Evil Eye

Wednesdays. Geez, it feels like every single week there’s a Wednesday. But, you know what? It’s nearly over, which means the week is almost over, which means the weekend is almost here. I can almost see Saturday from here. ALMOST. I’ll bet it’d be a lot clearer if I had better vision. (Oof, that transition was rough. Even for me. Gimme a break…it‘s Wednesday for crying outloud.) At any rate, I was at work this afternoon when my contact just straight up fell out of my eye. Bloop! Right there onto the floor. Luckily, I found it right away, because I would have most certainly been ruined for the rest of the day with just one working retina. How limiting! Geez, if my contact fell out while, I don’t know, driving, I’d have to pull over or drive with one eye shut. Whoops! There goes my depth perception!

I have suuuuper bad eye sight, and I’ve worn glasses since 5th grade. I. Loved. My. Glasses. They had giant round lenses, rimmed in a gold tortoise shell. They were Nickelodean brand. I used the little spray and cloth that came with my glasses to clean them compulsively. During my yearbook pictures in 6th grade, the photographer made me take off my glasses because there was a glare. When I got my yearbook, I looked at my picture and was horrified. By that time I was so used to seeing my face framed by the giant gold rims, that I felt like I looked like I was missing my eyes altogether. So I took out a pen and drew the glasses on myself. I ruined the picture, and thus, the only photographic evidence that I attended 6th grade.

Then, sometime around 8th grade, my mom must have looked at me, with my big silver braces and gold ginormous glasses, and thought, “Well, you just look ridiculous.” She took me to get contacts. Yay! Contacts! Or so I thought. I have a disgustingly vivid memory of that first eye exam. In order to test the amount of natural tears I could produce (you need tears for contacts, FYI), they took these pH strip-looking pieces of paper and slipped one INTO the corners of each of my eyes. I sat there and waited for the test to be done, closing my eyes with paper sticking out of them, and thinking “This is torture. This is ridiculous. How am I going to ever put things in my eyes after this?!” Needless to say, I had enough tears. Well, duh! I was ACTUALLY CRYING because those paper things hurt so bad. (If ANYONE ELSE had to go through this, please TELL ME! Everyone is convinced this is a “false memory”, but I remember it like it happened 20 minutes ago.)

These days, you’ll probably never see me with glasses. My contacts are every bit a part of me as my finger nails. I never take them out. And by “never”, I mean “NEVER”. I sleep with them in. It’s a really bad habit I got into in college. Waking up and not being able to see the alarm clock frequently resulted in many missed classes, so I learned to just sleep with my contacts in. People with 20/20 vision will never understand the panic and frustration of waking up and not being able to see past your own hand. So now I sleep with my contacts in my eyes rather than in their little case where they belong. Apparently, though, you’re supposed to take them out because when you sleep your eyeballs roll back in your head, making it very easy to lose a contact inside your brain. (Does it help you read minds? No.) But it’s never happened to me, so why fix something that ain’t broke?

Okay, I’m not the greatest at taking care of my contacts. But today when my contact fell out, I gave in and thought “Well this is a sign that I might need to go back to glasses.” Unfortunately, the glasses I have NOW are not exactly the bomb Nickelodean frames I used to drool over. I love the look of them…they are thick, black rectangular frames, but because I have a child-sized head and my glasses are made for ADULTS, they just slip off my head anytime I look down. Not exactly ideal (Eye-deal? Oooh, dumb. Sorry.)

But now my eyes are watering - either because I’m tired or because I’m having flashbacks to the Paper Strip in the Eye Nightmare - so, I’m gonna go attempt to take out my contacts and go to sleep. I just hope no one breaks in in the middle of the night…I won’t be able to see them and will probably mistake them for a roommate and just go back off to sleep. I wouldn't exactly make a suitable eye witness...