The Eyes Have It

I wear glasses.

I make no secret of the fact that my eyes are genetically mutated when compared to you few out there who can recognize faces in satellite photos, spot friends in airplanes cruising at thirty thousand feet and read bumper stickers in adjacent states. I've gotten quite used to waking each morning and not having a clue where I am until I reach over to my nightstand and grab my extra set of eyes. The floor of my bedroom could have dissolved over night and left a mile-wide crater, but I'd roll right out of bed none the wiser if I didn't have my glasses on.

I got my first pair of glasses when I was in the fourth grade. At the time I was only one of two kids who actually wore glasses, so I was fairly thrilled at having something which very few fourth graders had at the time. I'd go around looking at people and smiling and hoping they'd guess what was new about me.

The other fourth graders would look me over and ask , "Did you lose some weight?" or "You get a haircut?" But one fine day the smartest fourth grader of them all, Patrick Panduzi, walked up to me and said: "I know what is different about you. You just had your braces taken off!" I was overjoyed, of course. I've never actually had braces, but at least he was getting closer.

My first pair of glasses were big and round and ugly. The frame was made of a thick plastic whose color could only be described as "a dark sewage-like brown with lighter brown blotches reminiscent of puke swirled in for that really sophisticated effect." They were the kind of glasses that could assure my nerdom for all time if it had ever been doubted before. The term "bullfrog" comes to mind when I think of my portraits in those days.

But as a fourth grader, I was happy with them. We fourth graders would regularly have discussions about whether or not they could deflect bullets if I was shot in the eye and always wondered what would happen if I stared straight at the sun while wearing them. Some said the lenses would form a laser beams, melt my eyeballs, and blow my brains out the back of my head. But the smarter fourth graders knew that eyeballs don't melt, they explode.

Today I still wear glasses, but now I've left the wonderful world of crap-colored plastic and moved on to wire frames. I do this for a number of reasons such as comfort and fashion, but mostly because I know that my chances of being hit by lightning in the face are not greatly increased by wearing them, as we used to think in the fourth grade.

Contrary to what many of you believe, wearing glasses is not all fun.

It is not fun to walk in from the cold and immediately lose all visual contact with the world as your glasses fog over.

It is not fun to misplace your glasses, only to discover that you can't find your glasses unless you are wearing your glasses.

It is not fun to poke yourself in the eye while trying to adjust your glasses out of habit, even when you aren't wearing them. This maneuver is usually followed by a quick glance around the room to check if anyone saw you making a fool of yourself. The glance is useless, of course. Without my glasses, I can't even see if there are people in the room, much less if they are watching me or not.

Sure, a lot of people have made the switch to contact lenses, but I'm not one of them. There are a number of reasons (okay... four) why I don't trust contact lenses.

1. Contact lenses are invisible. (Have you ever seen contact lenses in anyone's eyes? No? Then they must be invisible.)

2. I'm not real keen on the idea of putting these little things into my eyes and just expecting them to stay there. I mean, is there some kind of glue holding them in? Is it magic? Do all contact lense wearers hold their heads tilted slightly upwards? What happens if you look down? Won't they fall out and get lost in the carpeting?

3. People who wear contact lenses always walk around with bloodshot eyes that make it look as though they've just returned from a funeral for their entire family where all the attendees grieved by smoking tear gas grenades.

4. When a person wearing contact lenses gets something in his or her eye, the experience does not seem to be a fun one. Most voice their discomfort with a very clear: "AAAAAAAAIIIEEEEEEEEE!!! GET IT OUT, GET IT OUT, GET IT OUT!! OH DEAR GOD!! AAAAAARRRRRG! KILL ME! KILL ME NOW!!"

And if I'm bothered by the idea of sticking a little piece of clear plastic in my eye, you can imagine how I feel about having laser surgery to correct my less-than-perfect vision. I looked into this process at one time but quickly felt that it wasn't quite for me:

"So, Doctor, you're going to point a laser..."

"Yes..."

"...at my eyes?"

"Yes..."

"A laser..."

"Yes..."

"And when you say 'laser' you really mean a microscopically thin unimaginably hot blade of concentrated light that, from what I can tell from copious science fiction movies, is pretty much the ultimate cool weapon if you want to overthrow an evil empire or blow apart a planet?"

"Well..."

"It was a 'yes' or 'no' question!"

"Now, Tom-"

"And this laser has, on the side of the casing, a good thousand scary words warning you of exactly how amazingly, blindingly dangerous and stupid it is to aim this laser straight at your eye."

"Umm..."

"That's the laser you're going to shoot into my eye to 'fix' my eye sight?"

"Tom, I think you're simplifying this a bit..."

"Your laser. My eye. Not going to happen..."

I have been wearing glasses for most of childhood and adult life now. I think I'll probably continue to wear glasses for the foreseeable (ha, get it?) future. In fact, when people ask me what things were like before I wore glasses, I have to say I don't know. It's all just a blur to me...

Humorist Tom Coffee regularly makes a mess at http://www.spillingcoffee.com. His writing chronicles his adventures in trying to lose weight, escape his office job, fix up his old house and cope with becoming a father for the first time. Filled with wit, emotion and silliness. Life is funny. Have some Coffee...