I know you’ve all been waiting for contact lens news with bated breath, so here’s my update: I went for my second class and didn’t do too badly. I have to say that at one point it felt like I was in a weird version of The Hunger Games, especially when I was firmly pinching my eyelids open with one set of fingers and grazing my eyeball over and over with another. Seeing all this happening in the mirror adds to the trauma.
Despite the fact that my contact lens instructor (gosh, this has honestly got to be one of the most frustrating jobs in the world) who was as calm and patient as an FBI negotiator, I still had a few moments where I had to do a reality check and wonder why the hell I was voluntarily self-sabotaging my own ocular comfort and happiness.
So far, my eyes have been doing pretty well in life thank you very much, no real minor injuries except for the time I almost went blind trying to cut a small tree* in half by bending the (still planted) trunk and jumping on it, and here pulling back their cozy, protective curtains and repeatedly slapping and tugging at their bare jelly flesh. And they had never been touched, not even in childhood, because everyone knew in the eighties that if you touch your eyeball you will go blind.
(It was like the legendary quicksand you had to dodge – one of the biggest anxieties of my childhood – and not swallow Hubba Bubba because it would form a big ball in your appendix and then you’d die. never touch your eyeball in the eighties, unless you were one of those crazy kids who briefly ran your fingers through a lighter flame or pinched the wick of the candle to blow it out. Wild.)
Anyway: poor, virgin eyes, suddenly with the covers thrown back and enduring what must have been a total sensory nightmare. Especially with me in charge of the proceedings, the most incompetent lens operator the world has ever known. Aside from my hands shaking like someone stuck in a washing machine set on a perpetual spin cycle, I just couldn’t get the conditions right. My finger tip was too wet, the contact lens was too dry, the puffy thing was upside down or inside out or folded up like a burrito…
You will be glad to know that I succeeded. After about nine hours of dangling the wet disc in front of my eyeball, it finally lost patience and launched itself from the tip of my finger onto the surface of my eye, sucking steadily and making its presence immediately felt.
The second one went in easier after the lovely teacher suggested I try a standing position for a bit of a change. I almost made a joke about homework, but I didn’t think it was the right time. He was only human: his patience certainly had its limits. But it glided more easily, so maybe standing is the optimal position to proceed? Who knows. Some people apparently like to hang over the end of their bed and have a mirror floor below them, which sounds rather dangerous if you ask me, but who am I to judge? Who knows what inventive methods I’ll use once I start the whole thing.
Read about my first contact lens experience….
After putting in both contact lenses in, it was time to take them out again – and this is where everything had gone wrong last week. I was a little more relaxed this second time, already used to the feel of pinioning an invisible gel disc that was just there on my eyeball and moving it from side to side. This time I watched in the mirror as the lens moved to the side and saw where the lens creased – grabbing it with long nails was difficult as you had to use the sides of your fingers (or you’d scratch your eye, which is serious) but after about five hundred tries i finally got it.
I really suspect that my eye just went “for the sake of it” and kicked out the lens itself because it was so sick of me poking at it, but we’ll never know for sure.
So I put both lenses in and then took both lenses out and then guess what I had to do? PUT THE EYES THINGS BACK! And I was much faster. I don’t think I did it in less than ten minutes per eye, because I had to factor in breathing time, anger time, and regular pep talks from my teacher, but I did it. And I wore them for three hours and almost got used to the alien feeling of them being there, sitting on my balls, so that was that.
Fast forward a few months, though, and I can’t say that the contacts and I ever really saw eye to eye. (Sorry.) It wasn’t the hassle of putting them on and taking them off, because that’s faster, but more that they didn’t really solve my problem. Which was that I just wanted full, seamless, no visible underwear. I wanted to be able to see, do everything, but not have to actively make that vision happen.
I didn’t want to have glasses on-off-again, where I needed one pair for walking and another for driving and about three pairs stacked for reading. but I also couldn’t do with contact lenses where I would have to remember to take them out if I needed a nap (surprisingly often) and where I couldn’t put them on in the shower after exercise but had to wear them to excercise…
It was just an added complication. The lenses. And for that complication there was a monthly cost that I found annoying, for some reason, despite the fact that I have pressing direct charges for Apple TV and Internet storage and Google Workspace and Spotify and all sorts of other things. Vacation car overinsurance that I forgot to cancel etc. I don’t know. It just wasn’t for me.
But what it was will it be for me Good. Please hold the caller, because an eye-hanging marathon is coming up…
*it was something invasive or something that needed to come out and I was too lazy to bring the shovel, so I thought bending the trunk and stepping on it with both feet would be an awesome low effort option. It wasn’t, I almost lost an eye.
