Wednesday, July 05, 2006

• My New Hydrokryptonitonic Optical Assistant

  Getting new glasses is like any other kind of shopping for me. I adopt the mindset of "get in, get (insert product name here), get out." You'd think it would be different considering that these glasses will be seen by all people that I come in contact with for the next five years, but it's not. I realized this last Thursday at the Lenscrafters at Northgate Mall. With time running out on my time at the Herald, I figured it was probably time to take advantage of my meager vision benefits. I last bought new frames six years ago, meaning that my current frames were bend beyond help and scratched up, so I took the plunge and set up an appointment with the Lenscrafter optometrist guy.

  My first pair of glasses came circa 1988. I didn't want them, even though I couldn't see that trees had leaves or people had eyes, but all that changed when I realized one thing. I could have eyeglasses specifically designed by the Karate Kid, Ralph Macchio. The Karate Kid was the first "big kid" movie my parents ever let me watch and it quickly became a regular part of my daily activities. Part of this was a byproduct of owning our first VCR, which was about eight feel long and weighed approximately 47 pounds. It was a beast, but that didn't matter because we could "watch tv whenever we want!" And we did.

  My love for the Karate Kid also stemmed from the pure drama of the flick. Misunderstood poor New Jersey teen moves to California and goes to school with the uppity snobbish valley kids. Gets picked on and beat up, but learns karate, kicks some tail and gets the girl in the end. For a fifth-grader teetering dangerously on the verge of puberty, this was the stuff that dreams were made of. So you can imagine how much my hesitancy about getting glasses was diminished when I discovered that good ole Daniel Larusso was on my side. Unfortunately, I never looked like Ralph, staring piercingly at you with just a hint of innocence to the right.

  Somewhere around seven hours after entering the store, I settled on one of the many pairs of Daniel Larusso glasses available. It never occurred to me though that the Karate Kid never wore glasses in the movie until the drive home as I was marveling at the new, sharp world around me. I guess I might have caught a glimpse of myself in one of our van's mirrors, gawking about at the newness of life with my Karate Kid specs on, and then realized that I had been suckered in. The glasses were awful, a grayish color with thick boxy frames and a double bar between the two sides. Even the "designed by Ralph Macchio, the Karate Kid" insignia on the earpiece couldn't cover up the disastrous nature of my decision. I had been fully inducted into nerd status and didn't have a clue until it was too late. Add these specs to my ensemble of two-toned shorts (imagine the shorts divided down the crotch with one side a solid electric yellow color and the other side a maze of lines the same color yellow, blazing red and neon green), a red mesh muscle shirt, double-striped tube socks pulled near my knees and my red Converse hi-tops ripoffs that boasted palm trees, bananas and oranges, and I was a walking "Slow Kids at Play" sign.

  I learned to love the Karate Kid glasses through the next two years, mostly because I loved seeing baseballs thrown my way before they hit me in the face, but by 1990 I was getting a nice upperlip mustache thing and squeaky voice, and it was time to evolve into something different. I was in the youth group at church, the youngest age group, and I needed "cool" help in the worst way. I noticed a black guy named Gideon, who was at least three years older than me and hailed from somewhere in Africa, sported a pair of specs that not only looked good but oozed coolness. The eyepieces were completely circular, in direct contrast to my "hip to be a square" glasses, and were a shiny gold color.

  After much pleading with my parents, I made the quick decision to get a pair of Gideon glasses. These specs weren't anywhere as bad as the Karate Kid era, which I happily donated to a vision drive years later, and I kept the same style for many years, though eventually it came to my attention that the lens were so big that my eyebrows could probably see fine if they had eyes too. In addition, as a general rule shiny gold looks good on black guys. Shiny gold looks ghetto on white guys. Check out the second pic on this link for an idea of what these glasses looked like.

  In my early college years, I discovered a look that I liked, smaller lenses, darker frames, lighter weight, and decided to stick with it. I replaced the lens once, keeping the old frames, until Thursday when wear and tear demanded a retirement of the frames. It took my roughly 10 minutes to find the frames I liked this time. These babies have just about everything. The frames are bendable ("but not unbreakable" as my "vision advisor" warned. "Don't sit on them or anything"), made of polycarbosomething (big words must mean it's valuable), lighter than a feather, scotch-guarded, scratch resistant, anti-glare and reflection, double as a tire gauge, can be used as a survival tool, pick up radio stations from Malaysia and have a secret microphone/listening device implanted inside the left earpiece. All this for the small price of around $500.

  I just stared at my V.A. (that's vision advisor for those not in the know) for a second before cooly picking my bottom jaw up from the floor and wiping away the spittle that had begun to pool at my feet. I had had my first "that's 1/6 of the price I paid for my first car" moment. I took comfort knowing that these glasses should last me through the next six years at least, plus insurance and my triple A discount would knock another $250 off my cost. But I think the real selling point came when I thought back to the days of the Ralph Macchio specs, and how there was probably some kid in a third-world country at that moment running away from bullies that were picking on him for wearing those same glasses.

  I determined my new hydrokryptonitonic optical assistant was a wise investment.