Over the weekend, I did something I’ve never done before: I lost a contact lens while at someone’s house.  This has never happened in ten years of wearing contacts, which explains why I don’t keep a spare pair of glasses in my car.  Obviously, I have also not had laser surgery, because lasers are for:

Shooting stormtroopers

Fighting Ming the Merciless

Blasting cylons

They are not for:

Putting in my eye

Going anywhere near me

PUTTING IN MY EYE.

Here’s the thing about laser surgeons: nobody becomes one unless they’re a Star Wars fan.  This means they’re familiar--too familiar--with the Death Star scene at the end:

“Luke, this is Red Seven.  Your targeting computer is offline.”

“It’s okay.  I’m going to shoot manually.”

“Wait a minute--how’s that again?”

“Yeah, I’m not going to use a computer.  I’m going put the entire universe at risk by trying to lob a torpedo in a tiny, tiny area using only my faith in a mystical energy field.”

“Luke, this is Red Seven. You suck.”

This is my issue.  I guarantee that any eye surgeon in the business will wait until the anesthetic kicks in, and then wave the laser thingie around and rant insanely:

“HA HA!  I am closing my eyes and then I’ll turn on the laser beam!  The Force will guide me as I slice your cornea to ribbons!”

So anyway, I wear contacts and I lost one while at my friend’s house.  He was brewing beer and we were all drinking it--a lot of it--but I was going pretty slowly and had just eaten so I was completely sober.  Still, I quickly realized that losing a contact is a lot like being drunk:

Everything shifts and blurs as though your head is submerged underwater

.

You’re afraid of saying something that reveals your handicap, so you become very quiet and you smile at everyone a lot

.

You’re hyper conscious that everyone sees the world differently than you do, which makes you faintly paranoid.

The women of the house came home--a sister-in-law, a nanny, a few others--and one of them looked at us sitting around the table and said “I think the men are a few drinks ahead of us.”

I said, “I’m completely sober.  It’s just that I lost a contact lens.”

She laughed. “Now that’s one I haven’t heard before.”

You know when you realize that arguing will just make it worse?  So I just smiled in my faintly paranoid way and stared at my beer, which, due to my impairment, looked vaguely like the old ‘70s cartoon character Captain Caveman.

But now I have third-party validation that losing a contact lens is pretty much the same as being drunk.  And I’ve learned from this incident. Next time someone to go out drinking, I’ll save time and money by saying “Right on dudes! Let’s party!  But let’s not go to a bar.  Let’s just take out our contact lenses!”

And no hangover the next day.