A lopsided spectacle

Sometimes glasses are half full. Sometimes they are half empty. Apparently, they are always lopsided. Rather, the glasses sit just fine on a flat surface so it must be my ears that are uneven. I learned this fun fact when picking up my new spectacles. I pushed them up the bridge of my nose, turned to the optometry assistant and heard her say she need to adjust them a bit. Fair enough; what doesn't benefit from a few tweaks? How about now? I asked after the first round of bending. Um, not quite, she said, maneuvering the arms again. She cocked her head. She tilted mine. She pushed the arms in tighter and twisted between the lenses with a force that seemed certain to snap them in two. I just can't get these straight, she added before heading into some mysterious back room for quite a long time. I had to heat these up, she explained upon returning, leaving me with images of my black frames melting into pliability while rotating in a frozen meal spattered microwave. That back area must double as the lunch area. Still no dice. She called in reinforcements -- always a sign of an atypical situation. I must be more asymmetrical than I thought. "I've tried everything but she's still not even. Any ideas?" she asked her cohort. Hmmmm, came the response from the reinforcements. Hmmmm is never what one wants to hear. Hmm means there might be no Plan B. Hmm means I'm going to need a case of V-8 and start limping on one side just to keep both sides of my glasses from looking unequal. I immediately reconciled myself to wearing nothing but contacts 24/7 and cursed the ever-changing eyesight that keeps laser surgery perpetually at bay. For the record, I'm admittedly pretty horrible at picking out glasses for myself. That coupled with an inability to keep from losing or breaking them probably explains why I refuse to invest in anything other than cheap sunglasses. But this time I'd done better than average, albeit with the help of three other people in the showroom who were forced to offer opinions on any number of possible frames. But the job of looking fashionable just got a lot harder if I now needed some sort of crutch on one side. Maybe a pencil eraser? All these years I looked for glasses that corrected by faulty vision. Who knew the greater handicap is not the eyeballs but the ears? Maybe that's the bigger frustration -- why didn't I know? After all, I look in the mirror occasionally. And even if I was blinded to my flaws, shouldn't somebody in this big wide world have the courage to point out my lopsidedness? Obviously, my friends and coworkers had spent years mocking me behind my back. Either that or I've been walking around with my neck unknowingly tilted to compensate for my ear deficiency. Life is funny that way, though. Just as you think you're doing OK, you find out there are problems you never knew existed. A few days later I went to the dentist for the annual cleaning, otherwise known as "The Day of Lying about Flossing." Your teeth are fine but your bite is quite off. You might want to consider braces, came the edict. Hasn't anybody ever told you that? The dentist was incredulous I'd never before heard the suggestion. I was incredulous at the idea of sporting them in mid-adulthood. Guess the bite goes along with the lopsided glasses and goodness only knows how many other shortcomings are secretly hiding under my frizzy mop of hair. But hey, they might be defects but at least they're mine. If I tell myself that mantra enough times there is something else my glasses will be: rose-colored. Michelle Durand's column "Off the Beat" runs every Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached by e-mail: michelle@smdailyjournal.com or by phone: (650) 344-5200 ext. 102. What do you think of this column? Send a letter to the editor: letters@smdailyjournal.com.