After 16 years of wearing glasses, I moved to contacts this last weekend. In the beginning I was breaking glasses at the rate of about one pair a year – a nose pad would break off, or an arm would break off, and it would all be in some freak accident usually involving a second person and a dodgeball at recess.
The regular breakage finally subsided after I got out of junior high, but random annoyances kept popping up. The lenses would never stay secured, and the frames would gradually bend under the stress of about 20 hours of headphone use a week. And worse – the freak accidents kept happening. I stepped on a pair in 2002 and while I was able to bend them more or less back into shape, they never fit quite right after that. Then in early 2006 I snapped a pair clean in half just while I was cleaning them. The next pair actually lived long enough to reach its retirement more or less intact, but I did drop them on a tile floor once, resulting in a visible chip on one of the lenses.
The short version of this tale is that I am apparently incredibly destructive towards my glasses. After 2 days with contacts, I’m not sure if things will be better or worse. Yesterday I dropped a contact in the sink trying to put it in, then when trying to take it out later in the day I ended up just crumpling it in the corner of my eye. Maybe those are just newbie mistakes, or maybe I’m doomed to destroy every pair of contacts I get my hands on too.
Anyone want to spot me $4000 so I can go get Lasik? Hopefully I won’t find a way to break the laser in the 30 minutes it takes to get the procedure done.