01 tokyo mon amour : 'pizzicato five' retrospective
02 the picture book (contemporary illustrations)
03 a year in the life of facehunter 
04 nylon street view

Some of my old and new favourite titles. got the first, second and fourth book few years back and recently the third. Absolutely love the contents inside! All the photos are so inspiring! again, i got to know this book from a swag senior in my college cum a freelance street photographer for magazines. he's one of the many cool guys that i look up to because he has such a strong identity, knows what he wants and not fear of going for what he likes.

the book 'facehunter' is all about travel diary, face hunting, street photography and fashion capitals. all the pages are filled with so many photos and unwritten thoughts! it just makes me want to keep exploring more! though i have only started a few pages, i'm saving it for a nice tea session. next up is the first book 'pizzicato five retrospective'. bought it simply because i love the visuals in the book. not to mention the price is a fucking bargain so i thought to myself 'there is no way i am going away without getting this treasure piece' and the next thing i know, i'm sipping a cup of iced chocolate with the book in my hand. 'the picture book' was an unexpected buy. i had 200bucks worth of book vouchers to spend. after wandering around the bookstore for a good one-hour book hunting, i only managed to come up with 150bucks worth of books. to fill up the amount, i simply grabbed the book off a shelf, hoping it would be great stuff — more visuals less text, i had to admit in this case i'm more attracted to visual than text — because it was all sealed up in clear wraps. and to my utter surprise, it turned out to be my favourite among all the other books i bought that day. it's all about illustrations and has been a great help to my drawing class. 'nylon street view' is simply another street fashion book that i love collecting and flipping through over and over again. these are some of the things that make me smile all day and keep me feeling contented.
on a side note, i've been thinking a lot about getting a tattoo since my senior year in high school time. on and off, i dismissed the idea countless times because my mom got so furious whenever i brought this issue up. recently i had started considering about getting one for real. in some ways, it started making me wonder how or perhaps why i am so different from my peers. while all the other decent girls my age are shopping for mascara and eyeliner and lipsticks and pretty little dress, ready to impress the people they meet; i'm looking up photos of tattoos online and considering which part of my body to get inked, leaving the impression of a rebellious daughter. and to be honest i can see it happening in a year's time from now. i couldn't help but keep thinking about it over and over again until it finally hit me. i realized i can never really be a usual girl i'm supposed to be (among my peers), or the girl my mom wish i would be.

as i grow i keep picking up new and crazy addictions and 'hobbies' that is against my parents and myself. and to say the least, they're all very self-destructive. sometimes i spend my sleepless night hating the person i have slowly become and wonder what could have been if i choose a different path. i wasn't sure how long this lasted until recently i finally realized i got it all wrong. i am now slowly coming to the realization that these experiences are what makes me grow, and instead of hating, i started feeling grateful for having it all happened in my life which i believe will shape me into a better and tougher person, and of course, the memories made along these 'self-destructive' experiences. they're irreplaceable. every single one of them meant so much to me now that when i think back. a cliche but inspirational quote i saw today in instagram 'no pain, no gain' i couldn't agree more. i don't care what kind of person i am turning into or how much courage it took for me to deal with it because at the end of the day i learned something. i have my own say in life and it doesn't mean i have to live the way others' live to feel right about myself. i am embracing who i am today.

and lastly, a completely unrelated interesting fact that i find pretty true from the author of facehunter, Yvan Rodic,

"i've never, ever bought a travel guide — it's against my entire philosophy. there's something depressingly unadventurous about trying to reproduce someone else's route and visit all the trendy places a writer has described a couple years before."

Labels: Books, Uncategorized