Back to contacts
Today as I was walking into a class in Harrington, I humiliated myself. I have been sneezing a lot today (which is strange, because I don't think College Station is a breeding ground for my particular allergy, cedar) and I was attacked by a sneeze right before I came in the door. Now one thing you must understand about me is I don't produce light, airy sneezes that might make someone think "How cute!" For unknown reasons, sneezes violently rack my entire body, causing me to spasm wildly and onlookers to gasp in astonishment and disgust.
This sneezing fit hit me and I was thrown forward. My glasses fell off, and stumbling for them, I careened wildly, smacked loudly into a wall, and literally collapsed on to the floor, hurled back from the weight of my backpack. As I put my glasses back on, I glanced behind me at the two students who had begun to say "God bless you" but were unable to finish due to their shock and horror. At this point "God help you" or "Why, God, why?" would probably have been more appropriate.
Although I tried to nonchalantly continue into the classroom, I could already tell they were text messaging their friends and possibly formulating blog posts of their own to tell about the incident. What annoys me is that I have been very happy with my glasses the last few weeks. I was coming back from a 6 year long sabattical from spectacles in favor of contacts, and I thought I had finally found the perfect solution to my distaste for most frames: emo glasses. Black, plastic, and full of mystery, I thought these glasses were the perfect complement to my persona. Unfortunately, when you lose your glasses, it's embarrassing regardless. It's not like those students saw me put them back on and said to themselves, "Wow! At first I thought this guy was a clumsy dork, but now I realize he's probably just some cool dude who likes The Shins!"
The thing is, no matter how cool my glasses are, they cannot hide the reason behind wearing them: I have comically bad eyesight. My eyes are weak and inept. If my eyes were a kid in junior high, they would be that pale kid with the concave chest who gets out of gym class with a doctor's note. As my friend Jerod rather offensively puts it, "If you had been born before they invented glasses, natural selection would have gotten you outta here." Har, har, Jerod. On a side note, I hate you.
But he has a point. Throughout history, people who have lost or broken their glasses have been ridiculed and abused. Perhaps the most famous is Piggy from Lord of the Flies, whose busted glasses led to his ultimate demise when Roger crushed him with a giant rock. When you think about it, Roger was really just taking nerd abuse to the next logical level. When he was a student, he probably got detention for throwing crumpled-up wads of paper at the heads of nerds like Piggy. Replace a ball of paper with an 800-pound boulder, and detention with a juvenile murder charge, and you have the same basic scenario. Perhaps this is what Lord of the Flies was trying to tell us: "Don't wear glasses. Oh, and mankind is savage and evil at heart. But seriously, take those coke-bottles off, you enormous dorkwad."
I sort of doubt that Roger-type meatheads from the Club Ice Hockey team will be hurling bricks at me from the academic building, but I'm still switching back to contacts. Emo or not, they're still glasses, and are just waiting to fly off at my next sneeze. And if you were one of those people who saw my disastrous encounter with the wall today, please don't blog about it.