Waste Your Time With Me

Libraries and bookstores, especially second-hand book stores seem therapeutic to me. Hmm, wait. I wonder why the word therapeutic is spelled like that. Why is it therapeutic and not therapic? Ugh. Back to the bookstores.

There's something relaxing with the delicate smell of old paper and the whisper and crackle of page-turning. Whenever I go to this store that sells used books, I can't keep track of time. I can spend a few hours there and won't even notice. There's a lot of reading materials to be lost into, and I don't even read in there. Every branch is too small a space for all the available items that I actually lift stacks after stacks of books to see the back rows. And the back rows to those back rows.

Whichever grabs my attention, I pick up and read the synopsis, or maybe not, then decide whether to purchase it or not.

I may have said before that I sometimes choose a book based on gut feel, but I realized that I used the wrong term. And I don't know the right one. In Tagalog, it's lukso ng dugo, and can be literally translated to uh, skip of blood? Jump of blood, or beat of blood? Something like that.

But the phrase is often used to address the feeling of familiarity or a sense of belonging with unrecognized immediate family members. For example, a rich woman has lost his newborn son. Two decades later, two grown-up boys show up, both saying he's the real son. But then the mother feels the lukso ng dugo with the first guy, so she chose against the second guy. There. Well, you probably realize that the phrase is often used in clichéd afternoon soaps. Hah.

So that's how I choose my books. And that whole selection process — at the right place of course, soothes me sooo heavenly. My thoughts go helter-skelter ninety-five percent of the time, as evident of this post I guess. But those old paperbacks and crispy hardbounds are the reason of existence of the missing five percent. When I'm with them, I can't think of anything else. It seems to provide a shield against all the other brouhaha in my head. Hence the therapy. Ooh-la-la...