A brand new face

What do you see when you look in the mirror?  This isn't so much a deep philosophical question, I mean it more matter-of-factly.  When you look in the mirror, you see...yourself.  Your face.  Every morning when you wake up and every night before you go to bed.  Usually with a toothbrush in your mouth, unless you happen to spend a lot of time just staring at yourself, in which case maybe you have a little too much time to spare.

Anyway, for most of my life, I haven't just seen my face, I've seen my face with glasses.  I think I was in third grade or so when I first got them.  And I need them, because otherwise I can't read that huge 'E' at the top of the charts.  So the only way I've seen my face without glasses is either as a vaguely me-shaped blur or with my nose practically pressed up against the mirror, which is not the way most other people would see it.

Until today, when I got contacts.

I don't plan on wearing them all the time.  Just on the odd day, particularly if I want to go running and don't want to keep pushing glasses up my nose as I go, or maybe on a random day when it's bright and I feel like wearing sunglasses.  Really, the only reason I decided to go ahead and get contacts was because my insurance will only cover new frames every other year, but lenses, whether contacts or glasses, you can have each year.  Plus, I have some flex spending money left over for the year, and if I don't use it, I lose it.  So getting contacts is like going shopping with money you've already spent.  Plus, I've always sort of wanted to try it, just to see.  Literally.

And so now, I have my first pair in.  Aside from being able to see to the side without turning my head, and dealing with the whole issue of touching my eyes so much, I'm just trying to get used to my face.  Because it's completely different.  I don't know quite how to describe it, but it's like there's so much more of it now.  My eyes are so far apart compared to the bridge between lenses on glasses.  And my cheeks, there's more of them as well.  So I'm spending a little too much time staring in the mirror, because it's not quite me.  And I keep putting my hands on my face, because it feels different as well.  My hair doesn't tuck behind my ears in quite the same way.  Little things that are completely ordinary, they are just new.

Okay, time to take them out again.  I've had them in for the allotted four hours, and I need to give myself plenty of time before dinner, since it took at least ten minutes to get them out the first time!