The mascara story goes like this

5th grade consisted of:

- the aforementioned perm/bang combo
- 3" thick lenses engulfed by heavy maroon plastic frame
- the fact that the frames were large enough to dip below my cheekbones and encroach upon the upturned corners of my mouth deserves its own bullet
- i was already nearing 5'4". i spent the next 15 years growing two inches, but when i was 10, i was a giant. in girth and stature.
- although i appreciate them now, my superman-long eyelashes gave me more than a little headache


So, sitting in class one day in 5th grade (mind you, I was right about 10 or 11 ... WAY TOO OLD TO DO THIS) I had reached the breaking point with the eyelashes brushing my glasses. It's not so much the downward part of the blink that's annoying. In the downward stroke, the eyelashes press past the eyewear and sort of invert their upward curly shape and have to lay on their sides at the blink-bottom. On the upward blink stroke, it can happen that the eyes can open entirely, while the inverted curl of the lash is caught on the eyeglasses. Thus, requiring the user to pull off the glasses or stick ones fingers behind the lenses to free the lash from the lens.

Let's add to this that my mother had me wearing mascara when I was 10 so that "people could see my beautiful eyes" from behind the pair of coke bottles on my face.

So in the blinking process, the downward blink caused mascara (aka, bat guano) smears splatterpainted in a line across my lenses, and the upward blink left me unable to open my eyes completely.

It was on one such occasion (blink, blink. strain to open eyes without using my hands, shoving my greasy fingers behind the lenses to release the lashes and leaving a smear of bat guano and palm grease in my wake) that a light bulb went off in my head.
Bathroom pass in hand, I sprinted down the hallway with the dreaded safety scissors tucked in my pocket (lord knows, I didn't run with scissors in my hand) and proceeded to whack off every last lash on both my eyes.

A happy blinker, I was.