Eye-Yi-Yi

I hate wearing glasses.  I hate the way I have to keep pitching my head up and down to see things at varying distances.  I hate the way they slide down my nose.  I hate the way they scrunch up crooked into my  face when I working in a tight space.  I hate the permanent dents they leave on the bridge of my nose.  And I hate the way I look in them.

But I do like the way everything isn't all fuzzy and shit when I don't have them on.  And, I could probably do something about the way I look in them if I bought a new pair.  I guess I'm pretty lucky that I went as long as I did without needing them.  I still remember the day I knew something was wrong.  When I used to ride the train downtown, I read the headlines on other people's newspapers who sat in front of me.  I could even read the body of the news item.  Then one day, everything turned fuzzy and I couldn't do it anymore.  Just like that.

Shit.  So I had to start wearing glasses, and everyone told me how good I looked in them, but they were lying because I could see the truth on their faces.  Not being able to find a new group of people to hang with who could lie well, I just lived with it.

In the past several months, I've been reading about what great strides have been made in "vision correcting" surgery, but when I've talked with people who have had it done, I get the feeling that they weren't 100% satisfied. I'm guessing that since they spent so much money on the procedure, that they felt they had to talk up how well it went, but some of their comments betray them.  I talked with my neighbor a few months ago who had the surgery done.  She said she was happy, but did mention that when she's out at night, streetlights and on coming car lights have a large "halo" around them.  I don't think I'd be real fucking happy about that.

Just last week, the guy who works across the hall from me had his eyes "fixed".  He came in the morning after wearing a pair of those "Cyclops" sunglasses like old people in Florida sport.  He's a pretty truthful guy and he told me he wouldn't have had it done again.  As he described the procedure, including the parts where it felt like his eyeballs were being pushed into the back of his head, and how for hours afterwards, his eyes itched so bad that he wanted to tear them out of their sockets, my shit ran cold.

I've had more than my share of operations, but they've all been in the general torso area.  Take something out, re-route this, shove this thing over there, etc.  But I can always hide the results with a wife-beater, high rider pants or a sarong.  But no one is going to touch my eyes. Especially with butcher knives and lasers.  I can live with a lot of things, but I don't believe I could live without my eyesight.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to some eyewear place and priced a pair of rimless, small lensed glasses, hoping I could minimize the "look".  They came back with the low, low price of about 500 dollars.  It seems like the less hardware you put on glasses, the more they cost.  Which doesn't make sense and sucks.

I'll eventually go ahead and get them, simply because I'm vain.  And in the long run, it would probably be cheaper to have surgery done than to spend money on glasses 500 bucks at a time.

But I've got something about not wanting to look at halos for the rest of my days.