(no subject)

[dr_pretentious]

The thing about getting a new pair of glasses is, you're also getting a whole new facial feature. It's a little less extreme than obtaining a new nose, but not by much.

On top of everything else this week, I've been viewing the world through a long-outdated optical prescription, because I lost my spectacles in a very silly canoeing accident. One reason I couldn't just hop in the car and drive to Rochester is, I couldn't see well enough to drive safely after dark, and nobody needed to compound the current disaster with a new one.

Before I got my bad news, I was going to write this witty little lj post about how my good spectacles were resting at the bottom of the Delaware & Raritan Canal, where they awaited discovery by some future archaeologist, and about how wearing my backup pair was sort of like losing my actual nose and having to make do with a battered Tycho Brahe costume from some long-ago Halloween. I was going to be all pleased with myself about Tycho Brahe.

Instead, I'm going to praise the kindness of the staff at the Route 18 Pearle Vision Center, who rushed my order for a replacement pair when I called to say I had to leave town for a funeral and would be grateful if they could shave a couple of days off wait.

Here I am, with a new face. It's very strange. The day of the very silly canoeing accident, I impulsively decided, instead of going with yet another variation on the usual professorial wire rims, to try something entirely different. It took me a while to figure out who I'd ever seen with frames like the ones I was considering. They're too young for me, was my first thought, but my sense of how old I am is seriously distorted by the youth of my students--the normative human being is between the ages of 13 and 17, so of course from that perspective, anyone over 30 looks ancient. Who wears frames like these? Only twentysomething fresh-out-of-college rising editors at New York publishing houses. Come to think of it, every young editor I'd ever met wore glasses like these. Well, Sarah, I said to myself, that might not be a bad thing.

Then I had to drag poor sabrinamari to the optometrist to look at me in the frames and assure me that I could get away with wearing them. It's sort of the opposite of that old Right Said Fred song, like knowing my shirt is too sexy for me. Brina was a very good sport about the whole thing, and insisted that I was in fact hip and funky enough to be morally entitled to these glasses.

Hip and funky. Think about the Sarah Avery you know. Is she hip? Is she funky? I bet those aren't the first adjectives you usually think of when my name comes up.

In a couple of weeks, I'll get used to the new face. Meanwhile, I look in the mirror, and I recognize myself, but I'm not who I expect to see, if that makes any sense at all.

Hey, Universe, my life is sufficiently defamiliarized now. I would like to stand pat for a little while. Really, this is plenty. It's more than enough.

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