Good morning!
I had thought to do a post this morning on some houses in a 1979 Architectural Digest bound volume I've been not-literally-but-almost-literally drooling over (at least salivating, let's say), when I decided this morning to write something instead on a subject that's been weighing h-e-a-v-i-l-y on me as the seasons change and pollen is anywhere and everywhere. Today is the first day in about a week and a half I've successfully popped contacts into my poor, rheumy little eyes, and I'm telling you, it's changing my life. In celebration, I pulled out this red patio dress I haven't worn yet (so many items in my closet fall under this category, this is from that flea market trip with Rae and Travis a couple months back), and took an outfit photo for the first time in weeks. Don't I look happy to be in glad rags instead of drab ones!
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I hope you don't mind a rant today, because that's what's on my mind. Why wouldn't I don my crazy dresses, according to my custom, lo, these many autumn weeks? My glasses get in the way of everything! EVERYTHING. They have turned me into the mercurial thirteen year old I never was, stamping around half dressed in the morning in tights and slip like "I LOOK SO STUPID! I CAN'T FIND ANYTHING TO WEAR THAT DOESN'T LOOK STUPID!" While I prefer to see, and know it's better to go around in spectacles than with eyes that are so bloodshot I look like I might have escaped from some government-funded secret laboratory in a horror movie, I have been so bummed out about having to wear glasses day, after day, after day. Number one: my prescription is so bad I have no peripheral vision. Every time someone comes up to the nonfiction desk asking for a stapler to my lefthand side, I have to whip around like a guest star in the old Batman tv series. Number two: My glasses are from SEE, and made of some fancy, compressed lenses that once smudged, remain smudged until you clean them with glasses-spray. I tend to inadvertently leave this at home and spend a good part of the day with my vision obscured by my own fingerprints. Number three: I just don't look like myself in goggles. I know you don't believe me, but it's true! The living proof:
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I hate, HATE being four-eyed. Plenty of folks look undeniably cute in glasses (many of my fellow bloggers can rock a pair of prescription frames like it was nothing), but I don't think many people with as heavy a prescription as I wear can still look like themselves. Friends close to me have assured me that the glasses are "cute! No, you look fine in those!", but I seriously have had more than one person I didn't know from Adam approach me at the desk to say "Um, excuse me, I just wanted to let you know, you look about a million times better without your glasses. Just sayin'." I am not making this up. Specifically, two patrons in the course of a week, the first said that, the second said "Did you know you look far younger when you don't wear your hair pinned like that and without those glasses? Your glasses make you look much too old and stuffy." Thanks, bro. Now, while these library visitors need to go back to Miss Porter's to finish some courses on etiquette and not saying whatever damn thing comes to your mind every time you open your mouth, I also have to grudgingly agree with them! Please overlook the bags under my eyes from excessive sleep deprivation and compare these two mugs, side by side:
Having worn progressively worsening prescription lenses since the tender age of nine, I think I started around a -3.25 (normal, you should probably wear glasses near-sightedness) and now boast a present day -9.00 in each eye (Mr Magoo sympathizes with your debilitating lack of human vision). +10.00 is the equivalent of a magnifying glass, so imagine I have essentially two inverse magnifying glasses attached to my poor head. This makes my eyes, which balance out my large head and beak and are easily my best feature, reduce to the size of distant dimes behind the lenses. I am grateful that I have vision that can be corrected, it's not that I'm just miserably bemoaning my nearsightedness, BUT-- why can't I just wake up in the morning and go to work looking like myself? It would be like if, according to your allergies, you could either go to work in normal clothes, or have to wear a full length, shapeless, burlap caftan. "Hey Lisa, you look way better in dresses as opposed to this enormous feed sack." Ya think?! I'm afraid to get LASIK because, gee willickers, if my regular optometrist can't pinpoint a reason my eyes are habitually bloodshot and painfully red, what kind of things might he not know about how my weak little oculars would react to being surgered upon? I'm just saying.
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| Surely, we've made progress since the Victorian era in the science of eye diagnostics? (source) |
I've been trying to just accept my fate as being sometimes in-glasses, sometimes out-- but I feel like, as opthamology must be a slightly more scientific field than say, phrenology or... I don't know, the kind of booths you see set up next to the ferris wheel where they can read your fortune out of a painted wagon, why can't my eye doctors prescribe some drop or at least a course of action to relieve my eye issues? I had a small retinal hole corrected in 2003, and iritis two or three times over the years, so it's not all hypochondria and vanity that sends me back to the eye doctor. I want to make sure my peepers are healthy! I've been something like five times in the last couple months, and while twice I did need a steroid drop to clear up inflammation, the other three times, our conversation went like this:
Me: So what's wrong with my eyes?
