I don’t know about you (seriously, I can in all honesty say that I absolutely do not know about you), but whenever I come across a box full of old eyeglasses, I fall victim to a sort of mild compulsion. I feel the need to put them on. It’s not an irresistible compulsion; I could probably hold out against it, if I really wanted to. But why would I?

Perhaps you also feel that same impulse when you come across a box full of old eyeglasses. It’s possible. But like I said, I don’t know about you.

In any event, I did, in fact, recently come across a box full of old eyeglasses while clearing out some shelves in the garage. I don’t know how many pairs of glasses. Dozens, both men’s and women’s, both regular glasses and prescription sunglasses. And hey, I gave in to that compulsion. I gave in without any hesitation at all. I wanted to see what the world looked like through a series of lenses generated for other people.

[SPOILER: it looks blurry.]

And almost immediately I felt another mild compulsion: I wanted to see what they looked like on somebody’s face. But you can’t just ask somebody to sit and try on old eyeglasses that belonged to other people, all of whom are dead. You can’t ask somebody to do that just for your own amusement. I mean, you can ask them to do that, but it would be awfully presumptuous.

So instead, I turned to the Model of Primary Convenience. Me.

I don’t take many selfies. I know what I look like; I’ve had this same face all my life, so there’s nothing there for me to discover. And, in all honesty, I’m sort of uncomfortable taking photographs of myself (unless it’s a reflection in a window or something).

But there I was, under a mild compulsion, sitting at a table with a box full of eyeglasses and my Pixel phone in front of me. So, I put on the first pair of eyeglasses I pulled out of the box (women’s cat-eye glasses) and I took a selfie. And I looked at it. And it was sort of hilarious.

So I did it again, with a different pair of eyeglasses.

Here’s a True Thing about people who spend years shooting photographs: you sometimes stumble upon an idea that feels like it’s worth repeating. It becomes a project. Eventually, I tried on 25 different pairs of eyeglasses and took a selfie in each of them.

This wasn’t as simple as it sounds (and it sounds really simple). Lots of the glasses I put on were so strong they were disorienting. Others were so dark they were difficult to see through. I often had to guess when I was properly framed so I could press the shutter release (which, yes, I know, isn’t actually a shutter release; it was either call it a shutter release or the button, and the button makes it sound like I was launching a thermonuclear weapon).

I tried to maintain the same facial expression in all the photos because…well, I don’t really know. Some perverted notion of uniformity, maybe? Something to do with the notion of an internally consistent photo project. In any event, it was really difficult to maintain the same expression, partly because I kept wanting to laugh and partly because the glasses distorted my sense of reality to the degree that I often couldn’t see my expression clearly enough to maintain it.

Earlier, I wrote that I tried on twenty-five different pairs of eyeglasses and took a selfie in each of them. I probably tried on twice that many; I just didn’t take a selfie in all of them. A lot of the old eyeglasses were similar in design, so there was no point in photographing them. I mean, one pair of aviator-style glasses looks a lot like every other pair of aviator-style glasses.

A lot of those similar looking eyeglasses had radically different prescription strengths. It probably won’t surprise anybody to learn that trying on a few dozen different eyeglasses of various prescription levels will can you a whanging headache. So if I failed to keep my expression the same in all the photos–if, in some of the photos, I look confused or dazed or disoriented or dangerously unbalanced–now you know why.

I did all this entirely to entertain myself, of course. I’m sort of embarrassed to admit that’s my reason for doing a lot of the stuff I do. But having turned my personal amusement into something of a photo project–having shot a couple dozen selfies in various eyeglasses–I find myself thinking some of you might find it amusing as well.

Besides, I firmly believe in Stieglitz’s concept of practicing in public, of showing work that doesn’t quite meet your standards for what the work could be. He wrote:

[I]f one does not practice in public in reality, then in nine cases out of ten the world will never see the finished product of one’s work. Some people go on the assumption that if a thing is not a hundred percent perfect it should not be given to the world

Stieglitz talked a lot of bullshit, but he was spot on in this regard. I don’t feel any need for ‘the world’ to see the stuff I do, but I’m a firm believer in sharing anything I think somebody somewhere might find interesting. Even when it makes me look ridiculous.