Houston, We Have Contacts

Every since puberty hit, I've needed glasses. I remember the day when Dad said, with much chagrin, "Son, why are you squinting like a blinded deer?" Dad, the wise sage that he is, knew full-well that, as I sat 5 feet from the TV, trying to peer through my eyelashes as Troy Aikmen handed the ball off to Emitt Smith once again, that I needed glasses.

The following phrase uttered by my father is one that I will always remember because it meant that my way of life would change forever. I find it funny, now that I'm 28, thinking how such a simple sentence as, "Here, Son, try on my glasses and see if that helps", fell like a truckload of bricks upon my shoulders that day. It wasn't that I was afraid of seeing the world around me as I pushed Dad's black and gold bifocals back up to the bridge of my nose, I was afraid of the world around seeing me! As a pubescent boy, glasses were a pain. Not only would glass-ified kids have to worry about keeping their spectacles clean and in functioning order, but they also had to worry about other kids trying to dirty or destroy said spectacles. As you may have guessed, I survived that gloomy day when, despite my best wishes and greatest desires, my faith in a normal childhood did not maintain my sight. In fact, I believe I've done quite well considering my peepers needed persistent adjustments.

The whole topic of corrective lenses floated into my brain, much like a feather floats from a birds nest slowly down to the green, crabgrass lawn below, when I decided to start a workout regine called P90X. The way P90X works is by providing a workout schedule that constantly changes, well..., constantly changes after three weeks of consistency. By breaking up and rearranging the workout routines, the makers of P90X suggest that their product can maintain the "muslce confusion" that helps continually create more muscle mass, less body fat, and a robust "Bring It" attitude. Since this workout regine cost a decent amount of money to start, i.e. some really expensive DVDs with a variety of paper documentation and descretly hidden advertisements for other products sold by this company, I wanted to make sure that I got the most out of my workouts.

As I began to deligently sweat to to Tony Horton's first DVD , which included his witty humor and bulging biceps/triceps/calves/gluts/etc, my vision suddenly became blurry. Afraid that I was having a stroke, or perhaps just some well-placed sweat conduets, I reached up to wipe my brow and adjust my glasses. Lo and behold, as I performed my patiented hand/knuckle forehead wipe and glasses readjustment manuver, I discovered that my glasses were no longer on my face! Amid my huffing and puffing, I hadn't noticed that my glasses had paused their workout video for a drink of water on the floor, but hadn't had the curtesy to let the rest of my face know. Happily, they were not broken, and were soon reunited with some of my best features, or so Mary says. But, amid the few second panic that I experienced as I semi-blindly groped the floor for my spectices, I thought, "Houston, we have a problem!" However, unlike using ducttape and an assorted airfilter to fix the challenge at hand, I had a much easier fix. Contacts! Yup, I'm going to wear my contacts more often, especially when Tony Horton and I are doing a Kempo workout X-style. Who knew that here, in my living room so many hundreds of miles away from the living room where I first encountered the dreaded concept of corrective lenses, I would utter the same phrase I uttered when I realized that Dad's glasses did help my vision: Oh Crap.