You know you are getting old when:

[Zombie_61]

The next step for me is going to be knowing when to give in and get bifocals, while resisting the opticians trying to upsell me varifocals at more than double the price....

I found the transition to bifocal lenses to be far less difficult than I had expected after hearing some of the stories from people who had reached that particular life event long before I did. Bottom line--if you need them, get them. Same goes for the varifocals should they become necessary. Vanity is foolish.

 

[tonyb]

The next step for me is going to be knowing when to give in and get bifocals, while resisting the opticians trying to upsell me varifocals at more than double the price....

I’ve been wearing glasses since age 15 and bifocals for at least 20 years now. Maybe more like 30. Had cataract surgery in my left eye in 2004, which corrected my distance vision so well that I no longer need spectacles to legally drive. But I wear them anyway. My distance vision in my right eye is better with them and my close-up eyesight is better in both. And besides, I’ve long been accustomed to having these little windshields over my eyes and I’ve come to prefer it that way.

 

[Edward]

I found the transition to bifocal lenses to be far less difficult than I had expected after hearing some of the stories from people who had reached that particular life event long before I did. Bottom line--if you need them, get them. Same goes for the varifocals should they become necessary. Vanity is foolish.

Not vanity in my case, more financial prudence.... varifocals are four times the price of single-vision lenses, which is why my optician pushes them so hard.....

Bifocals may be the way forward. I occasionally have to take the glasses off to read something very close up, though middle distance and long are both fine.....

 

[tonyb]

… you find virtue in a little spandex in your blue jeans fabric.

 

[Edward]

I’ve been wearing glasses since age 15 and bifocals for at least 20 years now. Maybe more like 30. Had cataract surgery in my left eye in 2004, which corrected my distance vision so well that I no longer need spectacles to legally drive. But I wear them anyway. My distance vision in my right eye is better with them and my close-up eyesight is better in both. And besides, I’ve long been accustomed to having these little windshields over my eyes and I’ve come to prefer it that way.

About fifteen years ago I briefly toyed with the idea of going for laser surgery. After getting contacts for stage and costume wear, I wore them out and about a fair bit. Then I discovered glasses I actually liked (rather than having to choose from whatever was fashionable in the optician's....) and that made all the difference. I always said that if I suddenly had perfect vision I'd keep my glasses anyhow and just have plain glass in them. I like wearing them, though I'm much less enamoured of being dependent on them.

 

[Zombie_61]

Not vanity in my case, more financial prudence.... varifocals are four times the price of single-vision lenses, which is why my optician pushes them so hard.....

My apologies; that's what I get for assuming everyone world wide is as self-important as most Californians.

 

[Who?]

My apologies; that's what I get for assuming everyone world wide is as self-important as most Californians.

Oh my!

 

[Fifty150]

She was born a few decades late for socialist, hippy counterculture. The product of a middle class home in the suburbs, with 2 income earning parents: she went to all the protests and rallies driving a BMW which Daddy paid for, and wearing the most expensive clothes from the mall. She would have been the perfect recruit for a cult. Jim Jones Resort in Guyana. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Spa Retreat in Oregon. She is "mostly" vegetarian. Except for caviar, lobster, sea urchin, abalone, oysters...... and Wagyu. She has a bumper sticker that says "NO FUR". But she owns over $10,000 worth of leather purses. Her self-guided, holistic, spiritual journey system includes fortune tellers, crystals, and MDMA.

I told her dad, "she is perfectly capable of intelligently making life decisions".

He held my gaze for a moment...... then laughed out loud.

That's when I knew I was getting old. This guy, was my age.

 

[tonyb]

About fifteen years ago I briefly toyed with the idea of going for laser surgery. After getting contacts for stage and costume wear, I wore them out and about a fair bit. Then I discovered glasses I actually liked (rather than having to choose from whatever was fashionable in the optician's....) and that made all the difference. I always said that if I suddenly had perfect vision I'd keep my glasses anyhow and just have plain glass in them. I like wearing them, though I'm much less enamoured of being dependent on them.

Be thankful to live in the age of relatively lightweight plastic lenses. When I started wearing spectacles they weren’t “glasses” in name only, as most are today. Those glass lenses were HEAVY, and the pads dug into my nose, sometimes rubbing it so raw that the sweat made it sting.

 

[tonyb]

… you clearly remember women wearing nylon stockings with seams running up the back.

