Not Perfect, pt 1

My ears are crooked.

You know those times when you realize just how imperfect you are? There you are going about your day, maybe even feeling good about yourself for once, and WHAM—you’re hit with something as trivial as realizing your ears are crooked.

That was me just last week at the optometrist’s.

I’ve had bad eyes since I was in third grade, so I’ve always known on some deep level that I was imperfect. Not because it felt abnormal—I was the youngest of three and my entire family had glasses by then. To me it was the most natural thing in the world. One time on a family road trip to California, the hotel elevator door closed, reflecting our family portrait back at us from the stainless steel surface—my sister Lauren cringed, giggled uncontrollably, and called us The Little Glasses Family. She’s the middle child.

But no, I realized I was imperfect because school kids are ugly, cruel little turds. The glasses, turns out, weren’t normal—glasses were for nerds, and my classmates made sure I never forgot that it was 13th Immutable Law of the Universe.

It took me years to rally and leave that stereotype behind. By sixth grade everyone was calling me Harry Potter (I looked exactly like Daniel Radcliffe at the time). Literally, as if I were The Boy Who Lived himself, I was known around campus as “Potter.” But not because Potter was cool or famous, but because he had glasses—Potter was a nerd. So I got contacts and grew a little, made the basketball team, had myriad girlfriends, and once again it all changed. Everything went back to “normal.”

Nowadays glasses are cool. They’re trendy. I know people who wear glasses frames as a fashion choice, sans prescription. (Hah—seriously, where were they when I was ten?) But in my early twenties my eyes started to reject contact lenses as a general rule. So these days, again, I typically wear glasses … and it’s mostly fine, except that my ears are crooked.

Not only are they crooked, they’re worse than I thought. Because before I got my glasses adjusted I couldn’t really tell. They were loose, and I could alllmost blame the lopsidedness on the frames. Almost.

But no, there I am wrapping up my appointment with the eye doctor, and I ask the girl at the desk if she can tighten my frames. They slide down my nose, I tell her, I guess they’re too big for my head. She takes a look at them. “No, it looks like I can’t tighten them because they don’t have the nose pieces.”

She’s right, they don’t. I have the newfangled kind that are supposed to fit your face without nose pieces.

“Let me see what I can do,” she says, and takes my frames to work some kind of optometrist voodoo magic in the back. When she brings them out the ear pieces are curved downward so that they’ll hook behind my ears better. Totally impressed, I slip those bad boys on and sure enough they do hook behind my ears. Neat.

I thanked her and left, and only after a while did I notice the discomfort. I readjusted them a little, then a little more, and they still didn’t feel right. Maybe she did it wrong, I thought. Maybe they’re uneven. I took them off and eyed them … Well, they looked even enough … So I nestled them back onto my face and kept going about my day.

Cut to three hours later. The back of my right ear was on fire by then, and the headache collecting in my skull was billowing black storm clouds. I could tell it was tugging on my right side more than my left, so I took them off for one last inspection: they were definitely, without a doubt, one-hundo-percent even.

That’s when it dawned on me. It’s not the frames, it’s my ears.

My ears are crooked. I’m not perfect.

Best,

CBM

p.s. the imperfection will continue.