i went shopping at parkway with my dad again after church today, and it all turned out to be rather a fruitful trip! :) the most major of my purchases are four books from mph--one j.d. salinger; three c.s. lewis, and the march/april issue of my everyday with jesus devotion from life bookshop. i had actually wanted to get that j.d. salinger (author of catcher in the rye, by the way, in case you were thinking he sounded familiar) book from quite a long time ago already, the first time i laid my hands on it at kino (first year in the u), but by the time i was actually prepared to buy it, it had already gone out of stock, so i thought it was pretty much like a miracle that i chanced upon it again at mph this afternoon, especially when i had previously searched for it there to no avail. and the c.s. lewis books... one of them's for a friend of mine :> one of them's for myself and the last one's for me too, but more importantly, for my sister's immediate reading. i really can't wait for wheel of time's book 11: knife of dreams to finally come out! i wanna own the entire set!!!

oh yes, and i got a teeny-weeny discount from life bookshop on account of my matric card haha! i sorta wanted to get a new niv bible, but after looking around for so long, i still haven't really found one that i really like... it's preferably small and flat, black leather-bound, and has those for-ease-of-flipping little cutouts... exactly like my current one lah, except perhaps with a little intro at the start of each book and all the small little details etc. etc. basically i just want all the wonderful things of all other bibles combined into one small thin flat one haha, but i don't really think i can bear to part with my current one either. and i've also made up my mind on what new backpack i want already!!! it's gonna be either a jansport vertex or a wasabi, black. my discman's finally gonna have an legitimate opening for *his* wires to peek out! (by the way hor, all discmen are male, wahahahahahaha!) okay, everybody can tell now that i'm insanely happy with my purchases today. now we know why they call it shopping therapy lah.

...but that's only part of the reason. i think the main reason's that i think God's still listening to me, He's still talking to me! although i still have a leetle bit of issue with the very, very last part of what the speaker (the same one at the camp last year) said at the sermon today. but she was very good, very annointed (according to my sis, 'cos i can never really tell, anyway). i still don't really see, why, if your neighbour dumps rubbish in between your house and his/her own, and he/she is a christian, why you should be the one to change yourself to accept him/her, given that if you tell him/her, he/she is either prone to correcting his/her own lifestyle a wee little bit, or will get angry and defensive and purposely do that again in the future to irritate you further. i mean, clearly, your neighbour is being unhygienic (which is analogous to "wrong"), and if after keeping silent about it, you finally try to xin ping qi he de discuss it with him/her, and he/she eventually responds negatively to good reason, who is wrong? really, i still don't get why you should keep it to yourself and change yourself to accept the unhygienic conditions of the corridor outside your home, which is totally none of your own doing?! all along i thought keeping it to yourself was the way, until people tried to re-educate me, and now somebody comes along and tells me something else again... totally confusing huh.

and anyway, my sister was going, in reference to the bible, in one of the new testament gospels, "what is it to you, what he/she does? it's ultimately between that person and God." so i was like kao-pehing to her that it does matter to me, 'cos it's unhygienic to dump rubbish outside my home! but she said it was just meant to be a rhetorical question. :< so why do i need to change??? that's my question! but anyway, i think that i don't really wanna go and torment myself by thinking so much again liao lah... i shall just continue to have my quiet time readings of "...wait, persevere in suffering, hold on to hope; forgive, make peace in dissent, love thy neighbour as thyself..." and if the case is really about my own obedience, then i shall try lah. hai. so miserable. but with holiness comes happiness. i jin liang lah.

and finally, before i end off this super long entry for today, something totally out of topic, i bumped into one of my secondary school classmates again. we exchanged handphone numbers and he said maybe we could go out for a drink sometime. i was a little taken aback for a split second, but anyway, he's changed quite a lot, in the sense that, in the short span of seemingly less than a year, he seems to have developed an angmoh slang and a bit of an angmoh dress sense, so i came to the logical conclusion that he's probably developed angmoh polite ways of speaking too. haha. i still think rather positively of him lah. :) and am endlich, the end.