Introducing My New Glasses
My New Glasses
Thanks again to everyone who voted on my new glasses. I like ‘em. This photo doesn’t quite capture the colors–translucent magenta and lime green. They’re made by a French company called Traction, whose design mission is to “combine Californian modernity and French refinement.” There you have it.
Please Help Me Shop For Glasses
My eyesight is deteriorating yet more and my family never really warmed to my current frames, so it seems to me that new glasses are in order. Do the royal we have anything to say about these four pair (kindly borrowed from Cyril & Dayne, so that Dave and Annalena can weigh in on them at home tonight)?
Contestant Number One
Contestant Number Two
Contestant Number Three
Contestant Number Four
Second Guessing My Glasses
Glasses Under Consideration – View 1
Glasses Under Consideration – View 2
Current Glasses
I know there are more important things to worry about in the world, but what do you think of this other pair of glasses? I See GB let me bring them home to show Dave and he’s not home yet. I brought a friend into the shop this afternoon for a second opinion and she said she liked my current pair better. She thought the other ones look the same only more boring. I still think they might be better, though — less severe, more subtle in their charm. They are also on sale…just $99…but my new progressive lens prescription is expensive, so if you’re not impressed with them, please speak up.
New Year, New Glasses
First things first: Here’s a photo of me in my new glasses. They were designed by Frenchman Cyril Dray of I See GB in Great Barrington and manufactured by Zip+Homme in Japan. I’ve been wearing them for a couple of weeks now and like them very much, even if they’re not magic like my much-lamented former green pair.
My family didn’t warm to them until we toured the Sol LeWitt wall drawing retrospective at MASS MoCA. We were taking in LeWitt’s middle period work, the drawings with the softer geometry and vibrant, not yet screaming color, and Annalena turned to me and said, “You know Mom, your glasses are starting to grow on me.” Dave looked around the gallery, “Yes, they make sense here.”
They seem to be preaching to the choir of good glasses lovers glasses rather than ones that promote world peace by uniting all of humanity with their mystical rightness. So be it. I’m grateful that I can see and that my little New England town is home to such an excellent eyewear shop.
I’m in professional limbo at the moment, having recently drafted a proposal for a new publishing project and waiting to hear what my agent thinks of it. I hate waiting, but love being at a beginning again.
I want to keep the sense of uncharted territory and freshness going with this blog as it enters year two. The more people read my blog (8859 visitors in ’08), the harder it becomes to stay loose with it, but that’s the key.
And since this is my blog where nobody’s the boss of me except me and, as many editors have noticed, I don’t care much about formal transitions…
Dave and I met on January 3, 1989 at New Langton Arts in San Francisco and moved in together three weeks later. I remember telling a friend at the time that our blazing romance was “not trivial.” Here we are 20 years down the road. It’s a miracle and a mystery.
R.I.P. Lucky Green Glasses
My glasses frames sprouted an irreparable crack over the weekend. I called Dave from the Petco parking lot in Pittsfield to report the sad news. He tried to comfort me with “honey, you are more than your glasses,” but I wasn’t so sure. These weren’t just any glasses. They were the best glasses in the history of glasses, or at least the history of my face and glasses.
I found them at Next Eyewear on College Avenue in Oakland six or seven years ago. As I recall, I didn’t really need new glasses at the time and I was broke as usual, but when I tried them on, there was something so extraordinarily right about them, so me only better best self about them, that I whipped out my credit card with the justification: no one will deny me if I’m wearing these glasses…which actually more or less proved true, plus they generated an incredible amount of good will and conversation.
Literally hundreds of strangers, from all walks of life and of all races, thought enough of my glasses to stop me on the street or on the bus or in the spa locker room to compliment me about them. Society matrons. Homeless men. Hip baristas from coast to coast. These glasses helped me learn to graciously accept a compliment. I’d smile like I’d never heard it before, look the person in the eye, and offer a sincere thank you in return.
It’s hard to say what exactly made these glasses compelling to such a wide range of people. All I know about their origin is that they were French and one of a kind. There’s no label on the frames. I just sent the above photo to Next Eyewear hoping that someone there will recognize the designer.
The glasses were subtly spectacular. They did a slow burn. When they caught people’s attention, the design somehow made them look closer. The liquid green pattern, the not quite cat’s eye shape, and the flirty black rhinestones combined with the feng shui of my face in a mysterious way that compelled people to talk to me.
I’m not a particularly fashionable or put-together person and sometimes the compliments felt like compassion…like the people thought: damn that geeky girl got something right, let’s prop her up and celebrate.
These glasses let me walk into any room and know that even though I might not be the smartest or the prettiest or the best writer or the most patient mother, odds were I’d have the best glasses. I will miss that power.
