the only thing worse
than bad memories
is no memories at all..
[dismemberment plan]
1.05.2006
Bonding With My Dad.
(I usually don't get along too well with my dad. We don't really fight often, but I find that I try to avoid him as often as possible because he tends to go into long lectures about fascinating topics, like: whether I'm eating enough, on time, at the right time; whether I'm getting enough sleep; how I am doing at school; why I spend so much money at Starbucks (I know, I know..); and my favorite -- whether I am pooping regularly.
In any case, I've realized that the reason why my dad can go on and on and on ad nauseam is because of the fact that whenever I hear his soft, socked, stealthy footsteps coming at me, I run. The man slowly accumulates things to talk about, and once I am in a helpless position, unable to escape, he lets it all out -- all of it at once, slowly -- until he is deflated, like a beach ball with a tiny hole in it.
Hopefully by spending more time with him, he will go easy on those hour-long lectures about whether I am pooping regularly.)
So today, I went out with my dad to a number of cheap opticians covered by our insurance to get an eye exam and a new pair of glasses. I lost my newish pair in an airport last year and my older ones make me look like Liam Neeson wearing goggles, so I figured it was due time that I attain a new pair. My dad had lost his glasses about two years ago (must run in the family) and has since been driving to and from work at night, blind as a newborn wombat.
My dad, ever the efficient strategist, devised an elaborate money-saving plan. First, we would swing by Lenscrafters in the mall, get insurance-covered eye exams for $40 each, then hit Pearle Vision, Costco, and Target to check out who has the cheapest frames. Ready? Break!
First stop: Lenscrafters. It was really weird -- my dad and I had decided beforehand that both of us would return home with glasses. Once we got there, he suddenly said, "I don't wanna. You do exam first. I will come back maybe next week."
What?? My dad has this strange idiosyncracy in which he suddenly backs out of plans for no reason. "We don't have much time. You do it first," he said. This vexed me greatly because the exam takes all of 20 minutes or so, and it was only around noon. Plus, I knew he would put off getting new glasses for probably another two years if I didn't push him in the right direction.
I grabbed one of the clipboards and made him fill one out. He grudgingly acquiesed after I insisted repeatedly.
Once the optometrist was available, I went first, and ran the gamut of tests including the incredibly terrifying part where a puff of air is shot directly onto your eye. That is the fucking worst. And not only that, the nice young lady who was doing it FUCKED UP and had to do it twice. Thanks.
After I came out, eyes weary and disconcerted, my dad looked up at my face from the waiting room chair and asked me softly in Korean, so that the people around us wouldn't understand, if I would come and stay with him during the exam.
It was then that I realized he was scared.
It's an uncomfortable feeling -- knowing that someone who has taken care of you feels frightened and helpless in the hands of practicioners, not knowing whether they will tell you that something is wrong with you or not.
There I sat, in a dim room, watching as my dad held what looked like a plastic rice scooper up to cover his eye and read off numbers from kaleidoscopic colored circles. I watched with a weight in my stomach as he put on a pirate eye patch and pushed a button whenever he saw a light in his peripheral vision.
"Did I get 100% right?" he shyly asked the girl, about his test performance thus far. "Hahaha," she responded noncommittally with a nervous laugh, avoiding eye contact, not wanting to offend him.
We moved on to a different room where the actual eye doctor sat him in a big dentist's chair, with one of those huge binocular-esque things that you can find on the Empire State Building, put a quarter in it, and look at the view of the city below. I held my breath as my dad read a line of letters, incorrectly.
He read the number "2" as an "N."
"That last one is a number," the doctor said. "Number? Oh... It look like... maybe.. 9?" my dad replied.
I was relieved when the doctor said the round bump on my dad's eye was normal and not harmful. A few horrible thoughts had been running through my mind: Cancer? Tumor? Eye surgery?
(Suddenly, I had a frightening thought -- I pictured my dad in a hospital cot, wearing a paper gown and matching paper hair net, helpless, frightened, old, and ill. I kept thinking -- in 20-30 years, will I have to take care of my feeble parents, rendered infantile with old age? Would I be changing their diapers and tucking them in?)
In any case, my sudden irrational panicky thoughts about elderly parental abandonment aside, we were both fine, much to my relief -- just near-sighted, so we left, with prescriptions in our pockets. Whew. Next step: finding frames.
