The Holidays: Libraries

“
Dear Neil Armstrong,

I write this to you as she sleeps down the hall.
I need answers that only you might have.

…

By any chance
did you write her name in the dirt
when the cameras weren’t looking?

Or maybe you surrounded both your initials with a heart
for alien life to study a million years from now.

What is it like to love someone so distant?
What words did you use to bring the moon back to her?
What did you promise in the moon’s ear about the girl back home?
Can you teach me how to fall from the sky?

I ask you these things
not because I doubt your feat.
I just want to know what it’s like
to go somewhere no man had ever been
only to discover she wasn’t there,
to realize your moon walk could never
compare to the steps that lead to her.

”
— Mike McGee

***

This holiday, I completed much but the days still seem to have flown by. While this blog was, well, not very active, I did get active in my real life self. Sorta. Kinda.

I had been considering a job when my mum put two and two together. Instead of hiring a tuition teacher for my P5 sister, she could just hire me! Yay! How convenient! I shouldn't be complaining, since she pays and I don't have to go anywhere to report for work. One annoying, stubborn, bad attitude kid should earn me these perks, right? I guess...

With Os out of the way, I finally had the opportunity to get rid of the heaps of secondary school work. Out with the old and in with the new!

This ought to be on the previous post but it's my favourite part of my desk for obvious reasons. I got these babies from Legoland Malaysia, on which a post will be up soon! I almost got Gandalf and a Mordor Orc because those were all they had (yes, no Legolas, no Pippin cries), but I figured I had to have Samwise, no doubt about that, and Gimli for his connection to Legolas and The Hobbit.

Well,  unfortunately, or fortunately for me, I only managed to start work on my wall, after doing up the RC library:

***

Then gent's had Three Men in a Boat. No need to say how immaturely awkward that was to me.

The Pod @ Central Library, Level 16 was breath-taking. The dinner provided in appreciation of the GRLs was as great as the 270 degree view of the city and Kids Read, the weekly reading program I help out at, was well talked about since it was in collaboration with National Library Board. The Director of Initiative Reading told us about her efforts to encourage Singapore to read by forming reading clubs. She formed a taxi drivers' reading club and a hair-dressing reading club.

From memory: "It was difficult to start a hair-dressing reading club. I had to go around to the hair salons and give out books, but many of them said they had enough of reading while in school many years ago. Once, when I went for a haircut, I realised that by engaging the hair dressers in a conversation while they cut my hair, I could convey my cause more effectively. I went for a haircut once every three weeks to get them involved. Soon, I wanted to approach Jean Yip to help spread the word and it so happened that I knew Dawn and Jean Yip's teacher. She was very helpful and gave me their phone numbers. "Tell them their teacher ask them to read.""

It reminded me of our efforts to start the bookclub, which was really, just a small effort because we had devoted and enthusiastic members. Oh how we would talk about favourite books, do exchanges and even have lame nerdworm stuff of sitting in Bidadari Park sipping tea, eating grapes and reading poems aloud.

Listening to the various great things people had to say about reading in the videos made me perk up with excitement and filled my tummy with a warm fuzzy feeling of the love of books.