Rose-Colored Glasses

(Warning: This post may contain explicit language. I may or may not - you'll have to read to find out - use the word s**y).

Recently, I bought new glasses. I've been a contacts girl for a very long time, so this was a big switch for me. In America (or, "the States" as olim are somehow strangely addicted to calling it), I occasionally switched between glasses and contacts, but in Israel, the Land of A Thousand Sunny Days, I had to wear contacts in order to wear sunglasses. (Because squinting = migraines, and who needs another migraine trigger? 'Cuz I have a sneaking suspicion that children between the hours of 4 - 8 pm are also triggers. So I like to eliminate the ones that I can (triggers, not children.)).

However, the Land of a Thousand Dust Particles made me feel like I wanted to rip my eyeballs out at the end off a long, contact-wearing day, but I didn't even want to think about what sort of ishurim and hafnayot Maccabi would make me get for a new pair of eyeballs, so I decided it was simpler to just make the switch to glasses + prescription sunglasses.

I, for one, have been very happy. First, this means no more eye-ball ripping! Also no contacts means one less thing to do in the morning while Nadav is shrieking for me to pick him up and I can't because I need two hands for contact placement, so he stands there in the bathroom pulling on my stretched-out pajama pants until they end up around my ankles. And also, one less thing to do at night, when I am so tired I can barely pull back on the aforementioned overly large pants.

Now that we're a few months into the new look, I asked my darling husband, my knight in shining armor, what he thought. I pointed out that it was really because of him and a conversation we had when we were dating that I started wearing contacts. I recall that he expressed his preference for contacts over glasses at some point during our courtship. I honestly do not remember if he was talking about people in general or me in particular, but back then, in the throes of young YU love, I wanted to look good for my man. (Fast forward twelve years, to overly large brown velour - did I not mention the brown velourness of them? - pajama pants, paired with an equally large old t-shirt of Donny's that is now grayish-white, with many a-stain of indetereminate origin. Trust me, the people who claim, "Wearing your man's clothes is sexy!" did NOT have this in mind.)

Anyway, Donny of course had no recollection of ever expressing his preference for contacts. He does have a hazy memory of discussing why politicians never wear glasses. So somehow, I turned a conversation about Clinton into a directive for me to toss my glasses and wear only contacts forevermore. Again, young, in love, YU, you get the idea.

Fast forward to the present. I bring the conversation around to me again. "You haven't answered my question."

"I haven't?"

"No. So what do you think?"

Silence.

"No matter what I say, I can only get in trouble."

"Oh come on. I have to come kippah-shopping with you and discuss the merits of fifty very similar-looking knit kippot and engage in lengthy conversations about how they fit your head and whether they express hope and optimism. You can answer this question."

"Well, you know I was once in a training session at work and they said when presented with a difficult question you should answer, 'It depends.'"

"You still haven't answered my question."

(Donny is often very successful at manipulating the conversation so I forget my original point, in cases where my original point may have been detrimental to him.)

Finally, he said he liked the glasses, but they created a certain "look" - he threw out a bunch of adjectives a this point - smart, intellectual, funky, he may have even included "sassy," I kid you not - and that the "look" was jarring when paired with certain outfits. Like pajamas. It all comes back to the jammies. I guess "Sassy Intellectual in Baggy PJs" is a fashion statement that hasn't hit Israel yet.

So now when I'm in my pajamas, with my glasses on, I like to get all up in his face and say things like, "Oooh, does this bother you? Huh? Huh? Is it jarring? Is it creating disequilibrium in your world? Well, too bad!"

Just call me an old-fashioned romantic.