I almost went back to my self-help books addiction this morning. Pheww….lucky I scrammed before I reached for the RM58.90 book. I actually don’t remember the title but I know it is yet another Stephen Covey book for parents.
You see, I have plenty of time on some mornings like this beautiful Tuesday morning. After I dropped my son, I went to Tesco for some much needed groceries shopping. Before that, I stopped by McDonald’s to have an Eggstraordinary muffin or something and a free refill coffee. I like McD’s coffee but unfortunately, I cannot finish more than one styrofoam cup in one sitting and yet, too hou-lian aka not so pariah to ask for refill and bring it home. So, I sat there slowly waiting for my coffee to cool down in the blardy styrofoam cup which takes forever. I finished replying my fans’ mails, my enemies poison pen letters, read Malaysiakini, check my blogs (all on my mobile phone) and the coffee was still hot. KNN.
BTW, the breakfast costed me RM7.90. For RM7.90, I could have taken some nice dim sum with a nice iced Nescafe.
By the time I finished drinking, it was 10 am! Shit, I wasted one hour waiting for my coffee to cool down. I went up to the next level of Tesco and Popular Bookshop was opened already. I walked in because it is open. Usually, I go to Popular with my sons and I don’t always have the luxury to browse through the kind of books I like but only stick to the kids’ corner (or risk having my son coloured the pages or two of them fighting or people ‘steal’ my little boy).
With so much time on hand and no annoying crowds, I slowly go through all the self-help books. *sigh* It has been a long time since I bought a self-help book. There comes a time when you suddenly realise you are your own best self-help guru. I can tell all the self-help gurus to fark off. I know how to live my life without someone pumping ideas into me. I can pretty much be a normal person without some cracked up psycho who earned millions of dollars cheating idiots to tell me how to behave. So, yeah, I didn’t get Stephen Covey’s book on how to teach children.
Yet, I cannot deny that Stephen Covey’s books have helped me somewhat in being a fairer parent. Ching Ning Chu Thickface, Blackheart also planted a lot of Chinese cunning ideas into me. (I am not Mandarin literate so I missed out a lot of Chinese cunning ways, you see.) Zig Ziglar’s Christian ways of bringing up children probably helped in the sense that all my sons turned out pretty decent. Max Lucado and Philip Yancey too have helped me understand Christianity. Plus a lot more other books which I bought at flea markets.
Maybe, I have the best self-help book now. The Bible. That’s why the urge to keep up with Monk who drives a Ferrari or one of those dubious stuffs no longer attract me. I am now into biography. But I have yet to find a person I want to know deeper and closer. Maybe, when I am in the mood, I like to read about Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Lim Guan Eng….Oops, you mean he doesn’t have a book about him yet, issit? *makes mental note to send book proposal and be ghost writer LOL*
So, are you still in the cycle of reading self-help books like a hamster running around the wheels? Read, read, read but lead to nowhere.