Democracy isn’t a Magical Elixir.

Sometimes I get caught up in the promise of democracy, believing that it would be the best imperfect solution to everything: graft, economic disparity and the common cold. My state is currently holding its election. And there are countless violations involved in the process you can hardly keep up with the news and soon enough they get swallowed in the waves. At this point, anyone who has made a voting decision either have a finely honed filter for the media and/or basing it solely on faith, blind or otherwise.

Then you read the other parts of the paper: a coal mine collapses, a boy in Irian Jaya is shot by TNI, National Examination results are botched for several schools and an entire town fails to pass the National Examination altogether, BLBI cases are still unresolved almost 12 years on and people are robbing bolts off the new Suramadu bridge.

For all the plans for development, there’s always going to be someone taking the fucking bolts of your infrastructures and harnessing steel from railways to be sold at the market. Is it the fault of the state that these accidents happen? You can say that they’ve resorted to sabotage our development because our system fails to give their basic needs. Yet, these gates were opened to connect these islands together for employment and the opportunity to achieve those basic needs. Then you say it’s because they don’t have the mental capacity or lacks the moral education to find better alternative means. Wait, hold on a sec. I think my brain just short circuited there. There will always be an infinite amount of excuses.

Reforms in education is needed! Judicial systems has to be reformed! Government bodies need better human capital! But these institutions are build for rigidities to become cosy self-serving receptacles for egos and seniority. Fuck you and your disdain for foreign influences when your speech is littered with English terms and your wife has an LV bag tucked somewhere in her wardrobe. Fuck you and your ramblings that capitalism have failed our country when it is the very system that got you there on that podium, standing on the means of production which you may have earned or squandered.

Is this all worth it? Is this really worth fighting for? A better system and a better country isn’t a utopian idea but surely there’s a better route.

I shouldn’t be this young and jaded.

Fame

looks like this…..

see…

It’s so sad.

Kota Tua

First weekend here in J-town was fun.

Saturday was spent lounging around on my bed watching movies….

… while my parents and The Sister are out frolicking in Bali. They’re nerding it up at some conference which I shall have the luxury of listening through tapes of it next week. So, frolicking is a bit of an overstatement.

Uncle DN came over though and we talked and talked and talked. Closest relative I have here is roughly 3 hours away if the traffic is kind. We hung out at Mal Kelapa Gading which is literally a zebra cross away from my house. We traversed the whole stretch of malls there. It really isn’t all that different from Singaling, from the Zara store to the Ya Kun Kaya cafe. At the risk of sounding like a spoilt brat, I’m bored with the same comfort and sense of safety.

So on Sunday we set off for Glodok at Kota Tua. Kota Tua or Old City was the trade hub of a bygone era. The place used to be our China town and surprise surprise it’s filled to the brim with electronic stores. After the riots of 1997/98, the place is still humming with activity but the walls are charred black, rotting with mold and negligence. It’s an entire community in a faded palette. The characters which inhabit the place have a certain colour about them: skin burnished bronze, with an offwhite sclera that blends into earthy brown pupils. It’s as if time had stopped ticking since 1997 and the white noon heat burned it all to a standstill.  I wish I had a camera to document it all.

We were there to forage for liberated movies to stem our boredom since we’ve concluded that public television will likely to whittle our brains away. The man has over 200 movies at home. Plus, he’s a burly guy so he’s perfect for adventures into the dirtier parts of the city. Like Kota Tua.

After Glodok, we hopped on a bike. Yeah a bike taxi. They wore helmets made out of weaved coconut leaves and rides vintage bikes with rust comfortably etched to the rims. It’s quaint but this is their livelihood, not a gimmick crafted by the tourism board.

We rode pillion to Stasiun Jakarta Kota. Stasiun Jakarta Kota houses the electric powered trains that moves people from Bogor, Bekasi and Tangerang to the city.  The spirit of a particular place lingers to the foundations, the columns and the rafters of a building. I love how the metal colums curves upwards. The clocks still possessed a certain kind of dignity. The trains line themselves up by shallow platforms. There’s ornate details in the pillars which props the awnings along half a dozen platforms.

