The worst part about glasses is that you always have to throw them away. It doesn’t matter what kind—they just don’t last.
One day you buy a nice new pair of sunglasses, and the next day your boss transfers you to the Antarctica office during the six months of darkness. And just when your moon glasses come in the mail, you get transferred to the office at the brightest desert in the world.
You go to a New Year’s Eve party and get some glasses with the year over the lenses thinking you’ll get a whole year’s worth of wear out of them. But then it turns out people only wear those at the party and not at a dinner where you’re meeting a girl’s parents.
You go to a movie and get 3D glasses, and you’re excited because now you can see the rest of the world in 3D too. But then you remember the world was already 3D because you aren’t a cartoon. All you can do is see the world blurry.
Or you get new prescription lenses, but then you shine a laser pointer in your eyes for an hour because you think it might somehow get you high. And now you need a stronger prescription.
The worst offender of throwaway glasses though are the eclipse ones. You only get a few minutes before the eclipse is over and they’re useless. Or so you’d think. I’m done throwing glasses away, so I’m going to keep using them.
With the eclipse glasses, you can look at other sources of UV radiation too, because you’ll know it’s being blocked. I like to go to the pet store and stare at the lights over the lizards. That can get you a few more hours to days of use depending on how well-behaved you are in the pet store.
If you print a picture of your eyes out and stick them onto your eclipse glasses, you can make it look like you’re awake when you’re asleep.
Or you can glue sleeping eyes on them to do the opposite. You won’t be able to see much though because the fake eyes will be in the way. But you can still listen. You'd be surprised at the kinds of secrets people will tell when they think there’s a guy sleeping in the corner.
A lot of people in the olden days loved eclipses, like Shakespeare. So another good use of the glasses is to convince a director to add a character into a play, “The Eclipse Starer.” They’ll probably let you do it since you already have the glasses.
If you collect a lot of eclipse glasses that other people have thrown away, you can make some sort of sculpture out of them. But I doubt it’d be very good.
One of the cool parts of the eclipse is looking at the corona of the sun. But I like to use my eclipse glasses to look at a Corona in my fridge. It’s even better in a way, because it’s made of beer and not lava or whatever undrinkable thing the sun is made of.
You can also pretend you just got your eyes dilated and the eclipse glasses are from the optometrist. You can get away with a lot when people think your eyes are dilated. Like shoplifting and driving under the influence.
Now that I’ve thought about it, these might be the most useful pair of glasses I’ve ever owned. I think I’ll be wearing these every day until the next totality.
