Eating, Praying, Loving

I love bookstores but since I realized my eyes do not enjoy reading fine print, hesitations on buying a book were bigger than ever. Thus, I haven’t read as obsessively as I used to.

(There is the obvious question of why don’t I get myself a pair of glasses. I had experiences with glasses. At least three pairs have been sacrificed to my clumsy hands. In two weeks or less, I’ll get tired of wearing them and I will eventually lose them without enough sympathy to find them. They cost a fortune and it figures I am not worthy of another one. I have opened my mind to getting contact lenses but my mother thinks they are killing machines disguised as calibrated sheets of transparencies. She said my eyes will completely give out if I use contacts. Lasik, on the other hand, is very interesting but seeing something on TV outside the capital of the Philippines rarely means its readily available.)

So now I’m in Jakarta (No, I’m not getting a Lasik.) and my sister owns the book by Elizabeth Gilbert called Eat Pray Love. I saw this already on a bookstore in the Philippines and in Singapore and every time I do, I would feel my hand digging down for bills in my pants. Hesitation kicks in and I decide that reading something this thick would probably draw my eyeballs out.  Holding that book now feels amazing because I saved a few bucks for patience, a virtue I sorely lack. I started reading it yesterday and I’m barely half-way through. My reading is of approximately thirty minutes of reading, then a millennium of contemplation.

 

The pauses are not only brought by the aching eyes. Eat Pray Love is a memoir of a woman’s travel to three countries – Italy, India and Indonesia – in an effort to find contentment. I got triple excited when I read the introduction and knew that the book was actually a journal of the author on her journey last 2006, simply put: its all real. The book is slow paced and she has wrote, in detail, all the life lessons and tidbits of thought she accumulated in every part of the world she is in. I pause because I need time to digest the magnitude of reality she shares in every few chapters. The book is amazing and is just perfect for school breaks.

Last August, a movie version was released starring Julia Roberts. I did not watch it because I lacked reason to do so. Tomorrow, me and my sister (who already read the book in full) are going to watch the movie.