See. I need a camera for this.

Someone should preserve these structures and allow for this area to draw in people, retain its character and yet still develop with the rest of Jakarta. I don’t want it to be forgotten.

Insatiable.

I thought that there was a hole in my heart in the shape of a man whose silhouettes I do not know yet.

For the past few months, I realise it’s not a man-shaped hole after all. Or girl-shaped. Or animal-shaped. I think it’s in the shape of a cactus, or a ficus. It’s hard to say.

It’s a hole though and it is hungry.

Weeks go by, it gets smaller and smaller. Maybe it’s knowing that at the end of the day, the heart you ought to love the most is yours first and foremost. Maybe it’s knowing your own worth in your own eyes and accepting the flaws only you know of and all the things that make you this magical creature of wonder. Maybe it’s doing all the things you love, even if sometimes it doesn’t make much sense to someone else because I’m the one who knows me best.

Being alone, learning all the ways to make it on my own and figuring out my place in the world is all it takes to fill that insatiable craving for something bigger than yourself.

This is it. I only have me.
That’s enough for now.

Escape Plan: Complete.

I have to be at work at 7am every morning. My office is at the very epicenter of this country’s financial artery. That means traffic jams, honey. Jakarta is notorious for it simply because everybody just wants a piece of the dirt.

To beat the traffic, I’d have to leave the house at 5:30am. Because the roads are known to be temperamental, it can take an hour or two depending on the weather, the political climate and how we’re doing as an economy. I’m not kidding you. I bet you can collect all the data, plot them in a line and regress a pretty predictive function.

If you calculated that right, I have to wake up at 4am every single freaking morning for 40 days this summer.

What did I say about being hardcore?

I sleep at 10pm, unless I want to arrive at work half-drugged, frightening and cranky. There goes my night life.

I could avoid all of this but I take the public transportation even though a car and a chauffeur is the staple needs of a middle income family here. Usually I don’t get a seat on the bus so I hang on to the rails for the hour journey home. My biceps and calves should be pretty toned by July.

I like looking at people inside the Busway best. They come in all sorts of different dimensions. I like looking at their clothes and figuring out who they are or at least, who they’re trying to be. It’s funny how much you can read from a hairtie circa 1990s or an original but heavily scuffed Puma shoes.

For all the sticky sweaty stinky days to come, I think I deserve a degree of self-righteousness to say that I am a hardcore environmentalist though I don’t wear The Badge on my sleeve. At this point, we’re only postponing global warming darling but I’m a better person than you.

If you really want the honest answer why I’ve designed an escape plan?
I’m just sadistic. Really.

…and I LOVE IT.

Because for the strangest reason, I feel more grounded and more alive.

Sorta Almost Kinda Famous.

Hi again.

See I wasn’t gone for long.

It would be stupid of me to leave this little corner of the internets when I am getting published! HELL YEAH I’m finally flammable baby. SPICE! decided to feature me as one of their bloggers for the month. How snazzy is that.

Don’t worry. All this ‘fame’ hasn’t got into my head. I’m probably going to occupy an area of 10cm^2 at best, really. If i get so much as a postage stamp, I’m already ecstatic. I am About To Be Sorta Almost Kinda Famous! SPICE! has a national circulation in Indonesia, is available in most major cities and read mostly by girls in university so statistically speaking about less than 0.1% of  will find this blog. Mind you that’s 240,271 people and probably much much much less than that.

I’ve bought my first copy yesterday and whaddayaknow, they’re a pretty good magazine with a good balance of weight, relevance, fun and fashion.

Enough bootlicking though, like Golda Meir once said:

“Don’t be so humble, you’re not that great”

It’s true. I know the very smallness of my upcoming fame.

It is miniscule.

The pinnacle of internet stardom was set by Kambing Jantan, alias Raditya Dika (see above), who not only clinched himself several book deals – five of them in fact – he has a comic book too. He has his own freaking movie WRITTEN AND STARRED BY HIMSELF. He is now the director of his own publishing house not to mention garnering lots of moolah and a few million adoring fans (one of which is a certain Little Miss Ayuningdyah). Never has self-glorification reached such heights of adulation.

