Vision is Highly Overrated
I'm having all kinds of trouble at the moment with a new pair of spectacles. I originally shopped around for what turned into about two months, and finally dug up five that I didn't totally hate. Not trusting my own meagre sense of style, I took a series of photos with each pair and whipped up a web page where I could show them off. I didn't make that page publicly available, because most people (particularly people who wander onto my site searching for goat porn and nurses in skimpy outfits) have no taste. The link was sent to a small number of people who I thought were pretty stylish, almost all of them women. The couple of guys on the list were really just an experiment, and they pretty much proved my point by choosing the frames everyone else hated straight off the bat. Anyway, the overwhelming majority of my fashion chickens picked the second set of frames from the bottom, the D&G Brown rimless ($600).
Some of you might be having a small heart attack at the prices of these frames. Initially, I did too. The problem is that everything else cheaper looked like complete crap, at least on me. Seriously, the $200 frames look like a giant spider squatting on two glass ashtrays. I searched and searched, and finally resigned myself to paying an exorbitant price for something that actually looked half decent. Since I'd be wearing them for the majority of my waking hours, it was probably worth the stretch.
The problems kicked in when I tried using the new glasses to actually try and see things. Initially it felt like someone had smeared them with vaseline, or my eyes were being distorted out of my head. I had headaches, missed grasping at door handles and bumped into walls, so pretty soon I took them back. They changed the prescription, but it was still pretty bad. I took them back again and they changed the curvature this time. No luck, so I took them back again. More adjustments, no luck. It was ridiculous. They were always nice and helpful, but by the fourth trip back I was starting to wonder if they were actually optometrists or actually panel beaters.
Currently they are in being fixed yet again, having the left lense set up for slight astigmatism like my current pair. For those who are interested, astigmatism is when the eyeball is shaped more like a football than a sphere. In my case this is probably due to working in front of a computer screen or being hit in the face repeatedly playing rugby, rather than any long term monocle usage. Hopefully they'll be done soon, and be completely perfect. Otherwise... well, I'll take them back again. Ugh.