Doctor: Well, I've checked your retina, everything's fine in both eyes-- left eye looks a little more irritated that the right, but nothing to worry too much about.
Me: Why is there like a red ring around my iris?
Doctor: That's just the load-bearing part of the eye. When your eyes are overworked, they tend to get irritate around the iris.
Me: Is there anything I can do about that?
Doctor: Have you been sleeping in your contacts?
Me: No.
Doctor: Have you been wearing them longer than you usually do, say late into the night?
Me: No, I've been in my glasses for like two weeks, trying to give them a rest. And drinking lots of fluids, and trying to get plenty of sleep. They just won't clear up.
Doctor: Have you tried allergy drops?
Me: You told me last time those might be what's causing the irritation, so I stopped taking them. Doctor: Well, I would just um....let's see...we could put you on the steroid again? See if that clears it up?
As if he were asking ME what I'd like to do! Do you go to the doctor saying "I've been throwing up a lot lately" and your doctor's like, "Well, that could be anything from pregnancy to influenza. Do you feel pregnant?" I hate the subjectivity of it. What the heck do I know about my eyes?! Other than they're not normally this bad?!
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| Glasses I've been considering...check out the first pair! 1,2,3 |
Anyway, lately I've been trying to decide if I'll just accept my fate as be-glassed, and if so, how outrageous a pair of frames can I get away with. Coastal had some cats' eyes I've been looking at, but it doesn't solve my problem of disappearing behind the prescriptive glass! Le sigh.
How about you? Are you blessed with 20/20 vision, or are you a fellow sufferer of Burgess-Meredith-in-the-Twilight-Zone-episode levels of myopia? Do you remember your first pair of glasses? Have you ever been frustrated with a health care professional's lack of, um, professionalism? How would rock a pair of coke-bottle lensed glasses, if you were forced to wear them? Let's talk! And please don't think I'm too bad for wringing my hands over a problem-that's-not-even-that-bad-of-a-problem-- it's been driving me crazy lately, and I had to get it off my chest.
That's all for today! I'm going to go enjoy my contact-lensed self away from this computer screen as best I can. Have a great Thursday, and I'll see you tomorrow for Photo Friday. Til then.
ok girl - this glasses you´r wearing are a bit huge on your face and definitely too dark. you should try a frame in a softer hue - pick up the color of your hair.
ReplyDeleteand then - cat eye glasses are very difficult to wear, for everyone. maybe a frame that is just a little bit cat eye and retro and not so a big statement?
and somewhere in the interweb should be directions for eye makeup when wearing your kind of glasses, optical tricks that let the eyes look bigger with glasses on.
advice from the old lady - wearing glasses for work and reading........
I like all of your advice! Maybe a lighter-color frame and smaller glasses *would* make the whole problem of "I don't look like me!" less of a problem. I do need to learn how to "style" myself in glasses better, especially if these allergies keep me in them for more of the year (I'm back in glasses today....arrrgh! But I wore my hair in a beehive today to make up for it it :) )
DeleteOh I feel your pain. I've been wearing glasses since I was 16. It's such a bother sometimes. I have both glasses and contacts. I tend to wear my glasses more than anything since I have dry eyes and get bad eye allergies too.
ReplyDeleteI have to wear the Acuvue Oasis contacts because they are much more breathable than other contacts. I need to get in to get an eye exam done but money is a bit tight right now so it will have to wait.
I wear Acuvue Oasis too! I'm worried that my saline solution might be part of the problem, though, I've always just bought whatever I saw first, and maybe if I chose something with less preservatives/more eye care properties I would have less trouble. I have to wait until the first of the year before my insurance will cover another prescription exam, but I hope I can find somebody better than the eye doctor I mentioned above!
DeleteThis whole post and the fact that you are a librarian made me secretly hope that we never enter a nuclear holocaust and that you are the sole surviver and surrounded by tons of books you want to read...when you break your glasses.
ReplyDeleteI personally LOVE my glasses collection, but will admit it took me a while to embrace. The lack of peripheral vision is an obstacle (even though my RX is -3.5) . I will even admit that when I wear my contacts for a week or so, I find it hard to go back to glasses because mine are perma smudged as well and constantly slipping off my non-existent nose. I just kinda started seeing them as an accessory and way to liven up my face when I am feeling blah. I have short hair so that is no fun, I'm not a hat person and I don't have my ears pierced because my body is allergic to pretty things....so I am in need of cranial adornment. They are also a really good way to cover acne or tiredness and distract people when you don't feel like wearing makeup.
