Item Number 40: Glasses, Black

Time in possession: 2 years now maybe? I honestly couldn't say for sure without doing some serious Internet sleuthing.

Description: Black plastic glasses with white "marble" inside detailing. No idea what brand. Very strong prescription. Kind of beat up (left arm is pretty wobbly) but are the height of nerdy/artist fashion. Or so I'm trying to convince people.

Cost: With lenses, these babies set me back something in the ballpark of $260. They do have all sorts of fancy scratch resistant, glare resistant, x-ray vision enabling, etc. coatings on them though. ...I wish they really did give me x-ray vision. That would be awesome.

Story: One of the projects that inspired this one was a project where this guy sold everything he owned on eBay. I can't find the project with a quick Internet search sadly, but it was published as a book and was a fun read. Several of his items were bought by friends of his but never picked up, his glasses being one of them, presumably because his friend didn't want the project's creator to walk around blind. If I did the same thing, I don't know if I could have made that gamble. I'm not saying my friends are jerks (well, some of them are jerks) but without my glasses I am blind.

When I buy glasses I always do two things: I buy two pairs, because of my uncanny ability to lose things, and I buy pairs that look like they could take a bit of a beating. While this pair haven't seen the worst of my glasses transgressions (at the moment the best on was probably when I fell off a snow bank and didn't' find my glasses until 6 months later) but they have had more than enough abuse in the years they have resided on my face. They have been dropped, hit off of me, taken off too quickly for their own good and fallen into the garbage can by my bed on several occasions. Frankly, the fact that they still hold themselves on my head and do their job is a small miracle.

When I was originally told that I needed glasses, I was told that my vision would continue to deteriorate until I was 21. I'm 24 now and while on my last eye exam my prescription had changed slightly these glasses still work well enough and I'm happy for it. Replacing your glasses every year is a huge pain in the ass and even with vision coverage from my library job and from acting, it's pretty damn expensive too.