Four Eyes

My glasses are broken, and have been broken for about two weeks now. They didn't brake in any sort of exciting way; I wasn't punched in the face, I didn't trip and fall and land on my nose. Nope, nothing even mildly interesting like that. They just... fell apart. I was at the State Fair with [Львица] and [La Maga], and I went to take them off so I could switch to my sunglasses, but as soon as I did, the bridge of the nose split apart and they were in two pieces. As you would expect, I found this very upsetting.

Alas, my poor glasses!

Convinced that I could repair them so I don't actually have to pay for new frames, I first took the Harry Potter route and duct taped them back together. I was sure that this would work, (which is mostly due to my deep love of duct tape rather than any sort of common sense), but, unfortunately, duct tape is not the most ridged of adhesives, and the weight of the frames combined with the pressure of the bridge on my nose caused the tape to sag. Rather than sitting straight and forming a solid 180 degree horizontal line, the taped bridge started to become the vertex of an 120 degree angle, which is both uncomfortable and awkward looking. Alas, despite my firm belief that all the world's problems could be solved with the application of copious amounts of the stuff, duct tape proved not to be a viable long term solution.

Next I turned to super-glue, which, despite my vague fear of permanently super-gluing my fingers together, worked pretty well at first. My glasses stayed together, and only came apart once or twice when I accidentally put too much pressure on both sides at one. It turns out, though, that after you've glued something together two or three times, a thin layer of dried glue builds up on the surface, which makes it so the fresh glue doesn't adhere as well. So now, two weeks later, my glasses are still broken, and essentially unwearable, so I've reverted to wearing my contact (yes, contact in the singular, as I only wear one), which I hate. It's annoying and makes my eye itch.

The main reason that I don't like wearing my contact though, is because it throws me off. I've worn glasses since I was eight, which is more than half of my life. They have become part of the way that I think of myself, so going without them for a long period of time makes my kind of existentially uncomfortable. I just don't quite feel like myself without them.

They've become an extension of myself, rather than just a necessary accessory. In middle-school, when I was most concerned with making sure that everybody knew just how much I didn't care what they thought, I adorned my glasses with as much random shit as I could get away with. I would duct tape brightly colored pipe cleaners to the corners, so that they stuck into the air like fuzzy antennae, and then cover the tape with blue sticky tack. At one point, there was also an LED flashlight on one side, and a small Christmas ornament and fortune cookie fortune on the other. I could only do this in the summer, because the school uniform code prohibited things that would draw attention to you, but for three months a year I got to say fuck you to societal norms via my glasses.

I eventually got over the need to be as different as humanly possible and stopped taping random shit to my glasses, but I've never gotten over seeing my glasses as an essential part of myself. So now I'm more than a little annoyed that they decided to break, and that it will be at least two to three more weeks until I can get a new pair, because I have to find a time to go pick out new frames and then wait for them to be ordered.

Anyways, I've probably said way too much about my broken glasses, but it's one of the things that's been on my mind lately, because, I apparently don't have better things to think about (which is actually not true. I have several much better things to think about, I'm just...choosing to deal with the trivial things before the actually important things, because those things kind of scare me).