By the way that patio dress is amazing!
The first time I saw that episode of the Twilight Zone I was like "GREAT. THIS IS WHAT THE END OF THE WORLD WOULD BE LIKE FOR ME." I should stock up on prescription lenses before the apocalypse! I think I need to get a couple different pairs of frames so at least I could use them, like you said, as accessories rather than necessary-things-I-hate-to-wear.
DeleteThanks on the dress! It's from that one crazy dude in overalls in the antique shed at the flea market. Travis (Rae's husband) found it in a box under a table and was like "Lisa, do you want this?" (cue me freakin' the heck out! All red and ALL MINE!)
Ough, eyes. I´m not as near-sighted as you, I´ve got a -5.something and a -6.whatever, but damn do my eyes look small behind my glasses. They aren´t huge anyway to start with and the glasses don´t help. And still I went for a bigger pair of retro cats eye frames this time because f*** it, that´s why. I´ve been wearing glasses daily since I was 6 and since the age of 16 had the same style over and over again and finally it bored me to no end. If you have to wear glasses, you should enjoy them.
ReplyDeleteI only recently thought about getting contact lenses for once in a while (also because a doctor said I should consider getting the laser...errr, noooo!). So far I didn´t buy any because they cost money and I don´t like that ;)
I really like the 3rd pair in your little selection, but that´s because they remind me of my own I guess. I feel that a rounder pair of frames is a good choice for your face shape and your recent pair isn´t that bad of a look in my eyes.
Well, that was a lot of blabla, sorry :)
Not a lot of blabla at all! I'm glad I'm not the only one out there frustrated trying to figure out what style of frames to go with...and maybe your cats-eye courage will inspire me to pull the trigger on the craziest pair I can find!! I hate having to buy contacts every year but I'm too scared to do LASIK and like I said, these monster-prescription frames are not only inconvenient, but they are actually *heavy* on my face! UUuuuugggh. I'll figure it out somehow.
DeleteI can sympathize as well! I'm about a -7 or so! :P I recently had a scare with a possible retinal tear but it turned out to be degeneration, which still sucks because it can cause retinal tears/detachments so I have to keep an eye on it. Haha pun intended. I wish I had inherited my mom's good vision instead of my dad's nearsightedness. lol. Btw, you look adorable in glasses! :)
ReplyDeleteIThanks for the commiseration, Michelle!! was going inf or my yearly check up and thought I was just having a lot of floaters because I was in college and had been having a lot of hangovers-- TURNS OUT, it was a small retinal hole. Haha, keep an eye on it-- I hear the more near sighted you are, the more likely you are to develop those things, so we're just stuck. Why can't we do exercises to make our eyes stronger the same way people with no muscles could train to build mass!! It ain't fair!! And thanks for the glasses encouragement-- like I was saying in an earlier comment, I'm just going to dress extra crazy/wear my hair extra high to make up for being grouchy about my eyes! :)
DeleteGIRL. I have been there, done that. Glasses at age 9, progressively worse vision until I hit the -9.00 mark. I hated my glasses. Hated. They weren't the thin, cute kind...even nice-looking frames looked bad with the thick lenses I had to put in them. I did okay with contacts for about 10 years until I developed a thermirosol (sp?) allergy...and then did okay for awhile with preservative-free contact solutions but eventually my eyes were itchy and red and could not tolerate my contacts for very long and it was just awful. It turns out that as I got older, my eyes got dryer...my ophthalmologist put me on Gen-Teal at night and other preservative-free moisturizing drops during the day. So, you might want to try it...it helped! But contacts still irritated my eyes somewhat, especially at night. Eventually, I broke down and got LASIK. Which, if your vision is really, truly terrible? LASIK is like purchasing a miracle. You open your eyes in the morning and you can see! You can go swimming and don't have to worry about losing a contact! It is wonderful. It is worth every penny I paid. I had it done 13 years ago and have had no problems and have perfect vision.
ReplyDeleteYour story of as-bad-as-me vision and success with LASIK really just made my day. I've heard so many horrible things down the Dateline type grapevine (a rhyme!) about people having worse vision, people having blah blah this or blah blah that-- I can be a straight fraidy cat about things to do with my delicate little eyeballs, so it's good to know you did it ten years ago and are enjoying perfect vision AS WE SPEAK. I wanna do that too! Did you get yours done here in Nashville or was it before you were in Tennessee?
