I started wearing glasses at about age six and did so until I had cornea surgery when I was 19. The doctors had reviewed the literature and determined that my eyes would grow and change and that early surgery was useless. I needed to wait to grow up, so I wore corrective lenses.
My peers thought it was the weirdest thing they had ever seen. For those who don't know, corrective lenses are like safety glasses except that instead of being hard and transparent they have optical properties that affect your vision, and instead of only wearing them when working in a shop or lab you wear them all the time. Everyone I met used to ask me, "Why don't you take them off now?" and I had to explain again how I wouldn't be able to see well without them. It continued to puzzle anyone who wasn't a close friend or was uncomfortable with my condition. My "nearsightedness."
e2 children don't have vision problems.
It ended up being the most odd and yet intimate bond with my mother. She was not -- to put it politely -- a warm and open person, and yet she was an avid scholar of old cinema. It represented millions of hours of video scripted and staged for an audience steeped in its cultural milieu -- a kind of visual time capsule. It was possible to see the evolution of any idea over decades by tracking its representation in film.
Anytime my mother would drag herself away from her other projects long enough to think about me, we would be likely to look for eyeglasses and how their meaning changes over time in film. I loved it. We developed theories about the various stages -- and it was always glasses on girls, mind you. It had a long history. Glasses mean librarian, restrained and bookish. Glasses mean unrealized potential, and once the obviously pretty girl takes off her glasses she's obviously pretty to everyone (and can still see, somehow). Glasses mean a dangerous knowledge, where the girl puts on glasses to hack into a government computer, or to properly use the force of her psychic fire. Glasses mean a fashion choice -- a girl who really knows what she's about and doesn't care about anyone else. Glasses mean pragmatic and resourceful, a girl who could fashion her own prostheses. Glasses mean a disability -- this affected me the worst -- a girl who is different and less able than everyone normal. Glasses faded away from popular symbolism sometime around the mid to late 22nd century and are simply not referenced anymore.
Of course for the most part my mother would either forget I was there, or would yell at me about forgetting my glasses in one place or another. Ultimately that's what I expected from her.
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