The one downside of using an umbrella is that
if you’re clumsy like me, you’ll probably hit yourself in the side of the
glasses with it. And this has a rather dramatic,
slapstick-esque effect as the force of the umbrella knocks your whole head to
the side. Although annoying, I took
comfort in the fact that I was probably amusing the passersby on the street
with my unintentional physical comedy.
You’re welcome strangers.
Blinded by the light (please sing outloud. thanks.)
I originally got contacts in
order to wear sunglasses. As someone
with very light eyes, it’s important to protect them from the sun, and no way
was I going to get Transitions and walk around in a gray cloud everyday. So the thing about that is, I don’t have any sunglasses option for when I’m wearing my
glasses. I don’t have prescription sunglasses
because I’m normally wearing contacts and that would just mess with my
eyes. I don’t have sunglasses I can wear
over my glasses because I never needed them.
So this whole past week, if I wasn’t dealing with rain-related mishaps,
I was being blinded by the sun. This
goes for other lights as well- any light will reflect off of glasses and blind
you a little bit. Life’s definitely
brighter when wearing glasses, though I don’t know if it’s a good thing…
Also, sunglasses are a
perfect way to ignore people on the street- most specifically people who have
clipboards and are trying to get you to pledge money. So I lost my perfect avoidance
mechanism. Next thing you know I’m gonna
be a platinum sponsor for Save the Trees or something…
I’ve been framed!
Seeing the world with
glasses on is like looking out of a window- you can see the world clearly
(unless you’ve got dirty windows, in which case, get on it), but only as far as
the window frame will let you. Same thing
with glasses- you can see clearly in the lenses area, but look up, down, left,
right and what you’ll see is the inside of your frames and a blurry world. It looks kinda like this:
Note: this is what it looks
like for me, because the inside of my glasses are yellow- so my world’s always
bright with glasses on.
Another Note: You probably
won’t see the world like this with glasses on, unless you’re actually by some
mountains. Seeing beautiful mountains
are not an effect of wearing glasses.
Is it snowing?
When I wear my glasses for a
full day usually it’s when I’m staying in my pajamas. And this really only happens on snow days or
sick days. Besides that I’m usually up
and at ‘em. So sometimes long-term
glasses wearing puts my in a weird state of mind, like it’s a sweatpants kind
of day, where you can sit around and be
even lazier than usual. If you see me out and about in sweats, please convince me to put real clothes on. This is
why glasses are dangerous, kids. Stay
far away.
...Alright, so they’re not
really dangerous, but I’m sure some contact-wearers would agree that wearing
glasses for long periods of time is unusual and puts them in a different frame
of mind. (Get it? Get it? Frame
of mind? So punny right? …man, what is
with my constant need for pun validation?...)
“I didn’t know you wore glasses!”
This is the response you get
when you don’t normally wear glasses until one day, you do. And my internal response is, “well, I don’t wear glasses…otherwise you would
have seen me wear them…” That’s the
thing folks- if you see someone wearing glasses for the first time, it doesn’t
mean they were hiding them from you, it means they probably weren’t wearing
them previously. This sudden change
could be due to just getting glasses, normally wearing contacts, or getting fake
glasses (like hipsters) and wearing them for fun- it’s probably not a scheme to
keep you out of their glasses-wearing life.
So the next time someone says to me, “I didn’t know you wore glasses!”
I’m going to reply, “Well, that’s because you’re not creeping around my
apartment at night when I’m doing homework in bed. You’ve passed the test.”
And they will have.
Note: I just made up this
“test” on the spot- it does not exist. I
was lying when I said they would have passed the test. Though it is
a good idea. I might implement it
sometime in the future…
Focus.
I’ve found over this past
week, that sometimes removing my ability to see the world (aka my glasses), is
a great way to focus and get some work done.
I spent some time in the library with my glasses off, with my face right
up near to my computer screen (yeah, probably not helping the poor vision
situation…whoops), not being distracted by any other visuals.
It’s like the equivalent of listening to
white noise, except with your eyes. When
the only thing you can see is right in front of you, it’s pretty hard to get
distracted by anything el- oh look, wifi!
Why yes, I am quite smart. Um, indubitably.
The best reason to wear
glasses? You look smarter. The other day I was rocking a blazer and my frames, and I looked like a (very young) businesswoman. I’m pretty sure it’s a fact (it’s not a fact,
I just made it up), that 89.4% of Americans think that those of us who are bespectacled
are smarter than our frame-free counterparts.
I mean which one looks smarter:
Psych! They’re both ME! But with glasses I am more intellectual and
impressive, albeit way nerdier…
Hindsight’s 20/20
Going into this week all I
could think about was the fact that I had no candy in my apartment, and I was
going to have to wear glasses for at least 7 days in a row. Now I do
have candy (yay! Snickers bar!) and I’ve worn glasses for 7 days in a row. But it wasn’t all bad. It’s fun to mix it up every once in a
while. Although my glasses-spots on my
nose probably won’t go away for a couple days, they will serve as a nice
reminder of my bespectacled week, and how cool glasses can be.
That said, I can’t wait
until I get my new contacts.
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