So, feeling slightly bored after school, I went down to Kinokuniya (surprise, surprise) intending to wither away my life savings on books that I need to read. There is always a grating discomfort, like a knot in my chest, when I discover a book that I NEED to read but fail to appropriate. It's like a little blonde pixie braids my alveoli together whenever that happens, and when I finally choke to death, it will flit out of my half-open, frothing mouth to deliver a friendship bracelet that will somehow land the story of my life in Chicken Soup for the Book Lover's Soul or Paranormal Activity.
Anyway, my hand hovered around the S section and snatched Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 independent of my conscious, rational mind. After floating around the Literature, Sleazy Romance Novel and Game Fiction shelves, my hand snatched Camera Lucida and Poem of the Deep Song. Realizing the folly of my ways, (and my forgetting to bring the membership card that would have entitled me to fabulous and dazzling offers beyond my wildest bookslut fantasies,) I placed the books back, making impassioned, if not unrealistic, vows to return someday.
That day exists only beyond the horizon of my knowledge.
Overcome with despair, I ordered a plate of roast pork when I had lunch with my family at Zhou's Kitchen. It's a nice place with impossibly uncomfortable seats and stiff-lipped waitresses. It's the furthest my family can go with my grandparents, but my grandmother still takes half an hour to walk from one end of Novena Square to the other. The roast pork arrived in neat cubes that were accompanied with a lacing of mustard. The mustard was dry. About 748 other dishes arrived shortly after that, including Salted Crab with Salty Beehoon and Salt (tossed with a handful of spring onions as a sort of defeatist afterthought,) and a noxious stew of fermented soybean paste with vegetables (that necessitated a comparison to Japanese natto to reassure ourselves of the bourgeoise value of its near-formidable pungency.) Not every dish tested our thresholds of taste and adventure though; the spring roll (singular, because it was enormous) with wasabi mayo fascinated us, and the coffee pork ribs with toasted almonds were, for lack of a more suitable description, freaking nice. The ribs were meaty and the portions were generous. We were stuffed and faintly disgusted with ourselves.
After lunch, my parents (with granny in tow) went to the hospital to visit my grandfather, while Esther and I went for pre-examinations retail therapy because we would only visit my gramps in the evening slot, and because we needed to. She bought herself new TOMS! Good for her! People light up when they first slip their feet into the soft hugging fabric, and immediately forget about the exorbitant prices at the hipster-shoe monopoly that is rockstar. They rationalize that a poor child, likely to be really ethnic, like African or Asian, would receive a pair of shoes in their thatched-hut villages, and then fantasize about their philanthropy for the rest of the week. But amidst the several levels of exploitation, the Feel Good that comes with the purchase of a pair lasts as long as the shoes last. I love TOMS. I also love rockstar for bringing them in. The capitalization of the brand name is just a little annoying.
In the evening we visited my grandfather, who has been asking every visitor to give him ten dollars so that he might take a taxi back home. We are like, No but you can't be discharged yet, and he's like The hospital already sent us the bill, and I can go home, mostly vocalized in rough growls. It breaks my heart to see him disheveled in blue pajamas in this blue ward with clashing green curtains and the heaving, moist jowls beneath oxygen masks wherever I turn; no amount of store-hopping could ever complete me.
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