Tuesday, August 07, 2007
i'm not exactly a book fiend, and many of you know that i have lost my liking for fiction novels and read plays instead. so that's why it's not exactly the easiest thing for me to convince myself to get out of the house on a hot day and scour the book stores of brash basah to look for my literature texts. well yesterday it wasn't so bad, because mum said she wanted to go shopping so i took a ride out, walked around for a bit and then headed off when mum went back for tuition.
my neck was cramped for to one side after a while because i have this habit of tilting my head to read the titles printed on the spine. i don't believe in pulling out books to read the titles because it will only frustrate me more to have to push the book back, knowing it's NOT the book i'm looking for. so essentially i cased out five bookstores looking like a retard, picking out books and muttering to myself. and oh boy it's a really long business, picking out books in a second-hand store. i guess you can't complain, for the price you're getting it at. i was fortunate that out of the 5 stores i visited, only one (the first) didn't sort out their books according to genre. but it didn't really matter, because that was the store i spent the least time in. the rest were pretty ok. i saw a collection of chekov plays that i was so tempted to get but didn't in the end, for some reason unknown to me. i found ibsen's 'hedda gabbler' with notes :) and joseph conrad in a pretty ok condition. paid $17.50 altogether. if there were people standing around at me at the time i found the new books, i think they would have been quite alarmed at the way i would suddenly jerk out of my head-tilting position and aggressively snatch the book from its place on the shelf.
***
today was part 2 of book hunting in NUS co-op. i have decided that i officially do not like any of my travelling routes to school because nothing stops remotely near my faculty and i have to walk for quite a while before reaching the backside of FASS. and yes, i only just reach the backside. taking another 45 minutes or so to acquaint ourselves with this new place we'll be calling 'school' soon only served to get the dark lord and me more frustrated, and i hold the architecture of the building responsible.
ponder on this: my squirt and i walked up six storeys
from the bottom to get the first floor. sometimes we get this place with a sign saying 'X storey', and we turn left only to see another sign saying 'X-1 storey' or 'X+1 storey', even though we can still see the 'X storey' sign a few paces away.
yeah you got it. everything in NUS is so user-friendly, from their websites to their buildings. wonderful. i think vernie will get hopelessly lost if she had to study here.
oh, and don't bother with the lifts. with the time taken to find them you would've progressed through two flights of steps and reached a place where you have to rack your brains to decide which sign you have to believe to get to your class.
ok the cool thing about NUS co-op is that pen-testing is still available! though the zig markers are 5 cents more expensive =( students are beggars, so beggars can't be choosers eh. i completed book shopping and was fortuituously delighted to see that Toni Morrison's 'Sula' and 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' were actually thinner than i envisioned them to be :) and Hiroshima is a play! yay yay plays galore! i'm trying my best to read what i can once through before things start to get busy. i'm almost halfway through hedda gabbler, and i'm reading with a conflicting swirl of repulsion and fascination as i accompany the twisted woman through her eventual demise. i think if there's anything that's going to save me from all my NUS misery, it's the re-discovery of my love for literature (even though i may bitch about it at times when i'm just not getting my stuff right) and of course, theatre. ting ting is doing fine in theatre, so i guess my tertiary stage exploits won't be too bad -- fingers crossed. i feel so weird calling it 'TS'...it's always been TSD this and TSD that...and now i'm just going to take the Drama out of it.
my squirt and i felt like crying as 95 bumped past NUH. for a while, the AYE looked just like the expressway next to the VJ tennis courts...
:'(
~Love
