Embracing The Inner Dork

One good thing to come out of my getting whacked by a car the other night is that I got a new pair of glasses out of the deal.

Or...maybe not. I was going to get new glasses anyway, so the outcome probably would have been the same without the hit-and-run. Machiavellian forces ruling the world, please take note.

Anyway. I'd been carrying a new prescription for glasses around in my wallet for a week or so and kept meaning to get a new pair but kept putting it off ... and then I got smacked. And my glasses got broken.

That's one of the ironic parts of the incident, actually (aside from the obvious irony of being hit by a car while standing over a dead cat that had been hit by a car). My glasses went flying in the impact and I was too busy trying to not get hit again to worry about them. I crawled up onto the sidewalk, waited for help to arrive, called home to let Beth know what happened, and generally killed five or ten minutes before I got around to thinking of them. I asked if someone would look in the street and see if they could locate my glasses. Five, maybe ten minutes they'd been there. Traffic flying by, cars parking, people milling about. "Can you look for my glasses?" was punctuated by crunch-tinkle-tinkle! "Yeah, I think they just got hit." Of course.

So I needed new glasses. I tend to wear contact lenses most of the time and use my glasses for evenings and around the house, but still, a guy wants to look stylish, right? It's nice when your eyeglasses make more of a statement than simply "Hi there, I'm blind as a bat. How are ya?" Statement? Stylish? This was a job for...well, someone else. Off to Lenscrafters, Beth in tow.

At the store, Beth and the clerk who helped us, Fern, sorted through dozens of frames, making suggestion after suggestion for me, each of which was met with "eh." They started with square-styled wire rims, moved on to round ones, then started suggesting whatever was closest at hand. I didn't like any of it. What I liked was the pair Beth hated most.

Brown plastic square half-frames with a wire underside, they were retro 50's style, ugly as hell, and something about them spoke to me. Beth and Fern both tried to talk me out of them and I tried to listen, but I just kept coming back to these. These are Dork glasses from the word Go, Beth tried telling me. I don't care, I replied, I'm embracing my inner dork.

Besides, they're Giorgio Armani. How dorky can Armanis be?

Answer: very.

Dork Stylee