And further research tells me he likes David Sedaris and is studying political science in UI. Both are cool in my book.

Hmm yeah I want some of that. Uhm, the adulation, not Raditya. Online crushes is so last summer. Literally.

Where was I? Right, so getting paid for simply being awesome and writing about it is a pretty sweet career.

So they picked my very first entry which was a rambling about a magical cup of black cocaine coffee. After translation I sound like a dry and wrinkly 55-year old woman. I sound uncool. But whatev yo~ If you want the pure unadulterated juice all preserved with dry wit and panache, the first draft can be found right here.

Didn’t I just say goodbye in the last post?

Yes I did. But I’ll be back in a slightly different form. Enough time has passed for me to tell you all the ridiculous random shenanigans I get up to when I am in between boredom and restlessness. I’ll try to be a lot less emotional about it too.

That’s not a promise.

Fortuna.

When things fall into place they seem to follow mirror opposites, in reverse order from this time last year. Point of reflection lies along the calendar pages. Work your way where the paper bends against the metal clips and it rolls off the page in a spectrum of opposites. It’s kinda amusing how crazy insane awesome madness of the topsy turvy kind with whipped cream on top this year was. I can smile now, satisfied but it wasn’t pretty when you’re in the moment.

This doesn’t make much sense to a random reader like you. I know I haven’t been making much sense lately and my random readership is dwindling. This space is never a good barometer for whatever weather hangs above my head. Wait, actually it is but it hardly makes any sense without knowing the juicy details that’s unwritten.

That, you don’t deserve.

If you hadn’t realised by now, this is turning into a collection of open letters for very specific pairs of eyes. The problem, I realise, occurs when you think it’s about you ….when it’s not. It’s fun though. You’ll get the satisfaction of being flattered if correct or the delicious doubt of wondering if it was about you. Always write with an audience in mind: that’s the basic fundamental rules to writing.

So, I sound like an emonemo dweeb sometimes. Don’t worry, I’m fully aware of this. Slick on your happiest smile and wind the spring in your steps. The world cannot know how pathetic and stupid you can be, but you my lovelies get first class seats. Enjoy the torture of my horrendous storytelling on your bed. It’s the price you pay for hearing the first unedited unplugged version of any story. It’s hardly coherent.

Sunkist Smoothie.

If I was a more truthful storyteller this blog would be so full of juice, Sunkist would want to squeeze me, bottle me up and sell me for $2.60 at your local 7-11.

I think if i had more follow through and a better sense for self-exploitation, I’ll probably be pretty rich by now. I’m serious. I could write food pr0n, extremely flattering reviews, get you to vote and funny shenanigans solely for my utter lack of ability to fit into the mainstream ….I’ll probably be able to command huge internet traffic. Wit is not a commodity like most of the girls you date. You’ve made the right choice though. I am too good.

But I like my privacy and anonymity which is gradually eroding by the day. I can pretend I’m a superspy leading a double life full of superfunkyactiony things: good girl by day, overachieves by noon, lazy in the afternoon and then SUPERFREAK at night.

But then I’d be lying and lying is bad for your health.

I may be able to do just that this summer when I’ll unplug myself and commit pen to paper. There’s serenity in that. I welcome the change of pace and the sweet solitude. I’m coming back taller in more ways.

Have I told you I have a very wild imagination and if unbridled could lead to highly disastrous results?

I get distracted easily.

Where was I?

People are so willing to whore out their privacy and bare every sordid little detail of your life for a fee. There’s facebook for that. Even then, it creeps me out more and more that when I meet someone the question you ask is not what would you like to know about me but what do you already know about me. That’s creepy. I’m creepy. FACEBOOK IS MAKING ME CREEPY. What happened to good old fashioned innocence where you know nothing, no trace of history?

Oh I’ve got new phone! It is teh sex. It is a chunky white modest midranger.