Next destination: Pearle Vision. After deeming Lenscrafters' frames as too expensive, we went to their step-cousin store, Pearle Vision. Unsurprisingly, they were just as overpriced.
I watched patiently as my dad tried on a few pairs of women's glasses by accident. I think he liked a pair of Donna Karan's and I momentarily panicked. I could not let my dad purchase a pair of women's glasses.
"Hey Dad, those are $250." "Let's go."
We left.
Next yet: Costco. It was really surprising to me that besides the enormous warehouse full of value-sized packages of toilet paper and buckets of gummy bears, Costco really has some decent glasses. In fact, they had a bunch of the designer frames that we saw for about half price: DKNY, Versace, Armani, D&G, Prada, Calvin Klein...
It took us about 2 hours of trying on just about every pair of glasses on the racks before we both found glasses we liked. My dad had a sweet pair of plastic framed Versace's and I had these kick-ass black plastic Anna Sui's, and once the saleslady behind the counter stopped ignoring us, she told me to try my pair on so she could see how I looked in them. I did.
"Yup. Those don't fit you," she said, in a sassy matter-of-fact tone. "What? What do you mean?" I was pissed -- those glasses took 2 hours to pick. And I liked them. "Those. Don't. Fit. You," she said, slowly, as though I was retarded. "On your nose, specifically." "Well, I know I don't have much of a bridge on my nose but.." "-- I'm glad YOU said that first so I didn't have to." "But.." "Plastic glasses just don't look good on Asians. ... That's why Asian people really don't buy this style of glasses."
I was absolutely incredulous at that generalizing remark. Obviously this attitude-ridden bitch had never visited Flickr or read a Xanga (a.k.a. blog server for 99% of the Asian internet community), or maybe she'd never even SEEN an Asian person before -- because as far as I know, ASIANS FUCKING LOVE THE BLACK PLASTIC GLASSES. AND LOOK GOOD IN THEM. Obviously the bitch didn't know what she was talking about.
She went on for a while longer, speaking very loudly so everyone could hear, saying that my face was too flat (thanks) and that I didn't have enough of a nose to carry off a pair of plastic glasses. This pissed me off, not only because she was talking about my flat face (a.k.a. my Garden State Brickface), but also because I used to have a pair of plastic glasses and everyone said they were hot.
Since I didn't have the iron swinging balls to tell her off, I instead said, "Thank you very much," put the frames back on the rack, and nursed my wounds in a corner. Instead of saying, "Excuse me bitch, I would like to earnestly recommend that you go fuck yourself," I did the next best (and very juvenile) thing -- make a call on my cell phone and complain about the ordeal loudly enough so she could overhear me call her a dumb bitch.
My dad felt bad getting glasses by himself, so he scribbled down his Versace frame model number for future reference, and we decided to leave.
(Before we left, he bought me an ice cream bar [Costco sells this divine vanilla ice cream bar that they dip into fresh, melted chocolate and cover in crushed almonds -- mmm! For only $1.50!], which he'd never tried before. I told him to take the first bite, and instead of taking the stick and biting into it, he tried to break off a chunk of it with his fingers. ... My dad is the only person I know who has ever, ever, ever tried eating an ice cream bar with his hands. WELCOME TO AMERICA, DAD!)
So we left, with our hopes still high and with our bellies full of ice cream.
Next: Target. Yeah, this location didn't carry frames. We left.
Finally: Home. All in all, a very fruitless, frustrating, pointless journey through some crappy stores and getting humiliated by some stupid sassy black chick with a bad attitude and even worse salesmanship. But I'm so glad I got to spend the day with my dad, listening to him cracking jokes (which I've very rarely experienced and were actually funny as SHIT), watching him try on ladies' sunglasses, sitting with him during his eye exam and translating what the doctor was saying into Korean, calling him on his cell phone when he didn't come out of the men's restroom for about 15 minutes ("Hold on, Yaejina, I will be out in 10 more minutes," he grunted), and my favorite part of all, on the drive home, we made fun of the stupid obnoxious bitch at Costco:
"Dad, her butt was like a sideways peanut. Did you see that thing?" (I really have to work on my insults.) "Yes. She walk like a duck it is so big. She must eat so much."
We laughed and laughed. And I tried desperately to remember and hold onto everything that happened throughout the whole day, and how much fun we had together, because I knew days like this would be few.
[Peek-a-Foo]