There's a Stye in My Eye...

and it won't go away! Granted, I've only been dealing with it for two days, but boy is it a pain in the butt! Last spring it felt like I was constantly dealing with styes. For a long time I thought it was stress related, but then I looked at the Wikipedia entry for styes and found out that it is basically a staff infection...in your eye. And thus the root of the problem was discovered - images of wiping down my sweaty face at the gym with the gym's hand towels instantly flashed into my brain, making me both cringe and gag simultaneously. I stopped using their towels, and the styes went away.

So, one year later, you think I would know better than to mop my face up every morning with my current gym's hand towels. Call me an optimist, but I really thought it was safe to use the towels. But with MRSA popping up around our county, leaving one high school boy dead, I don't really want to take any chances. Needless to say, I will be buying my own personal pack of hand towels this weekend.

While the styes (one in each eye) are mildly painful, they are mostly annoying. I've been relegated to wearing my glasses instead of my contacts. At the tender age of 16, an American Eagle co-worker told me plainly that "I didn't have the face for glasses" and I have been scarred ever since. So, I usually try to avoid wearing my glasses in public at all costs. However, my friends and colleagues have been very complimentary about my "new look" - one co-worker even went so far to say that I looked like Mary Ann from The Babysitter's Club, whose Wikipedia entry reads like this:

• Appearance* Long brown hair worn in braided pigtails for first 4 books (cuts it short in Mary-Anne's Makeover), brown eyes, short for her age, wears reading glasses.
• Mary Anne is the BSC secretary due to her exceptional organization skills and neat handwriting. She also vowed never to get her ears pierced due to being traumatized by almost having her ears pierced by a fellow camper at Camp Mohawk.

I was quite the fan of the BSC, so being compared to Mary-Anne is really all I could ever hope for!