"I Love Those"

When TigerBlog saw his son a week ago, the two of them had this conversation:

TB: "There is something different appearance-wise than at any time since before you were born. Can you guess what it is?"
TigerBlog Jr. (after 30 seconds of sizing up his father): "Nope. Got nothing."

That's okay. Nobody else noticed either.

Well, that's not true. One person noticed, and TB will get back to that in a minute.

TigerBlog isn't 100 percent sure how long he's been wearing glasses. He does know that he first got glasses back in the 1990s and, on the day he got them, Princeton had a home men's basketball game.

The first person he saw when he walked into Jadwin Gym with the new specs was, of all people, Brian Earl, who immediately said "hey, new glasses?"

TB will never forget that. New glasses. Technically yes, though he'd never before worn glasses. 

TigerBlog has gotten new lenses quite a few times since then, but the frames were always pretty much the same. In fact, for the last 10 years or so, they've been exactly the same. 

Until two weeks ago, that is.

For reasons unknown, TB decided that 2024 was the time to change his frames. They're radically different now. He doesn't know how to do describe it, but here are the old and new side by side. 

So that's the old ones on the left and the new ones on the right. And it's very stressful choosing new glasses, by the way. The woman in the eye doctor's office said "oh, I love those" to every pair TB tried on. To test her, he put on frames from the women's section, to which she said "oh, I love those."

Anyway, armed with his new glasses, TB went off to the NCAA women's rowing championships. Figuring that anyone who's known him would immediately realize that his glasses were different, he immediately set out to reconnoiter for a familiar face. 

He quickly saw four people he knew well in the first minute he was there: women's rowing head coach Lori Dauphiny, Princeton's Deputy AD Anthony Archbald, TB's Office of Athletic Communications colleague Joey Maruschak and Yale's longtime athletic communications person and former Princeton intern Tim Bennett. 

None of them said a word. When TB point his new glasses out to Anthony, all he got back was a laugh and a "never would have noticed."

When he got back to Princeton, he figured everyone would notice. Only one person did. And who was that? 

TB's colleague Andrew Borders. In a world of people who didn't notice, Andrew said "hey, new glasses" in the first 10 seconds.

TB would have guessed that Andrew would be the one.