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Crap.

I finally owned my need for reading glasses for things like the mouse type directions on hair care products and low-light menu reading. I even managed to find a cool-ish pair that doesn’t make me feel like I’m about to turn into a Columbia professor’s poet wife wearing her specs on a chain of chunky “ethnic” beads over a flowing batik blouse. I crack the requisite getting-old jokes when I search for them before reading my kids Harry Potter, and, as they’ve been trained, they chime in that I’m not, in fact, old.

In short, I’m rolling with it. Bumpily, but I’m rolling with it.

Until just now, that is. I was in the shower, and endeavoring to shave my pits, when I realized, I CANNOT SEE MY OWN ARMPIT HAIR BECAUSE MY ARMPIT IS TOO CLOSE TO MY FACE! You can’t wear reading glasses in the shower!

Just what in the good gosh golly goddamn are we supposed to do? I mean, really!

I am trying to type this with two chopsticks so that I can sit an extra foot away from my computer and still see the letters clearly. When they start once again to blur, I will move on to drum sticks, and then perhaps to fireplace pokers or retractable orchestral conducting batons, so determined am I not to wear the magnifying reading classes I obviously need. I will do this until whichever digit-elongating instrument I must use becomes too hard to control and my posts turn out like an 8-month-old is banging on the keyboard with her tiny fists. For whatever reason, I cannot figure out how to make the type bigger in the blog program than I use, and this seems easier than having to face yet another tech learning curve.

I did buy the reading glasses. I’m good at buying things, and in my rational moments I recognize that all that’s happening is my lenses, like everything else on my body, is losing elasticity; a slightly convex lens, like that on reading glasses, allows the light to focus where it should, on my retina, instead of behind it, resulting in clear vision. No big deal, right?

Wrong. Freakin’ reading glasses! What’s next? Reading glasses on a chain, because I’m getting so dotty I keep leaving them places–which I know I would? Then what? Reading glasses on a beaded chain? Then reading glasses on a beaded chain just in case, but worn on the end of my nose all the time, because even when they’re around my neck I have a few moments of panic when I forget that they’re there?

Once you have reading glasses on a beaded chain that you wear on your face all the time anyway, you’re practically obligated to dress in loose linen Maoist wide-leg pants and smock tops, and move to an Ashram near Woodstock.

Nah-ah. Not there yet. Not as long as there are chopsticks with which to type and then drumsticks and long, retractable pointers.

I know this doesn’t make sense. My skin has been losing elasticity for awhile and I’m not embarrassed to try various creams to help bring back the spring, not that they work wildly well. My boobs, well, you know, what with gravity and all, they’re not exactly living the high life, so I wear a bra, and wouldn’t dream of hiding the fact.

I’m sure I’ll come around to the reading glasses, too. I like to read. What can I tell you? It would be a shame to be limited to billboards out of car windows. But I will not wear a beaded chain to keep my reading glasses at the ready. If anyone sees me doing this, I hereby authorize an intervention.

Photo by: Tam Tam (Strollers)  CC