I’m getting new glasses today and it’s causing me to have an existential crisis of my own. Because on the one hand I kind of want to wear trendy, oversized, hipster glasses. But on the other hand, I am also scarred for life by my childhood spent wearing oversized glasses. In the early nineties oversized glasses were not “trendy” and “throwback” and “hipster.” No. I just spent most of my adolescence looking like Barb from Stranger Things.
Nowadays if you are deemed near-sighted as a kid, there are options. You can get trendy glasses specifically in child sizes. Back in my day they did not even have such a thing. The closest I got to being cool with my oversize glasses was picking out blue rims, so that I could look like Karen Brewer. Granted, modeling my fashion choices on a fictional character from The Baby-Sitters Club books was probably not my savviest idea. (It could have been worse. I could have modeled my style choices after Claudia.)
(Actually, based on the picture on the left in which I am in second grade but look like a forty-seven year old accountant, even Claudia’s outfits would have been better.)
The problem is, even now as a thirty year old woman I have a very tiny face. Most glasses look oversized on my face even if they are not actually oversized at all. I own a pair of gold-rimmed Ray-Ban aviators that my friend Jeanette bought me about eight years ago so that I could channel my inner Top Gun and they are the best fitting pair of glasses, sun or otherwise, that I have ever owned. They are from the juniors line. That’s right. I wear child-sized sunglasses. I am debating whether or not it would be weird if I ask the doctor to show me the child-sized case of glasses today.
Going to the eye doctor is always a bit of an ordeal for me anyways, on account of how they want to put a needle next to my eyelashes and blow a puff of air straight into my eyeball. And also the fact that despite having had to sit through that procedure once a year for the past twenty-five years of my life, I still panic, lunge backwards, and mess up the test every. single. time. I am a joy and a delight.
So now I have the added pressure of trying to choose a pair of glasses that fit and are flattering and are on trend. And I don’t know if you know this but when you are trying on glasses, they just have fake plastic lenses in them. So you can not see yourself clearly at all when you are attempting to suss out which pair looks best on you in the teensy strip of mirror provided on the side of the glasses case. I can barely make out my hand in front of my face without my glasses on, let alone determine which frames suit my face shape.
This is why when my mother stopped by to show me her new tortoiseshell glasses I had to regretfully inform her that they were not, in fact, tortoiseshell at all but rather dark brown with bright orange WOLVES printed on the sides. That’s right. Dozens of wolves, dancing down the earpieces. This does not bode well for me. I could literally go in there today and think that I’ve chosen a cute pair of frames only to be thrown to the wolves.
Life is heavy, man.
