I heard today that Sasuga Japanese Bookstore will be closing down as of tomorrow. This bums me out to no end.

Back in my senior year of high school in 1995-1996, my interest in Sailor Moon had reached fever-pitch and I would literally buy anything that bore the mark of Sailor Moon. Looking at the yellow pages (because there wasn’t easily-accessed internet for me in those days; it was my buddies with computers and AOL/Prodigy who got to go online and look at stuff), I discovered that there was a Japanese bookstore right over in Cambridge. Excited, I headed out there alone after school one day in the winter. Not knowing how to read Japanese, I asked someone if they had Sailor Moon comics and where they might be. They showed me and I was overwhelmed: twelve volumes of comics?!? Who knew?!!? Not me! I bought volume 12. I’d return back to fill in the gaps; I think nearly all of my Sailor Moon manga (save volume 2; I bought that at Million Year Picnic) came from Sasuga. I’ve bought a lot of comics from them over the past 14 years, mostly when they had a brick-and-mortar store in Cambridge (and their short-lived store in Brookline; I bought Codename wa Sailor V volume 2 there). When I’d see them at anime conventions, the fellow who runs their booth and co-owns the store would always recognize me and wave. I mean, hey, I’d been buying books from him and his wife since I was 17.

Anyhow, I’m pretty sad to hear this. Granted, the Boston area’s been without a brick-and-mortar Japanese bookstore for a few years (they shut down their store to concentrate on online sales and sales at anime conventions as the nerds became their main customer base- like me!), but I always knew that if I wanted to find Dolly Dolly or artbooks at an anime convention, I knew where to look. Man, this sucks. Their prices were pretty god, they had good selections, they would special-order for you (this is how I acquired all of The Big O comics in Japanese, plus The Big O novelization) and they were just overall pretty great. Keep your Kinokuniya: I and many other nerds and native Japanese speakers in this area had Sasuga. Now we don’t have them after July 5.

Sasuga, you were great, and I will miss you. I feel very guilty for not buying stuff from you at Anime Boston this year. Thank you for making it easy for nerds who don’t know a word of Japanese to acquire Japanese comics easily!

It’s time, once again, to search for a pair of warm-weather shoes. I have an ongoing battle with plantar fasciitis. It was dormant for a while thanks in large part to not being able to walk for very long distances due to my gimpy-ass legs, but as my legs have been more capable of walking, I’ve been doing more walking, and as a result, the plantar fasciitis is back with a vengeance. As such, I am looking for shoes – sandals, preferably – that are as cute as they are comfortable.

To that end, I Googled “plantar fasciitis cute shoes” or something to that effect and read a couple of articles about brands who can fit this criteria. Off to Zappos, and I came up with a few possibilities:

Christian, my husband, got me a totally sweet Betsey Johnson necklace that I’d, oh, maybe sent him a link to at some point in the past couple weeks. Maybe. HE IS A GOOD AND COMPLIANT HUSBAND! He listens to my wishes. Betsey Johnson was one of my favorite fashion designers in high school (with clothes in the realm of affordable for a girl in high school with no living expenses and the occasional hundo slipped to her for a birthday or something along with p/t job money). As I’m on the tubbier side, I can’t really wear her stuff these days, but jewelry I can do. She did make some plus-size stuff for Torrid, which I hope she continues to do as long as I am not able to shop at her store on Newbury Street in Boston, ha ha.

He, in turn, received a book about the films of Steven Segal and a Fantastic Plastic Machine CD from me. We didn’t go bananas (hey, we just got a new car, what the hell more do we need besides less debt?) but it looks like we both secretly got presents for each other, haw haw!