Damn your eyes!

I’ve been thinking about getting LASIK. I’m sick of wearing glasses, and I don’t have the testicular fortitude to shove anything directly into my eyeball, which rules out contacts. The only problem with LASIK is that the procedure sounds far more uncomfortable than simply foregoing wearing glasses and dealing with bumping into random things for the rest of your life.

LASIK has some big cons as I see it. It’s expensive, and insurance won’t cover it, so you’re shelling out several thousand dollars out of pocket. It has to be done while your eye is open and you are alert and aware of everything that is happening. You want to know the number one thing I don’t ever want to see? A scalpel being inserted into my eyeball. Which is exactly what they do. And they slice up a flap on the lens of your eye and fold it back, which temporarily blinds you. While you are awake. And aware. And thinking, “Holy shit, what if they botch this up; my vision will be like this forever!” Then the doctor, who is just a glorified teen with a laser pointer at the movies, fires laser beams directly into your eyeball to cut and reshape your cornea. And you get to watch all this unfold. They actually strap you into a harness and prop your eye open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Well that ain’t gonna work with me. No, I’d be clenching my eyes so tight, I would bend the steel that frame was made out of. Shoot lasers into my eye, please...

But LASIK has some awesome benefits. You never have to wear contacts or glasses again, which is awesome. You could go into 7-11 and buy sunglasses. Sure, you wouldn’t want to, but you could. You wake up in the morning, you can see everything clearly from the get-go (this doubles as a negative when you wake up next to that woman you brought home from the bar last night who has more rolls than a delicatessen). You get to take that stupid letter code off the back of your driver’s license, though the DMV will force you to keep the picture you took when you still had glasses because they are assholes (good luck getting pulled over when your ID shows you wearing glasses but you don’t have any glasses with you). Probably the biggest benefit is that when your friend has a midlife crisis and decides he needs to climb Everest and tries to drag you along, you can say, “I’m sorry, but I have had LASIK, and it fails at high elevations,” which is absolutely true, so he can’t even accuse you of lying (and if he decides to buy a Porsche instead, he might let you drive it).

The most compelling reason to get LASIK is because glasses suck. The worst part about glasses is shopping for glasses. It is physically impossible for you to know how a pair of glasses will look on you until after you’ve bought them and had your prescription lenses installed. You’ll walk through Binyon’s or wherever, and you’ll see some glasses you like. You take off your glasses, and suddenly you are functionally blind. You put on the new frames, but they have some weird dummy lenses in them that just make your vision even worse. You’re trying to see yourself in a mirror, squinting to the point that your whole face has gravitated to your eyes, so you think every single frame makes you look like a rat. It’s a no win situation.

The way around this, of course, is to bring a friend. Someone fashion conscious. You know, a woman. Men won’t be much help picking out frames. “How do these look?” “They’re fine, let’s go, we’re missing the game.” Women will actually help you out. But you need to make sure that you bring someone with similar taste to your own; you don’t want to get home and discover you’re wearing those weird rectangular frames from the Geordi LaForge collection because “rectangles are what’s in right now.” Above all, you want to make sure that whoever you bring along is in a good mood. Be patient with them. After all, they’re doing you a favor here. If you start to snap at them, they will get upset. And chances are, they don’t want to make a scene in the mall. No, they’d much rather go the passive aggressive route where they can spend the next two years giving you a non-verbal “fuck you” every time you see yourself in your new Ruth Bader Ginsburg reject glasses. They won’t even feel remorse; “Well, you shouldn’t have snapped at me.” So always be nice to the person who goes glasses shopping with you.

As for LASIK, I think I’ll wait a couple years. I have no doubt they’re gonna come out with some report that says the radiation from LASIK causes eye cancer or everyone’s LASIK is gonna start failing or whatever. I don’t want to be a guinea pig. Even one with perfect vision. I think I’ll wait for it to drop in price enough that I can walk in and get it done at a kiosk in the mall. Vision is fleeting, but four thousand dollars can buy a lot of happiness.