Rambling Rhodes

Keep An Eye On The Ball

This morning, I awoke in my usually groggy state of half-awaredness and went through the morning ritual of poking contacts back into my eyes and jamming a toothbrush into my mouth.

The morning ritual, it occurred to me, was one successive act of facial penetration after another, culminating in the Q-tipping of the ear canals following the shower. It's no wonder I look defeated each morning, what with the abuse I'm about to put my face through all over again.

At any rate, this morning my contacts were giving me more problems than normal. Maybe my eyes were particularly dry, or I just didn't put the contacts in quite right, but for whatever reason, they kept hazing over and trying to eject from my corneas.

Well, as I staggered sleepily and nakedly down the hallway to the bathroom, my right contact finally freed itself, at which point I enacted the patented "freeze, don't move" pose all contact wearers are no doubt familiar with. It's almost an instinctual reaction: you feel a contact flutter free from your eye, and you stop dead short, like you just noticed a Vietnamese booby trap and don't want to trip the wire.

I started wearing contacts when I was back in high school, which was a time in the evolution of contact lens technology when contacts were worth roughly the same as the Crown Jewels. If you lost a contact lens, you were going to find that errant lens if it was the last thing you did. Otherwise, you'd be dooming your parents into indentured servitude for life after they ponied up the dough for another pair. And you could be darned sure your mother would never let you hear the end of it. Maybe I'm projecting here.

Nowadays, contact lenses are practically given away, but old habits die hard. So it was, at 7 a.m. today, I was down on all fours, naked, inspecting the hallway floor like Sherlock Holmes looking for footprints. After about five minutes of intense floor scrutiny, even the cats seemed interested in lending a paw. Finally, I had to concede the lens was nowhere to be seen anywhere on the floor.

Using my powers of deductive reasoning, I came to the conclusion the contact lens must have then attached itself to me. This has happened before. I've found contact lenses clinging to my chest hair, and on my arm, and even once on my chin. Contact lenses can apparently adhere to anything. So, I logically reasoned the contact lens had to be somewhere on my body. But where?

Did I mention I was naked?

Without painting too obvious of a picture, I caught a glimpse of my missing contact lens clinging to my most favorite bodily area.

The question was whether I really wanted to salvage the contact lens at that point, or just crack open a new box and cut my losses. It was one of those defining moments that would help me further understand who I was as a person. Was I a defeatist? Was I a conservationist? Was I wasteful? Or was I clean? Was I the type of guy who could pluck a contact lens off his manhood and put it right back in his eye? Or was I the kind of guy who would shake that contact off into the toilet and opt for a fresh lens?

I'll let you decide what course of action I opted to follow.

Posted by Ryan at April 12, 2007 12:05 PM | TrackBack