 

[Fifty150]

Girls now get tattoos to make it look like they are wearing stockings with seams up the back.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I used to wear seams quite a bit until I came home from work one day to find an extremely creepy note in my door from an anonymous fetishist stalker. That was when I bought a gun.

As far as glasses go, I can't handle bifocals -- they trigger migraines. So I have two pairs of specs -- the regular rimless ones for distance viewing and driving, and a pair of horn-rimmed Harold Lloyd-type glasses for reading. I got two different styles so I'd be able to identify them by touch and not grab the wrong ones. But no matter what the situation I end up wearing the wrong pair and misplacing the other.

 

[Trenchfriend]

We had the class reunion topic here, years ago.

Man, I'm more than ever happy, that I never took part, I tell you!
Today, I met a class mate and we had a nice 15 minute talk and I heared from her for the first time, that they really invide teachers to this reunions.

HAHA!!
So I still handle the thing this way: F..k that s..t!

The basic point is, that there's simply nothing to talk about, so I don't see the sense of meeting.

 

[Zombie_61]

Ah, class reunions. I have to agree with Trenchfriend, they're mostly a waste of an evening. My wife and I went to our respective "10 year" reunions and, except for a few people, we spent the nights talking with people we had maintained contact with during the intervening years.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've never been to a class reunion. I don't care if I ever see any of those people ever again, and I hope that I don't.

 

[ChiTownScion]

My 50th reunion from high (preparatory) school is this month. Would have liked to attend, but it's a cross country flight, at least 3 nights hotel, a car rental... and a wife who hates "trying to relive old times" events. They hold them every 5 years as large multi- class "hooray for everybody" events, so having an event just for us would have been nice. So, I passed.

They planned an evening of drinks at a bar- restaurant owned by one of my classmates, but it was marked "graduates only." An all-male class- so they slammed the doors on the wives and gf's. That really nailed the coffin lid on it for my wife. Oh, and since I don't golf, THAT event wasn't a draw either.

I found that there are a lot of classmates whom I like a lot better as adults than I did back then. One guy whom I loathed back then became a co- worker for decades, and we grew quite close. I am grateful for his support on several occasions. OTOH, my closest high school friend never even answered a letter I sent him about a year ago concerning a possible meetup. I get the impression that he now sees himself as "too good" for we mere mortals. Ironic how that plays out sometimes.

On the whole reunions tend to be positive experiences for me, but I figure that I saved over a grand by staying home. Driving two villages over is a lot different than a transcontinental trip. Had I known for certain that the men of my social circle would be attending I might have been less ambivalent.

 

[tonyb]

I’ve maintained contact with several people I met in my teen years, but none with whom I attended high school. The last high school classmate I could honestly call a friend died in 1995. AIDS did him in. Had he survived another year or two, he might have gotten the life-saving drug therapies that didn’t arrive quite soon enough for him. Rarely a day goes by that thoughts of him don’t cross my mind. He was a good one.

 

[tonyb]

I used to wear seams quite a bit until I came home from work one day to find an extremely creepy note in my door from an anonymous fetishist stalker. That was when I bought a gun.

As far as glasses go, I can't handle bifocals -- they trigger migraines. So I have two pairs of specs -- the regular rimless ones for distance viewing and driving, and a pair of horn-rimmed Harold Lloyd-type glasses for reading. I got two different styles so I'd be able to identify them by touch and not grab the wrong ones. But no matter what the situation I end up wearing the wrong pair and misplacing the other.

I have a theory as to the origin of that particular, um, fascination.

 

[Who?]

At my 50th it was interesting.

There were people whom I recognized immediately, people whom I did not recognize at all, and people of whom I had absolutely no recollection. Neither they nor their names rang any bells at all.

Of the non-recognized ones, in many cases I asked the organizers “Is so-and-so here?” and they would point the person out. In one case I sat on the school bus with this guy every morning and night, and when I saw him I could not believe that was who he was. It was like a completely different person.

Strange, and slightly upsetting, but I was glad I went. I did not go to any subsequent ones.

I found my classmates to be ever so much more interesting as adults than they were 50 years prior.

We moved away right after I graduated, so I had not seen any of them for those 50 years.

 

[tonyb]

Gotta believe that the enduring popularity of “American Graffiti” is in its portrayal of a late adolescence/early adulthood people *wish* they had.

I have some fond memories of my teen years, but more unpleasant ones. It wasn’t until my teens were all but behind me that I grew comfortable in my own skin. I suspect many others would say the same.