Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Last Sunday I bought a dozen books at a used book store while waiting to meet with my friend Joel at the mall near his place.

Ten of them were priced at fifteen pesos. There was an Encyclopedia Brown book by Donald Sobol, an Erle Stanley Gardner, two Agatha Christies, a Dorothy Sayers, Whipping Star by Frank Herbert and a Wizard of Id collection. The last three I'll get to later.

The other two were priced at thirty pesos each, a Paul Zindel and a Gordon Korman. I figured if I was going to pay twice as much for these as the others, they ought to be authors whose works I absolutely enjoy.

That still totals to less than twenty pesos per book, which to me is a great bargain.

One of the books was "The Last Unicorn" by Peter S. Beagle which I gave to Joel for returning to me a Dilbert collection I lent him (which I also got at another book sale for a very worth-it 130 pesos) that my co-teacher Dianne needed for her BUSCOMP class (Finally we get to the academic connection - the first one anyway.).

The second one was "Lysistrata", which I gave to my other co-teacher (and Dianne's housemate) Celia last Monday, because she had watched the play just the day before and could also use it for the Theater Arts organization in school she's advising.

What I didn't know was that she also required reading the play to her students in LITFORM.

This is where the third book comes in. It's "The Crucible". She also placed it in her class's reading list for the term, and she and most of her students had to shell out five hundred pesos for a copy found in the local book shops. She told her students that they could get a copy of the second book on the internet though.

And I showed it to her last Tuesday, and lent my copy to one of the students who hadn't bought it yet (having to wait for her older sister, who is financing her education, to give her the money to buy the book).

I'm just struck by the literary synchronicity that made me get the third book just because I also got the second, when I'd hear of someone needing it the next day.

And since I'm on the subject of books, I borrowed the book on Mathematical Methods and Trigonometric Applications from one of the students who I passed in Trig App last term and who I know also passed MM1 under Maila.

This is because Maila had the only evaluation or complimentary copy from last term in the whole faculty room, and there are three of us using it this term: David for MM1, my co-teacher for Trig App, and me for both.

Having the prescribed textbook from which I draw problems we can answer in class not only subtly tells the students that they have a better chance of passing if they have the book to study from, but also puts me on the same footing as the other classes in preparation for our departmental exams.

And that's it for today. Class dismissed.