Am I Giving Up?

The original post by Natalie the Singingfool can be found at Am I Giving Up?

I never thought of myself as a vain person until I turned thirty. Well, okay, maybe I was a little vain in my twenties. In my defense, women in their twenties are supposed to be at their peak of physical beauty, which as contemporary Southern California society dictates, is all that a woman is good for until she bears children. My Master’s Degree had already decreased my value as a human being significantly (don’t believe me? Ask me how many potential employers turned me down because of my over-education. You’d be disillusioned by the answer), so I had to make sure I at least looked decent so I would not fail at being a woman.

Please don’t send me angry emails because of the above paragraph. It was written tongue-in-cheek. If you don’t understand sarcasm, I’ll be offering a seminar in the coming weeks for the low price of $99.95…

But anyway. Right after my birthday in December, I stopped wearing contact lenses, which I had worn for fifteen years because:

1. I look terrible in glasses. I have the wrong face shape to accommodate frames on my fat large head. Glasses may make other people look smart or hipster, but not me. They only draw attention to my more unsightly features, like chubby cheeks.
2. Glasses are annoying implements of torture for which I have little-to-no patience. They slide off your face when you dance in the kitchen to Wilson Phillips, you can’t wear them in the water, and they make wearing sunglasses impossible unless you can afford prescription sunglasses and not break them in your purse on a bi-monthly basis, which let’s face it, I cannot.

Despite these facts, I stopped wearing the contact lenses for two reasons:

1. I want to save money for lasiks, and my contact lenses are the most expensive brand possible because of my allergies. I thought I could save the money fairly quickly by simply no longer buying contacts.
2. My allergies got so bad that my eyes felt like they were crawling with termites all day, every day. Wanting to rip your eyeballs out and soak them in saline solution is not a pleasant experience. I ended up taking them out as soon as I got home from work anyway, because they hurt my eyes so badly.

Life in my glasses has been a stranger adjustment than I had anticipated. It’s crazy how much wearing glasses can shape your perception of yourself. While I always thought of myself as a moderately attractive person, I don’t think of myself that way anymore. I am now “quirky” in my mind. Do glasses have that much power over identity, like some kind of reverse-Superman scenario?

It could just be my age or the addition of many unwanted pounds, but I’ve apparently given up all pretense to beauty. Yoga pants have become the staple item of my wardrobe. I no longer cover my dark under-eye circles with cakes of camouflage. I wear my hair in a bun everyday. I’ve abandoned my high-heel collection in favor of cushier flats (at least they’re not orthotics – yet). Were all these changes over the past few months simply because I now wear glasses? Or are there more nefarious purposes afoot?

Perhaps I’ve been infected with a mysterious disease known as theblahs. Theblahs, which peaked in early 1990′s Generation X, is prevalent in developed countries the world over. It is accompanied by a blasé approach to life, indifferent hair-styling, poor taste in clothing, and constant snacking (mostly on cheese or cheese products).

When I think of theblahs, I think of this movie for some reason.

Let’s hope I save up enough for lasiks soon. I would hate to degenerate to the watching-bad-daytime-soaps phase in the condition.

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Joining the hop this fine day-after-daylight-savings-time-Monday!