Framed Up

I got new glasses, they are very different from my old glasses. This was intentional. My old glasses were black plastic, I want to point out that hey were cooler then they sound, “black plastic” sounds so black and plastic. They were black and plastic in the Buddy Holly vein not the Revenge of the Nerds style. So. A new day, a new prescription and a new look. For my first pass through the frame store I entered through the optometrist office, the back way into the store. The back way funnels you towards the designer frames, the pricey frames. This is fine because I have insurance.

I looked at the pricey frames. I don’t understand the appeal of Versace. The clothing I’ve seen in magazines manages to look bad on 6 foot bulimic dress dummies and the glasses frames just look awful - And I am not six feet tall or bulimic. It takes a lot of misogyny to make glasses frames cause the wearer to look  fat. The frames were very stylish though, only one arm, one of the lenses was square and the other was kind of oblong and it would help if the wearer had one eye in the middle of her forehead. For $300 you too can look like an impressionist drawing - Great for the weekends but it would be hell for updating those spreadsheets Monday morning.

And there were others. Lots of others but not as many as the last time I was there two years ago. This time there were fewer frames to chose from and fewer that my insurance would pay 100%  - That is both good and bad, it’s good because otherwise you can just go crazy trying on eleventyteen frames and lets face it, they all look pretty much the same - Or at least they do after you finally decide that the very stylish square frames that look so good on everyone else - Make you look fat. Square frames make everyone else look really good and thus the store is full of magic fat making square frames. I also was on my own and suffering from dilated eyes.

I was in trouble when I asked one of the store staff if they had any glasses that looked like Tina Feys. The woman didn’t know who she was. How could she not know who the patron saint of girls who wear glasses! The woman who single handed made wearing glasses cool! And the frame store salesgirl didn’t know who she was? If I could have seen better at this point and wasn’t technically still in the middle of my appointment, I would have left and gone to a frame store with more pop culturely aware staff.

I went back to the frame store  apres' appointment through the front door and low and behold was funneled past the clearance frames. Ta da! Not even close to Tina Fey, but better than my previous choices which were  either kind of awful or really cute, but purple and pricey. I’m not going to pretend I don’t wear glasses and the last pair were after all, black, but I was having a hard time seeing myself living full time with purple frames - but they were miles better than my other choices and I could have really liked them. I’m pretty sure I could rock a pair of purple frames. The new pair are metallic and gold toned. Not one single person at work on Friday noticed I had new glasses. I went from wearing black plastic to gold metallic frames and not one single person said a word.