DeleteI'm a new reader to your blog and I can relate. My perscription is changes from a 10-11 from year to year and yes, it's the horrid coke bottle affect.
ReplyDeleteI can't stand my glasses. If I *have* to wear them, then I prefer a light color (tends to fade away on my light coloring-good), wire, oval type frame. However all they sell are dark (makes me look oldere) plastic square frames. I'm old fashioned, not hip. I don't want square, dark plastic frames.
I wear contacts all I can but the other night I was walking in the neighborhood at night with my family and I ran into a tree. A tree branch got in my eye, it turned red, so Sunday I spent the day in glasses.
I'm sorry, I have no tips, but I can commiserate.
Laurie
I'm glad to have a shoulder to cry on, Laurie! I feel like the Buddy Holly frames are the only ones they even offer me at eyeglasses shops because they're the only ones thick-enough to cover up the (even when compressed, wwwwaaaaay) thick lenses. Isn't it weird to be in contacts, and then in glasses, like you were two separate people in each? Euugh. There's gotta be a better way.
DeleteMy very best friend recently got some contacts for the first time, simply wanting to be free of her frames once in a while. But it's funny -- she normally wears a pair of vintage cat-eye glasses fitted with her prescription, and I think a lot of people reacted to her contacts by wondering why on EARTH she would want to not wear those awesome vintage frames! Because she wants to wear what she wants, of course, but I guess the grass is always greener on either side of the near sighted fence. Anyway, you look beautiful both with and without your frames, just for the record. :)
ReplyDeletehttp://dresseduplikealady.com
Thanks, Cammila! I had a friend like that in high school who looked SO NOT HERSELF out of her habitual glasses...lucky duck, to have bad vision and a face that works so well with glasses! I agree about the grass is greener thing-- if I had perfect vision, I'd be mad I COULDN'T wear glasses, instead of vice versa! I appreciate the pep talk, though. :)
DeleteWhoopee! Bifocals since age 9! I'm nearsighted too. If you want to wear glasses, get the high index lenses. They compress the thickness of the lens down to half or less your normal lens. Also, ask the optician to roll and polish the edges. It gets rid of that frosty white look, and further reduces the thickness. You gotta go with smaller frames! I sulked pretty much through the 70's and 80's because all of the desireable glasses frames were huge, but now there is much more of a selection.
ReplyDeleteAnd as for the nuclear holocaust...We nearsighted people can see the leg hairs on fleas. No worries about breaking our glasses.
Haha, if that flea comes for me, I'm gonna see it comin! I just hate waking up in the morning totally blind. I put my glasses on Matthew once and went "THIS. IS WHAT I NATURALLY. SEE." and his mind was blown. Maybe I should go with smaller frames! I also thought about getting some mostly-tinted, almost-sunglasses glasses. I had an Italian cinema teacher in college, named Flavia Brizzi (doesn't she just SOUND glamorous?), who wore tousled blonde hair piled up on her head, high, high heeled boots that brought her up to maybe 5'3'', and huge, Sophia Loren prescription sunglasses to class every day. I could look like a Tuscan film star! Or a blind person. Either way, it might be worth a shot!
DeleteI have the same problem! I'm also somewhere around a -9.00 in both eyes and wear -8.5 prescription lenses. I'm usually too embarrassed to tell people my prescription because it's usually met with gasps and "Oh my god! That's really bad eyesight!" I also hate wearing glasses because they also give me the same coke-bottle effect, even though I have the super-compressed lenses too. I once had an optometrist comment very loudly, multiple times through our appointment, about how bad my vision was...uh, yeah, thanks, tell me something I don't know!
ReplyDelete(by the way, I think you look great with your glasses!)
I know about the really bad eyesight reaction! It's like when I tell people my shoe size, heck! I can't change how bad my eyes are or how big my feet! And I've had optometrists too go, "Gosh, you have REALLY bad eyesight". Uh, thanks. I once told the technician doing the eye chart part of the exam, when they asked me to remove my glasses and read the lowest line, that I could see that there was a light on and letters on it, but had no idea what any of them were...she wouldn't even believe me until I told her my old prescription number! Haha, I'm glad I'm not the only one out there facing all this eye-adversity.
