Last week the right lens popped out of my glasses at the gym, causing me a bit of panic until I finally got it back in such that it would stay. My right eye is my good eye, and if I can't see out of it, I am severely impaired. This prompted me to finally go to the eye doctor and get new glasses for the first time in way too long.

One of the reasons I had put it off for so long was that new glasses for me cost roughly two arms and two legs. I'm 20/400 uncorrected and I do not correct to 20/20. Through is some wacky astigmatism and other stuff and you have a recipe for very expensive eyeglasses. I have insurance, but it only just scratches the surface of the bill for me. My vision hadn't been getting worse and I like my current frames, and I'd been busy for the past several years trying to reproduce, so I didn't bother with the eye doctor. Now my glasses are falling apart mere weeks before I expect to have a second set of hands batting at my face, so it suddenly became very high priority.

Given the mint I have to spend to get new lenses, I have no qualms about buying designer frames. Besides, I wear my glasses every waking minute of every day except on those very rare occasions when I use contacts, so it's absolutely worth it to get nice frames. My current much-beloved-but-clearly-on-there-last-legs frames are by Armani. Sadly, when I went to pick out frames this time I was at a loss. Just about every set of frames in the shop was of the short and wide rectangular style, from the cheap frames to the designer ones. I know it's fashionable just now, but it's a style that absolutely will not work for my face, and with a prescription like mine it leads to very unflattering coke bottle edges. I need frames with small round lenses and the closest thing I could find were short wide ovals. In pure desperation I went to the kids section. I have a small face, so kids frames will sometimes work for me. I did manage to find a somewhat workable set of frames there. They are still squat ovals, but at least they aren't any wider than my current frames. They are by Disney and I'm just counting my lucky stars that they don't say so anywhere obvious on the frames.

I hoping the current fashion in frames doesn't last as long as the over-sized octagons craze I had to endure during the 80s. Armani, please make me some small John Lennon style frames in gold wire real soon now and all will be forgiven.