As I sit down to write this, I know that my memories are imperfect. We tend to overestimate or underestimate our feelings of events. Just like when you close your eyes and try to recall a memory and you pay close attention to the picture in your mind, you realize that that’s a pretty unclear picture. The people in it or the things in it, seems like electrical outlines. But that’s all your brain needs to color in between the lines. Strange, yet miraculous.
And so with this imperfect mechanism I’m trying to think what it was like before I started using Keepons eyeglass retainers. I have one very vivid memory, near the end of my time with slipping glasses. This was just before using Keepons. It was hot that day. And very muggy. I had just got off work and I was wearing dress pants, uncomfortable dress shoes, and a dress shirt. In my right hand, I was carrying my briefcase. I was walking with a colleague to a restaurant. We were going to have dinner. The restaurant was about a 20 minute walk. Which isn’t bad in itself, but my face was full of perspiration and my glasses keep slipping. The glasses I was wearing at the time were these metal frames. They weren’t that heavy, but they still slipped. I pushed them up and it seemed not more than a minute passed and they slipped again. I purposely held up my head in an unnatural position so the front of my glasses were higher than my ears. But this was really uncomfortable. As soon as I lowered my head to a natural position, my glasses fell again. After pushing them up, them falling, pushing them up, them falling again I gave up in exasperation.
Now here’s the thing with memories. You may not remember faces or places, but for some strange reason you tend to remember feelings, and I was feeling very hopeless and helpless at that point. Hopeless and helpless aren't feelings, they're labels. The action feeling was one of heaviness and wanting to hide away. I needed my glasses because I couldn’t see without them but they just didn’t stay on. I don’t know how to describe it. I don’t mean that at that point, I said to myself, “note to self, remember that at this moment on such and such a day and this hour of the day, I am currently feeling helpless and hopeless.” No it wasn’t like that. It was more like this. I recall feeling like I would have preferred to be any place than there, preferred to be anyone else than me with falling glasses, and knowing that it was just fancy and that all my wishing was for nought. I could not wish my glasses to stay on my head. I remember feeling how it sucks to wear glasses in the first place. People say that you end up wearing glasses because you watched too much TV as a kid, but I don’t believe it. I think that’s something adults make up to stop their kids from watching TV because they believe TV is a distraction. It is, but that’s beside the point. Two wrongs don’t make it right.
A little while after that, I stumbled on Keepons eyeglass retainers and they changed my life. I don’t mean change my life in an epiphany type of way like a man discovers the secrets of the universe in a grain of sand. I mean, I didn’t wish to be someone else anymore. It meant that I didn’t feel helpless or hopeless. I could function normally and not seem geeky. Don’t get me wrong. I use the computer and Internet a lot and I play a lot of video games and I’m interested in science fiction which kind of makes me a geek. But I’m rather handsome and I like the way I look. When I wear contacts, I look great. But contacts irritate my eyes so usually I wear glasses. Before Keepons it used to be that eyeglass slipping got so bad that I’d switch to disposable contacts for a month or two then get so uncomfortable with them that I’d go back to glasses and then when I started wearing glasses again I’d remember why I hate glasses in the first place and back and forth, shuttling between one source of comfort to the next.
Then like I said I got Keepons eyeglass retainers and things got a lot better. Life is funny. There are things in life that are trivial or inconsequential. Keepons are just pieces of silicone with a narrow tunnel running through them yet they’ve made such a big difference in my life.
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