This past fall I got new glasses, the first pair of new glasses in, oh, 13 years.

The other pair, technological marvels of their time, were falling apart. The anti-everything coating on the lenses had worn off in places, giving the lenses a mottled look, and the wire frame itself was molting some kind of coating you couldn't have known it had when it was all hanging together. Most importantly, my vision had changed quite a bit in the last decade and I couldn't really use them for seeing things. But because I only wore them between the bathroom and the bed and between the bed and the bathroom and only needed to see well enough to read in bed, I didn't see a need to replace them.

They were expensive, $700 expensive, in 1995. At the time, they were the first pair of glasses in more than a decade that I could wear for any length of time without discomfort, physical or emotional.

I've always hated glasses. I've hated them on me since I first started wearing them when I was eight, and I've mostly hated them on others. I switched to contact lenses as soon as the doctors would let me, and I've worn contacts almost everyday, and sometimes overnight, for 25 years.

My vision is terrible: moderately near-sighted but massively astigmatic. "Massive" is my opthalmologist's word. My contact lenses are of the custom-made gas-permeable variety that run about $150 a lens. Surgery is not yet an option. And glasses, well ... they've always sucked. Expensive, heavy, and physically and visually distorting. Let's just say, when the glasses came off it became a helluva a lot easier to make friends.

So, glasses have always been a necessary evil. Something goes wrong with a contact lens—lose it, break it—I'm suddenly blind if I don't have the emergency glasses handy.

In the past year or so, Andrew started kidding me about he disrepair of my glasses and I noticed I really couldn't see through them because the prescription was off but also because of the weird mottling of the old coating. I knew it was getting close to replacement time.

Then I went to the eye doctor and the eye doctor made fun of me. With the glasses on, I couldn't read the E. Later, holding the mangy things in his hands, he said, "You're going to replace these this year, aren't you?"

I was avoiding it. First, they're expensive. But second, like I said, I don't like the way glasses look and I don't like how they feel. They're too heavy or they squeeze too hard behind my ears. They hang so low that they rest on my big cheeks or my big cheeks lift them up when I smile. They always slide down and I always have to push them back up. And with my "massive" astigmatism, the curvature of the lenses creates this dizzying drop off in the field of focus. I can't look anywhere but straight. I can't tell if a car is hiding in the blind spot, and I can't tell if I've reached the last step of a staircase. I feel, and look a little, like Mr. MaGoo. Third, I really wasn't looking forward to that awful exercise of trying on an assembly-line of different frames to identify a pair that wouldn't make me look like a techie douchebag or an artwalker.

But I knew it was time to bite the bullet and get a new pair. It was before I went to Ireland, and I kept having this nagging concern that if I lost a contact lens over there I might have to trot through Europe with that raggedy old pair of glasses I couldn't see through. In the end, that was the impetus.

To make things easy, I went to Market Optical—where I got the last pair—and decided I wouldn't leave until I'd picked out a new pair. I took Andrew with as a third set of eyes and as an expert in how I look and my taste in things. I walked in, a guy walked up, and I said I need some new glasses. I said, I need this, this, and this, and I like, this, this, and this. I saw him looking at all the parts of my face. He turned. He grabbed a pair off the wall, put them on my face. How about these, he said? I looked at Andrew and his face was popped open like a hot kernel. Those look good! I walked over to a mirror, and Whoa, they did! I didn't look like myself, but I didn't look unlike myself either. I smiled hard, but no matter how hard I smiled my cheeks couldn't touch the frame. Just to be diligent, I tried on four or five more frames. All made me look like a techie douchebag or artwalker or they just didn't fit on my wide face or big cheeks. The first pair was it!

I got every feature imaginable to try to make these new glasses wearable. Final price tag: $1200, most of which my handy HSA account covered (thank god). And I couldn't be happier—they were worth every penny. I am not embellishing one jot when I say that these are the first pair of glasses that I can wear without hassle and that I enjoy wearing.

They hurt my ears and nose a bit after a full day. But they feel better subsequent days. The visual accuracy is astounding. There is almost no distortion toward the edges of the lenses, and the lenses themselves are amazingly thin given the severity of the correction. I've been wearing them even when I don't have to!

I've taken to wearing them on Saturdays. Makes me feel like I'm really taking the day off if I don't have to do the chemistry routine on my contact lenses. Today a girl even called out to me, "Your glasses are SOOO cute!"