So after the uber awesome festival, I spent the following weekend (i.e. last weekend) at the J1 retreat and let's just say it was an experience. Hahaha it felt more like a retreat for me than for the J1s. But I'm really grateful for S, C, M, and K because face it, I'm not the most sociable person, and it was really cool to meet people I've known but weren't too familiar with and just be accepted in my state of weirdness and awkwardness and bad puns and lack of sustained energy haha. I'm really grateful for them because social interaction with the ra-ra crowd would have killed me if not for these people. Also, aiyah, the J1s are so precious. Like I'm not that old, but when I meet younger people esp. people like my catechism kids I just get so hopeful for them. It's like they've got their whole future spread out in front of them and it's so big and wide and free and then I just feel that I love them even though I don't know them.

Anyway, retreat especially confession really made me feel God's overwhelming love. Yes I slept at 3am, but on the bright side, after I'd confessed my sins, the priest looked at me and said "You are lovable." Wham. It hit me in the face like a brick and I started crying very very messily hahaha. The thing is, he wasn't trying to declare undying emotion for me. It was wonderful because it was so matter-of-fact: You are made to be loved. You can be loved. You are loved.

Sometimes, ok, most of the time, I take a long hard look at myself and go meh. Sometimes I feel like despairing because I feel I'll never be good enough spiritually, academically, physically. Other times, I feel really good about myself and the sunshine and blue skies are my private pathetic fallacies. Anyway, it felt really good to have a stranger tell me "You are lovable". In my head I was all whatt? You don't know me and yet you think I can be loved? Even after I'd told you all my deepest secrets?

So yeah, I was crazy moved. I'm still very moved. In the moments when I lose confidence in myself, when I feel like I can't trust anything because #arts (and #relativity), I tell myself the un-embellished truth that God wanted me to hear: You are lovable. And that's enough for me.

In other news, I went to Mustafa centre on Wednesday with a friend. Yay for my maiden voyage! I'm trying to come up with a pun for Mustafa, but I keep thinking of the "I MUSTACHE you a question" pun hahaha. Mustafa and wide? Mustafa-and-away? I'm supposed to write a field report about it, but ugh.

Anyway, we entered mustafa from Verdun Road (more or less a back entrance) so we didn't have to get our bags checked or whatever, and well it wasn't very overwhelming. There were lots of jewellery and watches and calculators which were cool and very shiny but not my thing. Then we climbed up a section to soaps and clothes and it felt like CK in Chinatown. But then we went to the Food section and aisles and aisles of food stretched out before my eyes. It was amazing and beautiful.

First up, you have to understand that I'd heard loads of wonderful things about Mustafa. "Everything there is so cheap!" squealed a friend. "Oh you can get anything there, it's amazing" said another. "It's huge lah!" and so on and so forth. The tourists on Yelp.com.sg and Tripadvisor.com said things along the lines of the above. And I love love what this person, Laura N. on Yelp said,

"it is absolutely mental so prepare yourself for battle and keep an open mind - you'll find things here you never knew you needed."

So I went in mentally prepared to be blown away by this huge exciting experience of shopping. The watches and calculators and soaps and clothes were cool, but things really picked up as we were going through the clothes section and brushing past racks of clothes lining the walls and dumped unceremoniously in a pile. And then the bags, backpacks, laptop bags, suitcases, cabin bags, hardcased and soft-cased. Polka-dotted, multi-coloured, Disney Princessed, bags.

Then the souvenirs: happy merlions everywhere, gilded mirrors and combs with the words "Singapore" etched on them. And suddenly, a London bus. Wait. What? Snow globes of miniature London? Red English mailboxes? A scale model of the London Bridge? That was when I realised that Mustafa was a truly amazing place. Completely unnecessary things just made sense. Yes, that scale-model of the London Bridge belongs on the shelf next to the Singapore snowglobes. No, I'm not going to ask why, whatever floats the owner's boat and tickles the tourist's fancy.

In Mustafa, I found a microcosm of cosmopolitan Singapore. The ready unquestioning acceptance of foreign influence no matter who you are, just as long as you aren't rude. I saw Petite Poppadoms in a can, stacked up like potato chips, distributed in the UK and made in the United Arab Emirates. Made by the same brand, was a can of Poppa-dillas, presumably named because the food in question was a fusion of Indian poppadums and Spanish quesadillas. The back of the can read "It makes us but wonder what would have happened if the Aztecs would have survived the ages to visit the Taj Mahal." Which is a very strange thought. But hey, food is food is food.

Then there were Indian Maggi Noodles that were masala flavoured. I was so tempted to buy one packet which was 75 cents just for the fun of it. But, I have a sister allergic to maggi products and I didn't dare to try it. There were organic biscuits flavoured with agave honey. Biscotti, kit kat of various packets. There were chia seeds for sale, and various rices and lentils and beans. There were shelves of dates (the fruit) from various parts of the Mediterranean And fresh fruits-tamarinds, donut peaches, guavas and mangoes piled up high. And a bakery with gorgeous smells. They had chicken pies and doughnuts and pizzas and samosas. But it was Ash Wednesday, and a day for temperance so we just walked past hungrily.

There's a local movie called Gone Shopping that I watched a few years ago. It's about the lives of people and their interactions in 3 different malls. One of them was about a girl who spent her time wandering the aisles of Mustafa because her parents didn't really care for her. And the film portrayed it so magically. There she was wandering past the endless rows of glittering watches, her eyes full of wary wonder and determination. And I felt like that. Looking and fingering at all the things I could have, and the things beyond my reach. There's a wonder to be had in shopping, knowing that things might fit, things might not fit, and the colours everywhere. It's a kind of happiness that is purely visual. An art form even.

Maybe tourists go in for the novelty of facing an endless maze of shopping and material goods, I certainly went in there expecting that. But the things that struck me most were the people and the colours and the sheer mindboggling variety of things that people don't really need. It's like a kaleidoscope that keeps turning 24h a day, reflecting humanity in all its wants and needs and desires. And its a really pretty one.