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That is assuming that we are sane to begin with. Or that anyone is sane. We have serious doubts about the concept of normal.

Also, we did not have to stand in the long taxi queue (about 30 taxis’ worth of passengers) at the mall for four hours. We had options.

A. We could’ve walked home. We do this all the time. We like walking! It takes ten minutes. But we were wearing a long, wide skirt and for some reason we could not bear to get the hem wet. Why this was unbearable we don’t know, it wasn’t as if we had to wash it ourselves. We’ve learned that it is pointless to try and figure out why we do what we do. We are completely at the mercy of our brain.

B. We could’ve gone back inside the mall, lingered over coffee/drinks or watched a movie, and emerged two hours later when the queue would presumably be shorter. But we’d just had coffee. We don’t drink alone, it’s sad. And our only movie options were Man of Steel and After Earth.

We enjoyed Man of Steel but didn’t feel like watching it again. Not that we don’t find Henry Cavill adorable. (Have you seen I Conquer the Castle with Romola Garai and Bill Nighy? He was half his present mass and already adorable.)

At dinner the other day we had this delusional conversation with our friend, Mrs. Gendry. (We made a deal—we get all the Lannisters, he gets everyone else. Only the Tywin line, by the way, not Uncle Kevan etc and esp. not the ones related to Freys, yucch. Officially the psychotic little shit is a Baratheon.)

– We can’t go out with Henry Cavill, he wouldn’t fit in that doorway.
– Sayang, nag-text na, eh.
– All his clothes would have to be custom-tailored.
– How terrible.
– We’ll take Jamie Dornan from The Fall. He kind of resembles Henry, but is compact.

If we’d watched an M. Night Shyamalan flick and hated it, we’d have only ourselves to blame.

And if we had gone back inside the mall and emerged two hours later, we would’ve had to fall in line anyway.

C. We could’ve called our sister to pick us up and drive us home, but that would mean getting her to leave the office before midnight and she actually likes being in the office till midnight. We’re not the weirdo in the family.

D. We could’ve called friends who live in the area and asked them to drive us home. And they would, because our friends are wonderful. But we would do that in an emergency, and boredom does not qualify as an emergency. We just didn’t feel like bugging anyone.

E. We could’ve walked towards J.P. Rizal or Estrella and intercepted a taxi before it reached the queue. A lot of the people in line were doing that—walking off and hijacking cabs. But we had decided to commit to the concept of queueing up. Not that we’re judging the people who left to intercept taxis. (Although they could’ve been discreet and picked their friends up a bit further away instead of stopping at the head of the queue, which smacked of “Belat! Nakaisa.”) Maybe they were tired and had kids to go home to and homework to do. We weren’t tired at all, and our cats have an all-day buffet so we were sure they weren’t hungry.

In short, we stayed in the queue out of sheer perversity. It wasn’t that bad, we had our phone, music, and a book to read.

We have friends who really like Alain de Botton. He’s engaging and clever, but we’ve never managed to get through his books. After a few chapters the engaging-and-clever loses its charm and we feel that we are being played. (Nambobola ka na! Umberto Eco gives us the same impression, although he has more intellectual tricks to fall back on.) Essentially he writes swanky self-help books. However, we could not pass up a series called The School of Life, or a book called How to Think More about Sex. Who would not benefit from thinking more about sex? (It’s not how often you think about it, but how you think about it.)

The School of Life series is available at National Bookstores (the Philosophy section), Php475.

And the design—we want a book that looks like that.

So we stood in a taxi queue for four hours, reading How to Think More about Sex. Engaging-and-clever was exactly what we needed. De Botton kept us entertained in a situation where we might’ve run amok. His book doesn’t say anything new, but it reorganizes familiar concepts into attractive categories. It just zips along. Admittedly we skipped the part that has a diagram of a human penis because we didn’t want the people standing behind us to get too entertained. (Hey where’s the schematics for the human vagina? And does oral sex really cause cancer?)

We read the whole book in two hours. Then we sent out emails. Then we listened to music. At the 3-hour mark we were ready to walk home, but doing something we should’ve done three hours ago would totally invalidate the three hours we had just spent testing our patience and make us feel even more stupid. So we stuck around way past the edge of reason.

The patience training has kicked in! Our cats have trained us well. And we got something to write about, even if it was nothing really.