It looks like a brick but I’m the kind who cares about inner beauty and it makes my music sound fantastic. Is it weird that I find how it seamlessly integrates RSS into a ticker on the interface exciting? Also it has google maps. I will never be lost when I don’t want to be found. I use every little feature of my electronics: use it and abuse it till death do us part. It is a Sony Ericsson W508. It’s a Walkman that can answer phone calls and sms people. I like it when you’re so well differentiated and the perfect accompaniment for espionage.

See that’s an example of an unnecessary detail but because I reek of supreme awesomeness, that becomes the most significant detail you’ve read all week because you don’t read enough and not reading the right things. I’m not being arrogant. It’s a probably a fact and remember all facts are probable.

Potatoes are fantastic tubers aren’t they? Fried in a light batter and you’ve got instant magic carb sticks for power lunch, fueling ambitions so big you can’t even see it. Maybe I don’t want to see it just yet because I’m afraid of having the wrong kind of expectations. It’s not that awesome is it? I mean it is but come on.. They harvest the best of Indonesian blood and ….well I’m…me. By virtue of upbringing, chance and circumstance I got this gig. All the merit you see is condensed in two pages. All my personality contained in one page. Are you sure you want me here? I’ve kept it quiet even from the closest few because well.. honestly.. it’s surreal and I’m afraid of drinking it in.
Because I worry worry worry that maybe I don’t deserve it.

Some battles are left unwritten. There’s drought on your anniversary this year. That little well dried up a few weeks ago and I can’t muster a contrite tear. It doesn’t mean I love you any less. I wonder what you’d say if you were here to see the pink strands in my hair, the flight tickets and the itinerary.

How did I begin again?

Fortuna’s wheel couldn’t have been a more apt metaphor.

This is going to be the last post you’ll see in a while until my feet touches the ground. When it does, it is likely to spin underneath me. I’ll send a smoke signal soon.

This is a goodbye, maybe.

But I’ll be right back.

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are buried deep—leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this but, like everyone, I learned it late.

— From “West With The Night” by Beryl Markham

Stethoscope.

I found the song! Forget noise. Forget low fidelity.

What the hell was I thinking?

This is it. This is the anthem.

Nothing is permanent, I know.
For now, we’ll just have to build our sanctuaries,
wherever we are. Even though I’d rather be here
with you for what finite time we have. I can’t stay
for now. There, is home but you are home to me.
I really am sorry that I can’t be here,
you with the shy curls and the stethoscope.

The Cinematic Orchestra – To Build A Home (click to listen)

Out in the garden where we planted the seeds
There is a tree as old as me
Branches were sewn by the color of green
Ground had arose and passed it’s knees

By the cracks of the skin I climbed to the top
I climbed the tree to see the world
When the gusts came around to blow me down
I held on as tightly as you held onto me

Always On The Wrong Ladder.

aaron
shes like i regret not giving u a chance..
and im here going
wha?
i duno weird f*
and i havnt talked to her for like a yr
hate women

me
hey
i am a woman
you do not hate me

aaron
u’re on my frens ladder

me
THAT DOESN’T MAKE ME A MAN.

This happens so often it does not surprise me anymore. heh.

but just in case you’re wondering, look up The Ladder Theory.

Tidying up.

I spent the better part of the morning staring at my screen refreshing my email client, hoping for confirmatory emails to come saying “hey, we’re serious. we do want you here” and the same in the afternoon looking for clarifications as to why you’d ask for a recommendation AFTER you say you want me. Weird order no? I can testify that I have a functioning brain! Sometimes it has sparks of genius, most times it’s okay really. Rarely short circuits too.

So now I have even more things to do: forms, applications, declarations, important letters, laundry to clean, dry and fold. How am I supposed to get all of this mess sorted out?

ARGHHH.

Anaïs Nin

“There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.”

“I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don’t say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.”

— Anaïs Nin

Escaping Hibernation.

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this(or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.”

