Went absolutely stir crazy. Got fed up with my pasty self cooped up in my musty old room indulging my obsessions and trying to get some work done at least. Bored out of my skull, which is strange because once my idea of perfection was being solitary but now, solitary has become so booooring! Does this mean I've become more mature... or less?

Too much electronic stimulation, can sense my brain turning into total slush. Just had to get out and do something, buy something. But it's hard to be creative in your activities when you're so out of touch with what's happening in town. So I went to Kino at Bugis Junction to look for some reading material for a change. Why there? I swung by Sim Lim (again) to see what's up first. Staggered through SL Square with an armful of Xeroxed flyers advertising the best buys of the day but there's still nothing I want. It's impossible to avoid the people (I'm being charitable, they're touts actually) hanging around the escalators and escape without being handed something. While you're trying to avoid one, another will stick a flyer in your hands when you're not looking! The establishment should scatter recycling bins around the mall where we can stuff all these unwanted materials. I just folded my stack up and dumped them in the trash. A serious shopper KNOWS what he wants.

Thankfully, Kino stocked the books I was looking for, Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" (DVC) and Gaiman's "Neverwhere." I didn't expect to find the latter since I've not been able to find it before on other book shopping expeditions, but there it was sitting in the Fantasy section instead of Fiction (interestingly, Kino displays all fiction titles under the Literature section, how undiscriminatory). Brown was so much harder to find. I thought there would be piles of his book around since it's such a bestseller, but it wasn't in any section I looked. Then I happened to pass a restocking trolley just about to be wheeled away by a Kino staff and there it was! I grabbed a copy before it disappeared from sight. Now, I'm not so sure about DVC. My interest perked after Broken Sword and it's allusions to Templar mythology, but Brown is starting to read like a crime mystery novel although I expected more. Well, I'm committed already and I'm determined to finish DVC before I begin on "Neverwhere." It could take weeks since I can only read while in transit. Whatever. I need the stimulation of the written word every now and then.