Comic-me (awkward mid-sentence tangent that shouldn’t be happening two hyphenated words into the story: I have decided to refer to my drawn-self as ‘comic-me’ rather than ‘cartoon-me’ because it can be misread as I am comic, i.e. amusing, and I’m okay with that) is getting a makeover.
You know the classic high school movie makeover scene? That’s the scene where a designated cool-person exchanges a nerd-girl’s glasses for contacts (or just takes them away and leaves the poor nerd-girl to walk into things and get reading-headaches) magically transforming the nerd-girl into a cool-person worthy of having friends and being treated like a human being.
Well, I wear glasses now, so we’re about to do the reverse.
Kind of.
Reverse implies I start cool, put on glasses and get nerdy. In reality I start kind of nerdy, put on glasses and then I stay the same level of nerdy with the same personality and the same questionable social skills, but I feel a bit happier with how I look.
(Which is how successful makeovers work in the real world. I hope all you high-school-movie-screen-writers out there are paying attention.)
Here we go!
Look at me! I’m so happy that my arms have gone bendy! And how crazy smart do I look? I look like the kind of person you would stop in the street to ask pressing questions about quantum physics.
I need the glasses because I have moderate astigmatism. My left eye is almost okay, but my right eye isn’t. My right eye is that awful group-project partner you always end up with for university assignments who doesn’t do much, gets in the way, drags down your grade, ends up passing because of all your hard work and is the subject of your pencil-stabbing fantasies for the rest of the semester.
It’s probably a good thing my left eye no longer has to carry the team.
I’ve known about the astigmatism for years. And, actually, I’ve had glasses for years. But I didn’t much like them and the narrow frames annoyed me.
Annoyed is the wrong word.
Wearing my old glasses slots in on my list of everyday things I have an unreasonably intense dislike of just above the term ‘happy snaps’ and a little below folding fitted sheets. There must be some narrow-frame perks that I can’t see (/joke. Get it?) because some people seem to like them. But I would rather not wear glasses at all than wear my old glasses with the narrow frames.
And in fact this is what I did for years. I just didn’t wear them, except for reading. It was a surprisingly successful solution. It even saved me money on blu-rays and granted me immunity from getting carried away about otherwise mediocre video games with awesome graphics.
But sometimes you catch yourself wondering what pores look like.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise the answer was to just get different glasses. I worked it out a couple of months ago and immediately went out and picked out the biggest frames I could find in the shop.
And I love them. I wear them all the time. They are part of who I am now, the way not quite being able to read streets signs in time to make turns was part of who I was before.
And I thought it was time to make the relationship comic-official.
Silence Killed The Dinosaurs 
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