*Archived from October 2008*

Time has pretty much become meaningless in my new world on the other side of the planet.  Minutes stretch into hours, which stretch into days, which stretch into months … There is no real point in worrying about how long I will be in Australia.  I’m here and that’s the most important part.

So please don’t hold me to it, but I think it was about 3 weeks ago when I met up with My Flattie and we did 4 km of walking in the sand on Bondi Beach.  A couple days later, just in time for my newly painful shin splints to put a significant damper on my catwalk, I decided, in complete stupidity, to walk the 2 km from school to the train station because ya know … it’s FUN for every step to hurt.

Halfway to the station I decided it was time for a little detour.  My backpack was making me sweat (eew gross!) and my shins had begun screaming at me umm … right … moving on…

What I meant to say is a bookstore, with a golden halo hovering delightfully along the perimeter, called out my name. “Daisy! Daisy! You MUST visit me.”  Who am I to decline an offer from an angel?

And that’s when I discovered “Popular Penguins.”  And a light shone down from the heavens like “aaahhhh” and … hey listen – I told you in the last post I’m going crazy.

Ok so for real though – yo – I’m totally digging the “Popular Penguins.”  And as much as I joke about divine intervention … I do believe that life has a funny way of teaching you things. I will write more about it later but “The Consolations of Philosophy” by Alain De Botton was one of the books I bought that day at the bookstore and I have learned a LOT from it.  It’s fascinating and it is actually helping me cope with life so far away from home. I would have never discovered, read or bought the book if it were not for the joyous Popular Penguins – classic books at affordable prices.  And I would have never discovered the Popular Penguins if my brother hadn’t given me the heavy duty backpack, or if I hadn’t met up with My Flattie a few days before…

I think that’s pretty cool.

So to share with you one of the things I’ve recently learned from my new book, I present to you a quote from the great philosopher Schopenhauer:

Much would have been gained if through timely advice and instruction young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.

Oh yeah.  That’s right.