DeleteAnd thanks for the encouragement on the glasses I have-- I'm back in them today (woke up all allergy eyed), so I need all the pep I can get!
i had to join in. i hate the eye exam too! i always have to say "well i know the top line is a big E because it always is, but without my glasses i can't even tell there is writing on that screen!
DeleteI'm also a 4 eyes lady.... I wear glasses for the first time when I was 16 years old... bad time, just when you are trying to look cute for guys...
ReplyDeleteThat was also not really easy when I start to wear vintage because I though that my glasses didn't match my retro look... So I chose to try lenses, but I could not wear them every day, because it's quite painful if I wear them all the time, so I choose to invest in a few pair of vintage frames and here is my collection: http://lostin1950.blogspot.com/2012/05/50s-cat-eyes-glasses.html
Have you search for vintage frames?
I love all of your vintage frames! And how lucky you are to have found such a simpatico optometrist, who LIKES working on the old frames! I think you have a fantastic collection, makes me want to start looking for some of my own!! :)
DeleteI feel your pain! I've needed glasses since I was 11, and I can honestly say that my life was revolutionised when I got contacts at 21. I've been wearing the night and day contacts for years, and everything was fine....until my eyes became SUPER irritated this summer. Not due to allergies, but my eyes were just really dry, extremely red and blood shot and painful. I had to use the steroid drops and wasn't able to wear my contacts for a couple of months. Every time I tried putting my contacts back in - BAM! Bloodshot and painful again. Finally I let them rest and then used daily disposables for a month, and then got back to my night & days. But this week again, I got a case of the dry eyes (not painful, but red) so have been wearing my glasses the past couple of days. So annoying, as I feel so much more comfortable in my contacts ( 1) I look better in contacts, 2) glasses end up digging into my nose by the end of the day, 3) I constantly feel a bit nauseous and like I am going to fall over when walking around in my specs). ARGH! Also, I know what you mean about finding it harder to pick outfits - some outfits just don't go with glasses. Sigh.
ReplyDeleteI can so sympathize with everything you said. We're not alone!! That dang "in your glasses, out of glasses, contacts, steroids, glasses, antihistamine drop" regimen is HELL. ITSELF. on a girl's vanity. I just want to look like myself and wear what I want to! Euuugh. And I'm honestly probably too chicken to get LASIK. Maybe these seasonal allergies will finally even out and we won't have to suffer until spring and pollen everywhere. I need my contacts to work!
DeleteI'm the most near sighted person you will ever meet. I agree glasses are a drag, but I can still see, and I just get small ones with light frames and smile a lot. I do hope you find some you like. I can not wear contacts. I am too far gone for even surgery. And really I don't mind. I hope you come to terms with it someday and sorry allergies have been so hard on you, and many people, this year.
ReplyDeleteI should get lighter frames! That's really a good suggestion, My friend Jen Quier has a pair that are just out of this world-- maybe I should jump on the bandwagon! I hope these allergies go away soon, it's t-o-r-t-u-r-e. :( But it IS better to be able to see, glasses, contacts, whatever, than not being able to see.
DeleteI need glasses but I rarely wear them. I just hate the feeling of wearing glasses. Not sure why, but they drive me nuts! I have to wear them for driving (or watching silent movies/anything with subtitles). Contacts aren't an option for me, so most of the time I just walk around with blurry vision. On the plus side, the world is a bit prettier when it's blurry. It makes it hard to see litter on the ground or any "flaws" in the landscape.
ReplyDeleteHaha, what an optimistic outlook on nearsightedness! I wish mine was low enough that I could go without glasses. One time I showed Matthew exactly how close I had to hold a piece of paper to my face to make out the letters-- it seriously practically touching my nose! I wish there was a way to do eye pushups to make them stronger!
Deletei like your glasses! but i'm partial to a thick dark frame. i have worn glasses since first grade, and always have to get those special lenses that make my lenses small enough to fit in my thick frames! ah! so i feel you. i've been wearing my thick red framed glasses almost exclusively lately, and sometimes i worry i might be mistaken for bruce valance! haha.
ReplyDeletei have a few pairs of cat eyes that ive been tempted to get fitted with my prescription, but i don't know if i can handle it.
I know! Cats-eyes seem like such a dramatic jump! And with even with "free frames" on Coastal, my lenses are still EIGHTY DOLLARS, EUGH. I know you know, though, having similarly bad vision and high style! Maybe I'll pull the trigger on some and find out if it's worth it. I want to have some kind of personality behind these frames! PS I like YOUR glasses.
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