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Limit of vision

Spending hours staring at a Japanese confidentiality agreement more or less sucks the desire to words right out of you. Sometimes these little legal things are interesting, I especially like listings of disasters (Sinkholes! Lightning strikes! Bubonic plague!) for which, should they befall party B, party A has no responsibility. This one was mostly about keeping confidential the personal information of boring people who do boring things. Yawn. Who'd want to know anyway?

It didn't help that the document was really blurry, to the point where even words I knew were hard to recognize, and that my contact lens prescription is out of date enough to add extra blur. Blurry with blurring on top. The character 書 (write), which I learned back in Japanese I, was reduced to a little blot and I only recognized it from context. Eventually. When you stare at blurry text word by word, context tends to drop by the wayside.

When I went to the eye place on Monday, I got a new prescription, but they had no diagnostic lenses for me to try since I have a weird prescription that they don't keep in stock. They ordered some lenses, which finally arrived today. Anticipating clear vision with which to translate my document, I drove across town to pick them up, but when I got home and put them in, I was disappointed to find that the new lenses make things blurrier, except close up. It's like having on reading glasses. Accordingly I will be heading back over there tomorrow to try out some more lenses, whatever they have in stock. This time I will try them at the place and not leave (dammit!) until I get some lenses that correct my vision. This is going to put me behind on that working and studying thing I was going to be doing, but I really want to see again. Squinting at my monitor and bitching at the idiots who wrote my C compiler will be much more fun without eyestrain.

School was a welcome break from all such concerns. I ran over to campus for my math class at midday. Everyone was speculating about the tests we took last Monday and if the professor could take off so many points that you could get a negative grade, but we'll have to wait to find out because he had only graded one of them. More sets and functions. I kept my eyes open.

On the bright side, the man was around this afternoon and even cooked dinner tonight. He kept it simple so it turned out well: angel hair pasta with basil, pesto, chopped tomatoes, and olives, and I cleaned up after. Since the "cooking" was mainly a matter of boiling water and opening things, it wasn't as bad as you might imagine, although the pasta boiled over rather spectacularly. I wish I'd seen it, but all I saw was the impressive aftermath.

At the moment, I'm watching a Japanese nature show. The theme is reproduction in the ocean and I just learned how sea cucumbers breed. All I have to say is, I'm glad that segment is over. These Japanese nature shows sure don't shy away from yucky stuff. The earlier story about the floating flowers was much cuter, as are the baby seahorses that are on now. Since sea cucumbers are eaten in that part of the world, they probably don't fall into the category of yucky stuff for Japanese people, or many of them anyway. I can imagine the intended audience of this show crying "Oishisou!" ("That looks delicious!") when the sea cucumber appeared on screen. I've always found the habit of saying oishisou at the sight of a live animal to be strange, but it seems to be the norm (in my comparatively limited experience) in Japan. I finally began to wonder if there's another meaning to the word, however, after I saw some girls on TV say oishii when they saw a camel at the zoo. A camel? I really don't think those girls were imagining a tasty roasted joint of camel. Maybe it's a knee-jerk response to the sight of protein.

I'm not sure this entry is disjointed enough, but I am out of words and my eyes are tired. Note the common thread of eyes and seeing. That's the best I can do.

726 words | February 27, 2004 11:08 PM | Lost in translation