being the mall rat that i am, the mall has never intimidated me.

never, and that never includes that time when i found myself lost in bangkok with my cellphone back at the hotel and without that little card which everyone told me to carry around just in case i got lost. i simply shopped, shopped, and then shopped some more until i was ready to stop panicking then i whipped out the map from my bag and tried to make sense of where i was and how to get back to the little dot that was my hotel.

i thought that as a bar review, i was pretty much ahead of the "mall" thing - meaning i get to go to the mall on a regular basis. it also didn't quite help that in the beginning i used to study while waiting for my brother in the mall, then eventually, i began studying in the ateneo library which was a hundred meters from the mall. the mall - much like the way cigarettes were to others - my last connection with sanity. no mall, not even ever gotesco in commonwealth (which so so reminds me of easy, my third favorite seatmate in the whole wide law-school universe), can ever attempt to scare me out of my wits.

but then yesterday was a different matter altogether.

i went to the mall with one purpose in mind: get food, get money, and shop. and for once, it was necessarily in THAT order.

however, i took one look at the huge sale signs in front of the stores and the fact that i hadn't eaten anything all day, save for a small bowl of soupy snaxx went out the window.

and so i checked shoes out, mentally tagged those i wanted to buy, and made a mad dash to the atm.

and the line was long.

and so i decided to eat first, cause i was feeling faint.

and the line was long.

and somehow, for the first time in my life, i got so disoriented in the mall. a mall, which in the past, i had memorized like the back of my hand.

i don't know if it comes from the fact that the bar is a week away. or, it comes from the guilt that one gets when looking at still unhighlighted pages of commercial law review. maybe i just feel guilty cause i know that i don't need another pair of shoes.

but what the f*ck, i'm not going to let that experience cower me into submission.

mothership, here i come.

p.s. thanks calvin for giving a whole new meaning to blogging via phone.