Look me in the eye -- it's really clean

Apparently, I have poor eyelid hygiene.
I didn't even realize there was such a thing.
Granted, it's been a while since I covered this topic. I was a student at Oak-Land Junior High School when I tool home economics. This was back in the days before it was called family and consumer science. Although, if I'm honest, there was nothing either economical or scientific about anything I did there. Mostly I baked cakes nobody would actually want to eat and sewed felt pillows that were too small to be functional and too ugly to be decorative. I think there was a crude cutout of a dolphin on it.
One of the other things we covered in home ec had to do with personal hygiene, a topic of particular importance in a school filed with students all hitting puberty at roughly the same time. I remember learning about the importance of daily showers. And of washing all parts of the body thoroughly. And of paying particular attention to often-neglected areas like armpits and bottoms of feet. But I swear nobody ever told me my eyelids deserved any special attention. As far as I was concerned, they were just another part of my face, remarkable only for their ability to block out the light when I needed to sleep and to provide some degree of protection in the event of a Three Stooges-style eye-poking. That's all.
Apparently, I was wrong. Apparently eyelids are sensitive instruments requiring the same kind of specialized attention given to teeth or high-end swiss timepieces.
Last week, I got my eyes checked. In part I did this because it has been something like five years since the last time I'd seen an optometrist. In perhaps larger part, though, it was because the Nicollet County Attorney's office said I had to if I wanted them to dismiss a ticket I got last month for driving without the glasses my license said I needed.
I thought the fact I'd passed the driver's license eye exam again since then would be enough, but apparently those don't actually measure what you can see.
Actually, when you consider the way some people drive, they might have a point there.
Anyway, during the exam I complained to the optometrist about having a sensation best described as the corners of my eyelids had been sticking to my eyes. I'd been dealing with the problem by frequently either blinking or opening my eyes wide. This provided temporary relief and had the added benefit of driving my mom crazy. But it wasn't really a long-term solution.
According to the optometrist, my problems were the result of clogged glands in my eyelids. Apparently, the oils the glands were producing were not getting either onto or around my eye -- I didn't ask for details; for all I know it's the oil's responsibility to contract out eye-unsticking duties -- and the result is something called Blepharitis, which sounds kind of like the title of a Judy Blume book.
According to the information I was given Blepharitis is very common. Actually, it sounds like I've gotten off pretty easy. At their worst my symptoms included sticky and maybe occasionally tired eyes. Other symptoms include excessive tearing; red, swollen eyelids, crusting and scaling around the eyelashes and frothy tears.
In other words, ew. I mean, frothy tears? In other words, this is a condition that can make people look like the world's creepiest liquid soap dispensers?
The optometrist gave me something called eyelid scrub to take care of the problem. I'm not sure how it's different than ordinary soap, except it costs $13.50 per bottle. Getting diagnosed meant my insurance covered the visit, though, and saved me more than $100 so I didn't ask too many questions. The bottle claims the stuff is pre-lathered, which is nice because it saves me seconds of difficult work.
I'm a little worried the fact I have specialized eyelid scrub means I've become one of those metrosexuals everyone was talking about so much a few months ago. But I can't complain too much. My eyes feel less sticky. And there are hardly any eyelid scales.