The Moving Bookshop

[flemmings]

The unreliability of Japanese language bookstores in New York, and of Google itself, is beyond anything. Last November I spent a morning frantically trying to find Kinokuniya near Rockefeller Square when it was long moved to Bryant Park. Yesterday shinymonkey spent a morning frantically trying to find BookOff on E 41st St when it had moved to 45th two weeks after I was there last November: with no notice of 'about to move' then or 'have moved' now, and with Google maps then and now showing both stores as being where they were not.

The exercise resulted in a migraine and she had to leave without visiting Kinokuniya, and so was unable to get me more Campus word cards on which to write kanji and vocab. Unable to believe that the Koreans don't have some version of this very basic educational artifact, I went down again to the Korean stationary store and pulled out my last Campus word card pack. 'Do you have anything like this?' The owner pointed to a low shelf. Well well. What I had taken to be Blue Bear erasers or something, turned out to be Blue Bear word cards, with the ring detached and hidden underneath the cards. Being knock-offs, the paper is thinner than the sturdy comforting Campus version, but still. I have word cards again.

Saw the eye doctor today.

The good news-- the excellent news-- is no sign of glaucoma or macular degeneration. The bad news is yes, I have a cataract in my right eye, which is probably what's blurring stuff. 'Everybody has cataracts,' says Dr. Xia dismissively. 'Not everyone has them operated on. My 95-year-old father has cataracts and is still good to drive.' (I look at seemingly 40 year old Dr Xia and wonder if he's a menopause baby, or if he's actually 55 year old Dr. Xia and I can't tell Asian ages.) 'Yes, well, will *I* have to have it operated on?' 'Oh, probably yes. Or maybe not. The brain can adjust to an amazing amount of stuff.' He's much keener on prescribing different kinds of lenses for each of my eyes to deal with my astigmatism than in talking about surgery, so I gather there's no rush on this in his opinion. Which is fine but. Am a Boomer and think I should be exempt from this sort of thing automatically.

Go and mope Boomerishly at daycare cook who broke his glasses Tuesday and has been operating blind himself with myopic me to help him and read ingredients in case we give something with sesame to the sesame-sensitive kid etc. 'It's treatable by lasar these days, isn't it?' he says. 'Not like the 70s, you know.' 'Oh,' say I consciously, because my father in the 70s is exactly what I was thinking of: bandaged eye for weeks and weeks. 'Is that so?' So yes, well, yes. Maybe not so bad.

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Well, that's good news to hear. I do the hourly drops anyway for dry eye. ^_^

Dr. Xia (which is actually my guess at what his name is-- it might be Sieh for all I know) is cheerful and efficient and generally reassuring. But I think he might be the contact lens man at the outfit, replacing the guy I'd been going to for years. OTOH he does do my tests, which Dr Searle was in the habit of letting slide for years.

My complaint is that this outfit (Winston Koo and associates) now insists on yearly checkups if I want my lenses, at $125 a hit. This annoys. But if that's what the going rate is (and it might be the going rate for contacts only), and you're not being held to ransom for lenses, then yes indeed convenient, as in Bay and College.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

And the reason why I'll never learn Chinese is that the man's name is in fact Hsiung.

If you want to ask them how much for a glasses exam, they're at 416-977-4949.

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

If it had been in kanji, you'd have had no problem with it, you know.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I'd have read it in Japanese, or tried to. As it is, mandarintools has no notion of what a hsiung might be, either because it's Wade-Giles or (less likely) because it's Cantonese.

The word cards are 8x5cm or 3x2 inches, and thank you very much. The animal ones are cute, but I can't fit my regular rows on them and must use them for individual kanji, which is wasteful. So just the rectangles, thanks.

ETA-- Wade-Giles it is. 雄 is what I get when googling Hsiung, xiong in pinyin.

[i-am-zan.livejournal.com]

Good news about the eye ... but if you do need the surgery don't put it off for too long.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

TBH there's so much that blurs my eyes these days, like allergy goo and such, I don't realy notice the cataract blur unless I look for it.

There's also the little detail of a suitable time not to be able to read, which isn't any time before December.

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

LOL! I would have been happy to send you Campus cards if I had known you needed them. Though my office has moved, I still walk down there weekly for lunch.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Well, if you do happen to walk down there some time, could you pick me up some more? The pastel Korean ones are a mite larger than I care for.

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

Of course! Remind me of what size you want, they come in 4 or 5 different sizes, and if you want any of the animal shaped ones.