kindred spirit!

instead of losing spectacles, i lost several inches. the power went to my head. she seems to have gotten back on track however. i hope i do too. read on and you'll get it. if you don't, read an earlier post too, called "mayonaise". i really hope i get back on track.

The spectacle of myself by Lakambini Sitoy

When I was eight I came home weeping, claiming I couldn't see the blackboard. My parents hauled me to an optometrist. Before I knew what was happening, they had transformed me from a grave, pretty child into a hag. There was only one pair of kid-size frames in the optical shop, and these were horrible rectangles in thick black plastic. I will never comprehend the mindset of an optical company that could crank out frames like that - doubtless they were made for some hefty Poindexter type, a third-grade genius plotting to blow up the world in his lab.

The optical shop hadn't thought to stock frames for little girls either. It was assumed little girls never needed glasses or didn't want them.

For two whole years, I suffered in those Malcolm X glasses. My nose, a bridgeless triangle, flared like chariot wheels directly beneath them. My hair came down in opaque black curtains on either side of my cheeks; my mouth with its down-turned upper lip bore all the solemnity of a funeral director's. There was little reason to smile, mainly because none of the kids would talk to me. Direct eye contact is important to people, and being unable to provide it I was in effect a non-person. The toughest part was being mistaken for a genius who studied all the time, when in truth I hated everything except popular literature, and reviewed for Chemistry on the 15-minute drive from our house on the outskirts of the city.

Even when my parents thought to replace the frames with newer rose-tinted varieties, as round and inoffensive as a granny owl's in some idiotic Raggedy Ann story book, it made no difference. My reputation as a menopausal prig was in place.

Then, after the quiz bee championships and the piano lessons, the pimples, unrequited crushes and more of those appalling pink frames, the spectacles came off.

I was sixteen. It was summer. In the mirror of the optical shop I met my own clear gaze. My eyes threatened to tear up any second and expel the new soft contact lenses, but for the moment everything was magical. My eyes, a lucid brown, had lost that stunned blind look. Absent the heavy frames and streaky glass, they were naked at last. The world, a blur without spectacles, had resolved itself into lines and color as close as could be to hard truth. The tired dusty surfaces of the optical shop, the cracked tiles on the floor and ancient eye charts, were revealed to me. Gingerly I raised my gaze to the world outside the store window. A dissipated man in his thirties turned to look at me with interest. This is power! I thought in a rush of glee.

Power it was. Those lenses and I became best friends. They were the closest thing to a phone booth Spandex or a pair of seven-league boots - instruments that conferred magnificent attributes upon the wearer, attributes that upon closer look were but extensions of her innate talents. With them, some inner engine of femininity went into overdrive, as I struggled over the span of a few months to learn the rituals of coquetry my classmates had mastered at birth.

The lenses got me into trouble too. Within my family what had been suspected for years was suddenly staring them in the face: I was the prettier daughter. It wasn't long before friends and classmates discovered that fact, but I was too naïve to know envy or advances when they came my way. Blessed with neither magnanimity nor grace, I would tell my older sister, in our quarrels, that she was ugly as an orc. She'd threaten to rip up my contacts and consign me once again to Poindexter oblivion.

But a more dangerous consequence was a sudden fear of all things requiring dedication and intellect, accompanied by a fervent regression into what was light and pretty. I stopped trying to be Edward Hopper and spent hours sticking Pini-Mu stickers into notebooks. This was freshman college, a time when most bright, misdirected kids are wiping the high school slate clean and using their brains at last, on the long road that culminates in an illustrious leadership career. But I'd been to that intense, angry labyrinthine already and was scared to death of another run.

The tortuous journey to maturity (my writing being my lone potent weapon all this time) has been marked by a push and pull, between a surface prettiness and a bleak worldview that was the first I ever had. Now that hormone-laden adolescence is behind me and it really doesn't matter to me whether I wear glasses or not, I still am faintly astonished at how crucial they can be to other people.

Some build their identities around their specs; a pretentious critic for an internet magazine had herself caricatured in a pair of frames larger than her chin. They are powerful signifiers. Women most especially flaunt their glasses to show that they are anti-beauty, intelligent, and an authority in their field. People are intimidated at once by that image -- and rarely demand proof. *end*

also used to having that intimidating look, i don't want to know that i only survived because people did not demand any proof! i have to get back on track!