uhh i think chit's telling me to blog, so i am going to blog. oh she says she's bored with her daily fix! how sweet. i said "aww" when she told me that. ok moving on.

today i lost my glasses, bought lots of books, did no studying, walked around a lot under the blazing sun, got extremely tired and went for rehearsal and then came home and ate my brother's birthday cake.

1.
woke up late. was supposed to be at kel's at ten but managed to wake up at about 945 and then my mom needed me to help her with some stuff for my brother's party. so i got ready in a tearing hurry, wore my glasses and dumped my contacts case in my bag and left. my mom's friend dropped me off somewhere around acs(b), and it was almost 12. or 1145, and kel had to leave so i told her to just go ahead and i'd go straight to orchard. so i walked, in the blazing heat, through balmoral road and then realised that i had to see kel to return her secret garden cds which i unearthed from my pile of cds, and realised i'd had them for a considerable period of time. so i met her and passed her the cd and decided that my sloman was wayyy too heavy and i had this weird premonition that since i was no longer going to kel's, i would probably not get any econs done, and plus i badly needed a drink of water, so i called her and thank god she was still home and i went upstairs with her. and then her mum was very nice and gave me a ride to orchard.

2.
borders to wait for chit. wandered around, was tempted to buy several things but reminded myself that the whole point of the entire outing today was to go to the booksale, which means cheap books which means not borders prices. oh but i was ANNOYED when i saw that the bin laden book that vaish and i shared and bought in whsmith on friday was selling at borders for 19.95 which is a whole 6.50 less than the whsmith price! anyway picked up a few things to read, including an australian women's weekly (don't ask. i'm just a tabloid-reading freak.) and 'the invisible trade' which is about singapore's high-class sex industry. i think i've mentioned that before. i need to buy that book. it looks really interesting. i settled myself in front of the dictionaries and read the magazine, when in fact i should've read the invisible trade or 'snobs' by julian fellowes (who wrote gosford parks - so snobs is another one for the wishlist.) then chit turned up, and some security guard chased us away cos apparently no sitting on the floor. for god's sakes, the benches were all occupied and there were dozens of people sitting on the floor in other parts. ok maybe it was just no sitting on the floor in front of the dictionaries or something. so we went to the kids section, where you can only sit on the floor. in due time a woman came along and said only kids and parents can sit on the floor there. so i got pissed off and loudly said sometihng about how it was annoying. and then i just decided to leave, which chit'd been bugging me to do for ages because she was hungry, the poor child. on the way she bought a sandman calendar for daph, and on the way to the door after buying the sandman thing, i bought 30 dollars worth of stationary. well, a very pretty notebook for 24 and a file which ultimately proved useless, for 6 bucks. i considered returning the file when i realised how utterly useless it is. i'm still pissed about that.

3.
lunch at coffee club express. the prata wrap still rocks, but for the first time i realised it's thoroughly unsatisfying for a hungry person. stole some of chit's soup. but it was tomato, and not very good. coffee club does broccoli soup much better. and i think there was once they had leek soup. or maybe it was pumpkin. or potato. ok one of those weird vegetably soups. i love weird vegetabley soups. like the pumpkin soup at spageddies which has chicken stock in it and i'm going straight to hell aren't i but atleast i'll be well-fed and happy.

4.
bookfair. this proved to be a three hour affair. it was quite large, dusty and a FURNACE. because it was already boil-egg-able outside, and then you're placed inside this stuffy plastic tent. and everything you touch feels like it's burning up. seriously. after a while instead of leaning against the cardboard boxes to search inside, i resorted to bending over with a careful distance between my tummy and the box. which was tiring. and then i had no water and i felt truly wilted. after i picked up some random useless books at the fiction section, i went to the literature section and realised there were much better books there. ran into risse and the guy whom i assume is either pak or han. i forget. they look the same. he was quite helpful to chit, in ridding herself of a couple out of the thirty or so that she planned to buy. and then i also accumulated a huge bagful of books, but after the 30-dollar-borders expenditure my budget was considerably lessened. but then i'd picked up a lot of junk, and i exercised some extreme willpower (extremely hard for aparna especially in the arena of shopping, so applaud her) and got it down to 4 books i think. then chit left to draw money and GET DRINKS and i managed to pick up about 3 other books while left waiting and guarding her books. but then she helped me get it down to two. then daph arrived, and i wilted on the floor after gulping down an entire bottle of water. she looked through the books, then some guy (presumably guy in charge) came and apologetically told us not to sit or else everyone else would start sitting. although seriously, there were only four people sitting including myself and chit, and the floor was mostly really dusty and there was no space anyway except for the little place where we were sitting, but today was obviously not a day meant for sitting on the floor in places that sell books, so i sold out to The Man again, and got up. then the guy got very peeved at some kid who was standing on a book and looked around and asked whose child that was, and then announced to anyone who was hearing that the books weren't meant to be stood on. i totally agree, sir. he seemed rather exasperated, poor thing. after that i joined daph in her search for books, tore out the front page of a book because it had a really cute note on it from 1934!!! there were some really really really old books there. the process of the tearing of the page was quite funny. and then i successfully picked up another few books. i'm incorrigible. FINALLY after many detours/stallings we made it to the other end of the tent where the cashier was located, and paid for the stuff. i realised i could've just walked out without paying and no one would have been the wiser. because i was collecting my books in this big red plastic bag that they were using to pack the books in after people paid. this was because at the beginning chit and i asked some guy if they had baskets or something, and he handed us those bags. damn. i could've saved almost 40 bucks!
anyway, ultimately i think i paid about 36 bucks or something for the following:
f scott fitzgerald's short stories (am proud of this because it was the only copy i found, and everyone else wanted it after that)
woman on the edge of time - marge piercy
cat's cradle - kurt vonnegut jr (it looks a bit like someone left it in the toilet or something, but otherwise acceptable condition and it's a nice cover and was only 4 bucks)
breakfast with champions - kurt vonnegut jr
goodbye, columbus - philip roth
the good men - charmaine craig (it's da vinci code-ish, one of those medieval church-y controversial things, and it's and 'uncorrected proof for limited distribution' meaning it's one of the early copies they send out for people to review so they can put the reviews on the cover of the book when it's sold to the public, which all in all makes it a fairly rare copy and thereby quite cool.)

