A tale of two eyes
This was the first passport of my own that I owned (I’d shared one before from when I was seven and mum and dad and I went to Hong Kong and then Korea to adopt my brother and sister). I’m fifteen in this photo. Obviously you can see from the photo the genesis of the suave stylish individual you now know and love (or don’t on either count).
Worth noting are the round spectacles, with bonus super strong magnification only on the right lens. This made my right eye appear disproportionally larger than the left, quite unfortunate actually because that eye is as lazy as Sunday morning – I never actually use it – and it’s typically not looking at what I’m actually looking at.
(It’s called ocular vision – as opposed to binocular like most of you lot have. It means I have poor depth perception, will never open the batting for Australia, and get headaches from those stupid blurry expensive 3D movies).
This used to make conversations quite awkward. People would be constantly looking over their shoulders because they thought I was looking at something behind them. After the third or fourth time of there being nothing there it generally got a little bit awkward.
The really annoying thing is that I didn’t actually work out that this is what was going on until I was well into my twenties. Luckily, as you can see in the photo, while spectacularly challenged, at a young age I was blessed with a luscious head of hair and a keen fashion sense.
After I worked out what was going on with the whole people-looking-over-their-shoulders-thing (why the fuck is everyone so paranoid?!), and also that the magnified lens was actually completely useless, because I never actually used that eye, I went to the optometrist, and brought a new pair of glasses using the prescription for my left eye for both lenses.
The vision in my left eye, interestingly, is practically perfect. I don’t particularly need glasses unless I get really tired. When you’ve been wearing glasses though for twenty-plus years, every single day since I was four-and-a-bit, going to the first day of Kindergarten with a big brown boring patch over one of my eyes – yes, you’re right, that did see me labelled as totally cool, absolutely no laughter or teasing or anything like that – it kinda becomes an irresistible habit to get up every morning and put the glasses on.
Plus, glasses are cool.
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