Don’t you just hate it when *that* happens?
I mean, it’s your 21st birthday, so you spend quality time with your family in a place you’ve never been to together. You eat in an expensive restaurant — which you normally can’t afford — to use a 1000PHP (21.38USD) worth of gift certificate. You visit Fully Booked in Bonifacio High Street after your early dinner to look around for good titles, even if you don’t really have enough money to buy more than two.
You enter the bookstore, look to your left as you leave your bags in the package counter, and see a stack of “fresh from the box” books that sets your heart on fire. You’ve been wanting to get that title for the longest time. You’ve looked in every bookstore imaginable for that book, and you feel extremely lucky you’ve finally found one that sells it. That certain paperback version has been released just 2 months before; you never can afford a hardbound one so you don’t think twice grabbing a copy.
You spend two hours thinking if you should get it or not. You’ve read the novel already, no thanks to the illegal practice of distributing e-books (you don’t buy e-books anyway, so you think that’s a little fine even if you know it’s not). But you have a collection to complete, and it is the only book missing from your shelf (along with the new title that has just come out). So you buy it, because you can’t help yourself.
Fast forward one month later….
National Bookstore has a sale going on, and, of course, being a self-declared bookworm, you don’t miss the chance to get first dibs on the great titles you might see.
First visit is a success. A table full of 30PHP (0.64USD) books are just what you’re looking for, so you pick more than a dozen, never you mind that you’re about to use the money you’ve saved especially for the Manila International Book Fair. It’s already closing time, so you hurriedly grab those that have caught your interest — about a dozen of them — and you go home feeling accomplished.
Second visit a couple of days later, you’re hoping for more 30PHP titles but find none. So you go over to the 99PHP bin; they’re ex-library hardbound books that are still in great condition. One title glares at you from the table, and you grimace inwardly as you mentally sing “Nanghihinayang” by Jeremiah. (If you’re too clueless to get it, it’s the same title that you got on your birthday, only helluva lot cheaper and in hardcover.)
Now, I ask again, don’t you just hate it when *that* happens?
(Now you don’t want to publish this “I’m so smart I rock” blog entry you’ve written a couple of weeks back because you feel like such a complete dufus.)
* 299PHP = 6.39USD; 99PHP = 2.12USD.
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