so i'm quite proud of that. although books make a heavy burden and my mom had to be shielded from them because she thought i was studying all day at kel's and NOT spending three hours wasting my ass at a bookfair. anyway it wasn't really THAT impressive a bookfair. i'd prefer a warehouse sale, because i like new books. stories of pansing always make me sad, cos it sounds like it was amazing. ah well at that point i was off having a ball in england so i shan't be sad.

5.
went to ps to eat. pretzel and mrs field's cookie. ate the pretzel in a thoroughly messy manner. licking my fingers and the cheese and everything. but sour cream and onion pretzels are messy cos the white powder which i think is onion powder flakes off everywhere. oh but i DID wash my hands before that, considering i was coming from a second hand booksale. and i put in my contacs, and hooked my glasses in my collar. as in, the v-neck thing. which is sort of the collar i guess. then i ate, and left for fine arts.

6.
fine arts. details quite irrelevant. important thing is that it was boring and i was very happy to see vaish (for once =P) because i was lonely. i hate fine arts. it's so unfriendly. although actually i saw a lot of people that i know. but it's all the 'hi how are you? fine! you? fine.' sort. and there were these two younger girls who're in uwc and have these heavy american accents, my mom's friends' daughters, whom i talked to for a while, who were quite nice despite the accents. one of them has a brother in rj. lipsynched during the rehearsal because they decided to go at breakneck speed for the rehearsal itself after making us wait for 1.5 hours before they rehearsed our bit. jeez.
vaish walked me out, waited twenty minutes for a cab. almost gave up and made my dad come all the way and pick me up, but just when he was about to leave to come and get me, i got a cab. yay.

7.
home, and i realised that my glasses've disappeared. must've fallen off in the mrt or something. and i only have one pair of glasses and contacts between me and relative blindness. meaning that until i get a new pair of glasses, i have to wear contacts from the time i wake up until the time i sleep. i feel sad. actually my degree's not that bad i think, but astig and usedness to wearing something that gives me perfect vision, renders me helpless when without those aiding pieces of plastic.
to make myself feel better, i ate a huge slice of my brother's cake. etoile, fantastic.
watched tv for a bit. realised that my contacts nowadays feel like there's nothing in my eyes. only that my eyes get more tired.

anyhoo chit's getting impatient now and hurling insults like that she's gotten sick of waiting and gone off to read the giver or something (although i suppose i can't compare myself to the giver in terms of interestingness) but anyway i'm getting tired as well. and my eyes. and my feet REALLY hurt. i'm going to go finish reading angels and demons and then sleep.

oh talking about angels and demons, last night i only slept at about 4 i think, because i was reading and getting freaked cos it's so spooky, so i decided that i had to press on till i finished the book because until i finished i wouldn't be able to switch off the light without fear. so i got to about 80 pages from the end, and finally succumbed to sleepiness and quickly switched off the light, shut my eyes tight and huddled under the covers and prayed for sleep to come quickly. haha, the other night same thing happened but i had a chicklit book nearby so i read that for a while to calm myself before going to bed, instead of going on a suicide mission to try and finish 250 pages when it's about 1am already.

another thing - 'vienna' is very alias-relevant! and daphne of all people pointed it out. to think, exactly a year ago it was ME the alias freak who related everything to alias, and in her words '[saw] everything through an alias-related haze'. things do come full circle. vienna's a beautifuuuul song.