You teens have it pretty soft. I say you should be forced at squirt-gunpoint to wear hard contact lenses for a minimum of one week or until both eyeballs fall out, whichever comes first.

But then, maybe you don’t know that once upon a time contact lenses were made from a substance purposely designed to etch a million tiny scratches in the surface of one’s cornea.

My hard contact lenses were blue, which proved a waste of money because the question I heard most was “Why are your eyes so red?” At this point the person would notice tears streaming down my face and feel bad that they had upset me. In truth, it was impossible to not weep continuously while wearing hard contact lenses. The body automatically produced this fluid as a way of saying, “You protozoa brain! Why don’t you buy a pair of glasses?”

An added feature of hard contacts was the opportunity to boil them each night in a nifty little electric sterilizer. If you happened to be in a hurry, you could boil one contact in the left receptable and cook a very small pancake in the other, though a flapjack the size of a quarter isn’t terribly satisfying. The morning I got the two sides mixed up didn’t do all that much for my image. Still, wearing a pancake in your eye does make a good conversation starter. You may wish to try it, but I doubt it.

Eventually, contact lenses became a real headache for me. The more books I read, the more my head hurt. God’s call to higher education involved leaving my contacts behind. My head stopped hurting, and once again I could focus on what was really important: the study of His Word.

Finally, a note about glasses and love. If I feel that my glasses are inhibiting romance, I simply remove them. Just like clockwork, my wife’s arms open wide to embrace me. She has to do this, because I can’t see where I’m going and I trip over things. But either way, the ploy works. You may wish to try it, but not until you’re married.