2 months and a day...not bad.

anyway. thanks gayle for ur confession of, uh, love. haha. OKAY i love u too. :) joce, u can come over, anytime. most welcome. :) (wow i must be feeling nice to put so many smilies). n kare, we SHOULD go bac sometime! jus once. really wanna see wat it's like..i miss the familiarity there.i wonder if things have changed..but it always felt like homecoming whenever i do go bac, u noe wat i mean?try asking ur ma again! i'll go if u do!

i jus finished reading jodi picoult's book Perfect Match, abt a prosecutor who wrongly shoots a priest whom she thot had sexually assaulted her son. (i jus did a summary like this for jon, which i think is pretty nicely summarised, so decided to add it here. hehe)it's a good read, some poignant ones that make me linger around awhile before moving on. i like the way she writes in small parts, and not long chapters. there's always something to ponder about after each part, and i like that. i especially like this part, from 5 yr old nathaniel's pt of view:

"it happens when i am trying to come down the stairs superfast, my feet ahead of the rest of me. one of the steps just isn't where it is supposed to be, and i fall really hard onto the railing where hands go. i hit the part of my arm that makes a corner, the part with the name that sounds just like what it is. L-bow.
the hurt feels like a shot, a needle going in right there and spreading like fire under the rest of my arm. i can't feel my fingers, and my hand goes wide. it hurts more than when i fell on the ice last year and my ankle got as fat as my leg. it hurts more than when i went over my handlebars of my bike and scraped up the whole front of my face and needed two stitches. it hurts so much that i have to get past the ouch of it before i can remember to cry.
'Moooooooooooooooom!'
when i yell that, she can come quick as a ghost, the air empty one minute and full of her the next. 'what hurts?' she cries. she touches all the places i am holding close to myself.
'i think i broke my funny bone,' i say.
'hmm.'she moves that arm up and down. again. then she puts her hands on my shoulders and looks up at me. 'Tell a joke.'
'Mom!'
'How else are we going to know for sure it's broken?'
i shake my head. 'it doesn't work that way.'
she picks me up and carries me into the kitchen. 'says who?' She laughs, and before i know it i am laughing back, which must mean i'm going to be okay after all."

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i was changing my sheets last night, and was amazed at how simple and quick it has become, over the years. no more soft toys to clean, bolster to undress and dress..ok mayb not much quicker. i looked at my bed, and realised how empty it has become. now all it has is a pillow, and my blankie, pinned to the edges of my mattress, an age-old habit/tradition since i have a habit of kicking them off in the middle of the night and i believe my mother got tired of having to wash them every so often. there used to be about eight palm-sized soft-toys sitting beside my pillow, leaning against the wall that functions as a guard in case i fall off the bed. then there was my fat bolster lining the rest of the wall and leaving me with little space to toss when i sleep. years after being savaged by mosquitoes almost every night, enlightenment dawned and i painstakingly reduced the number of soft toy inhabitants. when it still persisted and the moskies started to attack my sisters as well, i removed them completely. okay, there were occasional visitors, but they're usually gone after another family of moskies decide to camp with them. i suspect there is a conspiracy. anyway soon i weaned myself of my bolster, becos of the one trip i took to i-cant-remember-where, where there wasn't a bolster to hug and boy did i have a hard time getting to sleep. so there and then i decided to be independent of that fat thing. fat guy stil stayed on my bed for a few years, i dont know why, when all it does is lie there and accompany the wall. until one day, after struggling to clothe fatty did i realise its redundance. so out it went into the guest room. now, as i look at my spacious bed leaning against the slightly yellowed wall, i realise that there's so much of my childhood i've put aside as the years went by. such that the only indication that a child once lay here is the sleepy, drooling teddy bears that lie silently on the sheets of my bed, along with its matching pillowcase, and of course, my blankie.