When I first got braces (an event I bless and rue) my mom’s best girlfriend told me that she had wanted braces as a kid. So bad. But, her teeth were too nice.

She wanted glasses too, but her vision was nearly perfect. She was healthy, and pretty, and she just had this need to have some sort of artifice between her and everyone else. Why wasn’t she allowed a disguise, she reasoned, when so many other people were afforded them?

She never said it in as many words, but that’s obviously what I would have thought if I was nine year old girl in 1964.

Having had my fair share of wearing braces, I didn’t think I wanted glasses; I had pair in high school, just for reading. I thought they looked like John Lennon’s, but in them I looked look a great owl.

It was bright in California when it wasn’t raining, and Justin and Sara shopped for sunglasses with me. I subsequently became so enamored with the tiny square frames of my pair that I didn’t like to take them off. The indoors are brightly lit anyhow. I wore them in Amoeba on my second trip, peering over them at the most used CDs I had seen in my life.

Returned for LA-land to my primarily indoor habitat here at home, I promptly scheduled an optometrist appointment. And, well, when I said I was worried because I use a computer eight-to-sixteen hours a day the doctor was convinced immediately. I needed to protect my assets.

(When was your last checkup?

Um… during the Clinton administration?)

Three days later, I had indoor-appropriate glasses (I could only get away with wearing the square ones on my head at work; even on the way down in the elevator I got looks). I feel as though I have located an entirely new me, a me as sharp as I used to be, as precise and witty. I attend meetings, dinners, and soirées in them exclusively. I wear them to bed to scan through magazines. I look better in them when I sing.

I think I might call my mom’s best girlfriend to let her know that I finally get it.