Eye. Glasses.

Here’s a selfie I took yesterday, retouched by my father; it’s becoming my new avatar, replacing the one that stood me in good stead for a year:

I’m wearing my new eyeglasses, just arrived Friday from Gaudet Optical in Halifax where I ordered them a couple of weeks ago. I ordered a pair of “computer glasses” at the same time, to use while I’m at my workstation, and I’ve been alternating between the two pairs over the weekend.

As the bifocal prescription in the glasses above — my “everyday” glasses — is someone increased, and the shape of the glasses is round as opposed to rectangular, and as the computer glasses have a completely different lens designed specifically for viewing a computer screen, my brain is exhausted at all the rewiring it’s having to do. I need to take a day and sit in a dark room just to give it a rest.

The “everyday” glasses come from the French company Anne & Valentin; the model is called “On the Wave,” a model that a Japanese website describes like this (in translation):

Full of handmade feeling like carved from stone texture features. A sense of volume that stand out with precisely machined edge, of Anne & Valentine unique to stick to handwork, our eyewear that captures the essence of beauty.

Something gets lost in the translation, but there are elements of truth there.

Something I hadn’t noticed until now — it’s hard to notice things on your eyeglasses when you’re wearing your eyeglasses — is a thin metal strip inlaid into the left arm:

I’ve no idea what the meaning of this is. But I’m the kind of guy who likes having mysterious symbols hidden in his eyeglasses, so it works for me.

Beyond the wonky brain adjustments required, and the secret inlay, the new glasses are something of a bold departure from the “get as innocuous a pair of glasses as possible” approach I’ve taken to eyewear selection in the past. The Gaudet Optical slogan is “fine eyewear from functional to outrageous,” and while these are by no means on the outrageous end of their spectrum – I saw some pretty amazing eyeglasses that hover around or beyond that end — they are by no means wholly functional either. They say something – I’m not sure what – and that’s a completely foreign concept for me. Needless to say, it took some gumption to go out of the house for the first time.