movies

“Sever the ignorant doubt in your heart with the sword of self-knowledge.”

That’s what my fortune cookie said this evening, anyway. A quick search suggests it’s from the Bhagavad Gita, which seems an odd and unexpected source of fortune-cookie wisdom, but it is a nice sentiment nevertheless.

It ties in a little weirdly with a movie I watched this evening, the Korean film Mother, where the title character twice suggests acupuncture to “loosen the knots in your heart and clear all the horrible memories from your mind.” It was a weirder movie overall than I expected…though, having seen Joon-ho Bong’s previous film, The Host, maybe I should have expected that. They’re very different movies — Mother has no giant monsters crawling from the Seoul River and attacking people, for instance — but they’re both a little off-kilter. It’s an interesting movie, about the lengths a mother will go to prove her son’s innocence, but it was ultimately a lot stranger than I bargained for.

Other than that, the day was spent not doing too much. We had a redo of last Saturday‘s attempt to get the car inspected. This morning, my father and I encountered no strange traffic, no police cars blocking roads, nobody else at the garage to get the last of the inspection stickers. It went off without a hitch.

I can’t say the same for my attempt to buy eyeglasses this afternoon. Two weeks ago, I went with my mother to a discount frames warehouse her boss had recommended, and I made an appointment with their optometrist. The appointment itself went well, and my prescription hasn’t really changed. It hasn’t changed at all in the right eye in over a decade, which is where I have the astigmatism. (The left eye changes, mostly, just as it tries to compensate.) The optometrist asked me how long I’ve been wearing glasses, and she wasn’t at all surprised when I told her it’s been since I was about two or three. She said that, usually, when she sees an astigmatism like mine, the person with it has a lazy eye. Which, if my mother hadn’t thought to take me to the eye doctor when I was young — mostly because I was her first child and she worried, not because I had any symptoms — is something I’d probably have.

Something I definitely don’t have — and check out that seamless segue there — are new eyeglasses. Unfortunately, my prescription is beyond their capabilities, too thick or too high or too something to be done by them. So unfortunately I’ll need to have it filled elsewhere. I don’t desperately need new glasses, so I’m going to hold off until I can find somewhere with relatively low prices. The last time I bought new frames was a year or two ago, and both of them snapped in less than a year. Then one of the replacement pairs snapped. So I’m looking to find something that’s a cross between decent quality and decent price.

I’ll just have to keep my eyes open, no pun intended.

I read a little more slush for Kaleidotrope, though stories keep coming in. I was really glad to re-open to submissions in January, but I’m just as happy to be closing to them again tomorrow. I’ll re-open again in January of 2011, and I think I’ll keep the same reading period, more or less, going forward.

And I’ve been using the kneeling chair a little more. The padding on this one isn’t all that great — I guess you get what you pay for — so it’s a little unforgiving on my shins. I don’t know that my back feels any better for it overall, but sitting in it does seem to cause less discomfort than sitting in a regular chair. At least in my lower back. My shins, as I said, are kind of taking a beating.

And that’s it, really, for Saturday.