Lighter boots

In Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated), the 9-year old narrator-protagonist Oskar uses the phrase "heavy boots" to describe feelings of depression/nervousness/sadness.

Some things that gave me lighter boots this past week:
Gorgeous sunshiney weather
Kellogs' Crunchy Nut cereal with strawberries and bananas in milk, every morning (=
Molding rabbits out of plasticine
Plans for picnicking-cum-studying sessions in Hyde Park during Easter hols
My "Poem for the Day" book from Sook Meng
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The average person falls asleep in seven minutes, but I couldn’t sleep, not after hours, and it made my boots lighter to be around his things, and to touch stuff that he had touched, and to make the hangers hang a little straighter, even though I knew it didn’t matter.
- Jonathan Safran Foer

But maybe the truth is that, our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets... My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility, the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind.

Salman Rushdie, "Shalimar the Clown"

2006

And memory was not madness was it, not even when the remembered past piled up so high inside you that you feared the files of your yesterdays would become visible in the whites of your eyes. Memory was a gift. It was a positive.

- Salman Rushdie in "Shalimar the Clown"

The stranger at the bookshop

Last Sunday after service at DUMC (which was very refreshing, by the way), me, my brother and his friend Nick dropped by SS2's Salvation bookstore. The guys wanted to pick up a few CDs, and I wanted to check out the prices of those small leather-bound bibles cos the one I have is in the Living Bible Translation, which is a little too contemporary for my liking. You get things like Saul calling out "Hello there," to Samuel and it causes many a giggle whenever I'm asked to read bible passages aloud in bible studies, I'm serious! Haha. Anyway, I saw one I liked but it costs RM69.90 I think - and I wasn't quite ready to part with that amount of money at that time. Which makes me feel guilty cos many times I don't think twice about spending that same amount of money on, say, a pair of jeans I like. Or, in terms of the pound sterling, a nice meal at Chelsea Bun. Lol. Priorities, priorities! *sigh*

But how I have, yet again, digressed! Hahaha. I wanted to tell you about this lady I met while we were both browsing through the Popular Authors section, right at the back of the bookstore. I noticed she was glancing at me every now and then but I thought nothing of it. After a few moments, she said to me, smiling, if you're looking for a book, that one is good, pointing at Phillip Yancey's What So Amazing About Grace. She said she saw me looking at The Jesus I Knew, also by the same author, and so she thought I might be interested in the book. And I told her, no, I hadn't read any of Phillip Yancey's books, although I'd heard of them a lot. For courtesy's sake, I picked up the book she recommended, and she went on to tell me, she isn't a Christian but she likes reading these books. Now THAT caught me by surprise. And so we chatted for a bit... she told me she was attending some sort of Christian exploration course at a church in Jalan Gasing, and that she had done a rather detailed study of the book of Mark (wah, put many of us Christians to shame leh!). I was heart-warmed and at the same time a bit tongue-tied by her openness in telling me these things - I mean, I'm just a random stranger at a bookstore, after all. She even asked me to recommend a book to her (knowing that I'm a Christian myself) and I quite sheepishly told her that I'd never read any of the books on that shelf before.... oops. Anyway, she picked up The Jesus I Knew in the end. But my point is, *happy sigh* it's truly great and encouraging to know that there are people out there who are so close to coming to know Christ in a personal way. I bet more people are open to the gospel than we think. The harvest is ripe indeed. What are we doing about it? What am I doing about it?

p/s= Oh, I forgot to ask her for her name. So I could pray for her. *sigh*
p/p/s (added as an afterthought)= 'The Stranger at the Bookshop'??? What kind of corny title is that?? Sounds like a title of a Nicholas Sparks book or something....

Random thoughts

Yesterday night must've been one of the worst nights of my life. I don't know what made it happen but I was suddenly struck by a really really bad fever - my body temperature must have been like 60 degrees celcius or something. Hahaha. Can you believe it, I was wrapped up in my blanket, double-layered, and still trembling from the cold. Well, the fever's subsided now but my body's still feeling a bit queasy. Blame it on the durians, lol.

Here's something I read in Ha Jin's Waiting which I found rather amusing:
She took a bite of the pear, which was juicy and fragrant and reminded her of a banana she had eaten many years ago.
Makes you go, hmmm....

I've been back for about 3 weeks now and my mom's already complaining that she doesn't get to spend much time with me coz I'm always away. Been to KL four times already and was in Penang for a couple of days as well. I have promised myself that I will not leave home for the next 2 weeks unless it's with my family. Me = good daughter. Hehe.

The thing I love most about an optical mouse is that you can use it just about anywhere, even on your thigh. =P Hahaha.

Reflecting on that email from Professor Shah, I now wonder to myself, since when did PASSING an exam become such a big deal to me? *sigh* I think I've developed Mastery-phobia, and to think I will have to go through it every year for the next 3 years! Oh dear.

Oh. Here are some pics taken in Malaysia so far. =)


Barathy and me


Traffic lights! Teehee.


Yamcha-ing at our favourite stall in Bentong. And yes, they are twins.


Me and Chewie!!!! *hugs*


In Penang. A showcase of ****'s bad parking skills. Hahahaha


At Gurney drive


Alan scratching his armpits; Justine, still the hiaoster; Alvin and his fifty-cents smile; Lay Ping looking good in her bronzy tan!


Yay! Now we have the same bag! Bought one for Barathy too, hehe.


Bunch of lamers. Tsk.

Book-tagged!

From Charlotte's blog

Total number of books I own: Alamak, you don't expect me to actually count them one by one, do you? Well, offhand, I'd say in the region of 110-120?

Last book I bought: See previous entry. *sheepish grin* Not my usual staple, mind you.

Last book I was gifted: "Conceptual Design of Chemical Processes", given to me by Chi Wei. Hahaha!But no, that doesn't count. =P J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit", given to me by an old old buddy, Hong Aun. And that was yearssss ago.

Last book I read: Dai Sijie's "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" and Philippa Gregory's "The Queen's Fool".

Currently reading: I have a (bad?) habit of reading two books at the same time. Currently, it's Mark Salzman's "Iron and Silk" and Erich Segal's "Love Story".

Five books that mean a lot to me: (in chronological order)
1) "Anne of Green Gables" by L.M. Montgomery. A girl's childhood couldn't possibly have been quite complete without reading this set of books!
2) "Gone With The Wind" by Margaret Mitchell. Definitely the longest book I've ever read, lol!
3) "Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt.
4) "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy. Possibly my favourite book of all.
5) Last but not least, the Book of Books, the Living Word, my Daily Bread - the Bible!

I hereby pass this tag to:
Sook Meng!
Jenny!
David!
Alan!

I was tired... I don't know why this should have come back now, except that I remembered how good it had felt to do nothing then and sit there resting my puffed-up feet, not caring or worrying over anything else. I'd been tired, but it wasn't the same as the feeling this spring: not the tiredness of long waiting and doing things month after month with no change. Nor was there the weight of all these things - I wished I were ten years younger, or ten older! If I were younger, they would not exist, and older - I could learn to accept them. I wished there were someone I could tell all this to. If it had been told, it would not have weighed me down so much. But I could not tell anyone here and go on living with them, knowing they knew and were thinking about it, staring at me with this in their minds. They would have been kind, I know, but kindness is sour comfort.

-Excerpt from 'Now In November' by Josephine Johnson.