First, little touches clearly make a difference. When I got in to work yesterday, I had some time to hang out and chat with my friend Keren before meetings. When I walked in, she was like “You look great. Something’s different, wait you got new glasses!” Ehhh no, at least not yet, as I was actually going to go and get new glasses after all my meetings. The new and different thing was simply that I’d used the eyeliner that I bought when I had that makeover. I didn’t do the whole eye thing (never do), like mascara and shadow and so forth. I’d just put on a very tiny touch of eyeliner. Clearly, I should do this every day.
Getting the glasses was a big experience and took like 3 hours. Ronen had shown off his spiffy new glasses to me last week, modeling all 3 of his new pairs. Yep three new pairs. There’s a great deal going on at the glasses shop on Ivn Givrol and Arlozorov: if you buy one pair, you get two others for free including one of them being prescription sunglasses. Not only have I been needing, for like years now, new regular glasses, but last week I also lost my sunglasses. They seemingly fell out of my purse on the day I was lugging large amounts of heavy books home from the office and my purse kept sliding off my shoulder and banging against my knees as I walked and I had no hands free to get it back on my shoulder. It seems the knee-bouncing knocked them out of the purse 
So yofi, glasses special here I come.
Into the shop I went and tried on like a million pairs. I had first one, and then two, shop women helping me in my choice. (For one thing, I am blind as a bat without my glasses on and so had difficulty seeing in the mirror how the various pairs looked). They were really cute as they searched out the ‘perfect’ pairs, “I like this shape on you the best but wait, I think we have the same frame in a different colour that might really suit your eyes, just a moment, let’s try it…” The nice thing was that they were really being helpful and not pushy or overbearing. So I picked out a pair of sunglasses, a pair of “workhorse, everyday” glasses that are in a classic style but with a bit of subtle pizzaz (the metal frames have a blue tint to them), and then a “fun” back-up pair where the frame is in red but only frames along the top and sides (this is my favourite pair). The cost of the glasses with eye exam was just going to be affordable via a 16-month tashlomim. Excellent. Then I went in for the eye exam.
Now my eyes are not only bad (I’m legally blind without glasses) but funky. I have not one but two astigmatisms with the two eyes differing radically from each other. It is not a case of vive le difference. It is also the case that, with glasses, I can see far and I can see close but anything mid-range is ehhhhh yeah kinda blurry. She did all the standard making sure I don’t have any kind of eye disease and then started testing me. Nu, they’ve obviously got something relatively new on the market, namely multifocal lenses that can be specifically calibrated. Before, the doctors always said there wasn’t a viable option for fully correcting my vision –they could give me a pair for far (really close isn’t an issue for me with or without glasses, if it is say a foot to 1 1/2 away, I’m good) and then another pair for mid-range, but that doesn’t really work out to be a practical solution –imagine changing out your glasses every time you want to see something without blur that is between like 2 and 6 feet away…. But now they have these all-in-one’s that include bifocals (which I don’t need yet, thank goodness) and a mid-range correction calibrated to my special needs (which would let me see my computer screen without leaning way close to it and clearly distinguish which black and white cat in my house was crossing my path), that was awesome when she, for my first time ever, had me seeing everything with total clarity. The miracles of modern science.
I didn’t get them. Not only did the 3-for-1 deal not apply to the (specialized) multifocals but to get a single pair was going to cost twice as much as the 3-for-1. And in this climate with my light blue eyes, I really need sunglasses. Totally couldn’t afford it. But ya know, I don’t care. I really, really don’t care. I didn’t see the world as most people know it until I was 14 years old because every eye doctor I was taken to as a small child was convinced I was “faking it” for attention or whatever because they couldn’t conceive of the idea that I couldn’t see the Big E, or that when I could with correction, I couldn’t see the middle-ground clearly, etc. Since I did get glasses and could distinguish that there are individual leaves on trees and that the world really doesn’t look like a Monet painting, the last thing I take off (if I get around to taking off) before sleep is my glasses and I put them on before I open my eyes. Besides, I may want to drive a car at some point and my understanding (I’m very proud of myself, by the way, as the exam, discussion, and everything else was all in hebrew) if I understood correctly, is that the multifocals have a side effect of not giving correct depth perception at a distance and so shouldn’t be used for driving.
So I said nyeh, gimme those 3-for-1’s! And in two more weeks I will have them. I’m very excited!
(Photo by Dani Machlis)
