Don't cry for me, Argentina. I've got my own tears.

I am dumb in plenty of ways, not the least of which is my contacts. I’ve worn corrective lenses since the 4th grade and grade school/junior high was a veritable parade of unfortunate eyewear. You might say I made a spectacle of myself. Ba-da-bum. Shut up. Anyway, I had the big-ass plastic frames in all sorts of colors: pink, blue, lavender. Late in high school, I tried contacts, but since I have a bit of astigmatism, it was either shell out big bucks for the fancy soft contacts, or suffer with the rigid gas permeables. Guess which I had? I lasted about 6 months with the gas perms. It got to the point where I’d wake up every morning and want to cry when I thought about putting in my contacts. First, the putting-in dance was just a huge pain—when something is coming towards my eye, I tend to blink and/or back away from it, neither of which is exactly conducive to getting the contacts in. It sometimes took me a full 15 minutes to put them in. Then, all day, I’d be blinking furiously, as my eye tried to reject the foreign object that was hugging it so close. They were scratchy and uncomfortable and it hurt to open my eyes all the way. So then people started thinking I was a snob, because I’d tilt my head back and peer at people through squinty eyes.

Needless to say, I went back to glasses in a hurry and have been wearing them ever since. Luckily, I started choosing nicer frames that flattered my face and didn’t look so dorky (though, coming full circle, I now wear a pair of purple, plastic frames, but they’re cute!). But with the wedding coming up, the vanity monster reared its ugly head and there I was, in the optometrist’s office, getting fitted for contacts. As it’s now almost two decades since I last tried contacts and I earn my own money, soft contacts for astigmatism are affordable, so I went for it. It’s still not like my eyeballs are floating on puffy clouds or anything, but it’s doable. I think my eyes are naturally a little dry and sensitive, so I’m always putting in re-wetting drops, which is a comedy routine unto itself.

Watching friends who’ve worn contacts for 20 years, I’m astounded when they casually tilt their heads back, squeeze a single, perfect drop of liquid out of the little bottle, and it falls right into the target eye. Me? Well, I’ve got the head tilting down. Everything else is a crap shoot. I go through rewetting drops like a baby through diapers because over half of the drops miss my eye or I blink. I even got the drops in my ear once, which...yeah, don’t ask. I have no idea. Now I have this routine where if I get the drop anywhere near my eye, I roll my head around, trying to direct the course of the drop into my eye, never mind all the dust and dead skin cells the formerly sterile liquid picks up. But the process always ends with me toweling off my face and neck.

So if you see me with tears streaming down my face at my wedding (and yes, thank the heavens for waterproof makeup), I might be crying tears of joy and happiness, or I might’ve just put drops in my eyes.