How to Unpuff Your Eyes

Last night I cried (well, sobbed, to be honest) for a while about leaving. About leaving my boyfriend, specifically. I don't like how that sounds, but I can't think of another way of putting it. Anyway, my point is that I woke up today looking more terrible than I ever have in my life. And having most, if not all, of my crazy years behind me, I've woken up looking pretty rough before. This was much, much worse. I was going to take a picture, but it was too awful. Both of my upper eyelids were incredibly swollen, and my left lower lid was doing something crazy too. Honest to God, it looked like I had been punched.

I'd been planning on going to yoga, but that was now not an option, so I set about figuring out how to bring down the swelling. I started with cold spoons. This was a technique that my ex taught me; apparently he was a big cryer, though I rarely saw him cry. I've never been that jazzed about the cold spoon thing though, I guess because I grew up in Michigan and am well acquainted with the wet skin frozen to metal phenomenon. And eye skin is so delicate!

But, I started with that because that's all I knew.

The spoons don't stay cold for very long, so I googled away and learned a few more tricks.

Next step: wrap ice cubes in paper towels, hold them your eyes. That one seemed like it worked pretty well, but got a little too cold and I felt like I was freezing my eyeballs.

My final treatment was getting a bowl of ice water and dipping a washcloth in it and resting that on my eyes. That was the most comfortable and I felt it was the most effective, but it was also the last thing I did, so who knows.

Now you know.

By the way, the whole time I was doing this, I was watching the Today show which ran segments about Graceland and the PCH. I'm going to Graceland on my way out west and I've always wanted to do a PCH trip, so I kept cheating and taking the ice cubes off of my eyes to see the tv. I walked the dog and then went shopping and no one asked me what was wrong, so I think all the eye treatments did a passable job.