When my students gave me a homemade birthday cake yesterday they also gave me some balloons including this one that’s a portrait of me.

After looking at it for a while I realised something – I was puzzled by the presence of the glasses. And then it struck me – I’ve become a glasses guy – that is, it used to be if you wanted to draw a picture of me you’d draw a guy with a beard and maybe with long hair. I was a beard guy. I don’t wear glasses all the time, just magnifiers to read. In fact, since I only wear reading glasses, I’m constantly taking them off and putting them on, fishing for them and shoving them into pockets when I’m done with them. But I guess that now I do it often enough that my students think of me as a glasses wearer first.

Don’t get me wrong – I love glasses and in fact have a fetish for the bespectacled, but it’s jarring to see that I’ve passed that milestone.