Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Warmed-over Wednesday


I was inspired recently when my assistant editor came up with the idea to do Retro Tuesday at Real Teen Faith... an opportunity to re-post some of the most popular pieces.

Cool, I thought, I can do that here. We'll call it Warmed-over Wednesday. It doesn't sound as cool, but trust me... it's as cool... or as warm... as it can get. This column was first published in March of 2007.


Back in first grade, my best friend pretended to be near-sighted so she could be a "cool" kid and wear glasses. She confessed to me, in a secret moment on the playground, that she could see the blackboard clearly without her coke-bottle lenses. She just wanted to be
different, she said.

I guess if being different meant tripping over her own feet and going cross eyed, her new glasses definitely made her different.

Sometime during middle school it was no longer cool to be different. Being different meant being called a nerd. It was all about being the same as everyone else – fitting in. We had to wear the right jeans, the right lip gloss, and definitely – above all else – we had to NOT wear glasses.

By that point, my best friend had trained her eyes to
adjust to the coke-bottle glasses so that she needed them to see
clearly. The easiest solution was contact lenses. Out with the old –
in with the new. You'd better believe we celebrated.

We decided, one winter night, to destroy her old pair of glasses. We tried dropping the hefty black frames from the second story bedroom window. We tried burning them with fire. We tried crunching them with our feet.

They were indestructible.

That was 16 years ago. So imagine my shock when that same pair of glasses showed up on a celebrity's face last week. The about.com website reported that Scarlett Johansson showed up to receive an award wearing "nerd glasses" – glasses that looked just like my first grade
best friend's glasses. Maybe Johansson wore them because she was accepting the award at Harvard University and felt she had to fit in.

I'm not sure her reasoning. In any case, the title of the about.com article is "Nerd Glasses: New Trend?"

Which made me wonder… could this be a new trend?

I did an Internet search (and we all know the Internet contains the answers to all the deeper questions of life) and discovered that yes,
hairboutique.com informs us that "intellectual nerd" glasses are back in. "Sullen Girl" at her site "Fashion for the Clinically Depressed" (http://anagnorisis.typepad.com) says, "Seems that people besides myself are actually wearing nerd glasses on the street." And Joseph Manez, from jsonline.com, says "The wearers can laugh at the quirkiness of their clothes while at the same time embracing it. One has only to look at bowling shirts and nerd glasses..."

There you have it, folks. Nerd glasses are the new trend.

Finally, we've caught up with all the first graders out there who just want to be different.

****

Question 4 U 2 Day:

Do you, like me, secretly own a pair of nerd-glasses?

4 comments:

banderclip said...

I have a pair of tiny granny glasses that I wear sometimes...I prefer contacts so I don't have to keep pushing the glasses up. :D Nerd glasses never looked cool on my face sadly.
Christy

Arianna said...

LOL! My oldest sister used to have a pair of rose-colored, HUGE glasses back in the 90's. Not her best look :)

I wear glasses, but thankfully mine are decently attractive, and not TOO nerdy :)

Unknown said...

Ouch. What a bummer that she ruined her sight just to be cool. Did she regret that later on?

Bare Naked Blog w/Bekah said...

Christy - Ahh, come on, I bet Nerd Glasses look adorable on you. :) We demand pictures!

Arianna - VERY funny about the rose colored glasses. I'm sure yours are adorable!

KM - I'm pretty sure she did! I don't know if she wears contacts now, as I haven't seen her in a long while... but it's likely :)


I know all about waiting--for the right guy, for high school to end, for my boobs to come in (two out of three ain't bad).



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