Winter, 1931-1932 from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume One 1931-1934

Days of wanting my body to drown in slumber must stop. I don’t want to be invisible. Give me the dirt and that solitude. Reclaim the precious space inside my head where no one can intrude with their barbs of insecurities. I like knowing there is only one of me – whole – not a mangled half of some other incomplete ego. That is quite an insult don’t you think?

Don’t ever need me like you need air. Grow a pair of gills.

I’m grappling between being swept off by the promise of youth and the reality that all things are finite. I accept that a large majority of people are not wired like me, for better or worse. Natural selection will work its magic.

I need to know who I am out of here.

Some Tribe Somewhere.

Jas brought us to the Jacob Ballas Children’s Garden.

None of us knew where it was. My cab circled round three parking lots and somehow wound up in NUS Law. Now I know where the C J Koh Library is.  There’s a Black Angus inside there too, quite random isn’t it? I had to get to the Botanic Gardens and that meant trekking through the campus bushes. I am not -that- crazy.

It turns out the secret entrance was next to the Jacob Ballas Children’s Garden. I entered the Children’s Garden compounds and was confused since university students do not lounge around sand beds and paddling pools with toddlers. Apparently you have to have a child with you to enter and I GOT IN. Yes that’s right. I’m so badass I can infiltrate a playground. Imagine what else I can sneak into next time.

The Hallway by Miranda July

more about “The Hallway“, posted with vodpod

By Miranda July

Appeared in YOKOHAMA 2008: International Triennale of Contemporary Art
13 September – 30 November 2008

It’s weird but I have admired her other works but never figured out the name of the artist behind it until now. I should do more of this more often: finding who did it and remembering that name. But if I do it’ll ruin pleasant surprises like this.

You know moment that happens in movies where you’re standing before a person who has always been there in front of you but now looking at them in a different way, saying:

I have loved you all along.

or something like that.

via Alex

This is the first few scenes of her movie:

Me, You and Everyone We Know (2005)

Low-Fi.

Shuffle through 10 GB of songs and you can’t seem to find one to suit the mood: good lyrics is a must – nothing juvenile, nothing contrived – with beats for headbanging, not tragic, not hesitant, a song that could hold its own, get lost in the folds and valleys, layers and layers to bury, loud enough to drown the quiet and soft enough to fill the tiny spaces.

Noise or just low fidelity?

image courtesy of Masaaki Miyara

Another strange morning where I wish i could close my eyes and pretend:
I don’t exist. I am a thought, quiksilver in memory.

Bud I Was Bored.

You know when you get bored and you see a nifty word you google its meaning and as you compulsively traverse the links you end up reading about something else completely different but fascinating and yet somehow they seem to connect together in ways you hadn’t thought about before…

yeah okay have you done that?

No?

So, I was googling the word Ikhlas which somehow led me on to the words…

You Are Not A Caricature.

Or the mimicry of a fictional character.
In real life, people move to their own accord. We do not live by some predetermined 45-minute plot lines where stereotypes move about in predictable incestuous circles.

Sanity lives here.

Possession.

Of all the things to covet, a human being I cannot possess.

You can steal a cadaver. Rent a warm orifice for the night. Take advantage of a pair of inebriated lips. Sign a lease on a womb, a brain or some assortment of body parts. You can buy its loyalty to stay still in one spot but never forever. Death takes over.

You cannot own a person.

Image courtesy of Complejo

No one can possess you, let alone steal another being from your grasp. You are not a captive unless bound to the earth with metal chains and cuffs. You are responsible, no one else. Gravitate to one another like moths to fire but the flames can never lay claim to its fluttering body before it licks the wings to cinders.

Though you may never have them, they leave an imprint and that’s all that you can keep: some permanent, some temporary, some for the better and some for the worse. Just being with them – their presence and sometimes their mere existence – draws out from you a colour you didn’t know you had or have always known but now amplified in a different hue. Like a muse. Like electricity: a palpable awareness of your very being, your words and your looks. It’s all you. It’s frightening and unfamiliar. You crave how you look in their eyes and that recognition is very particular, very unique, very distinct from one encounter to another.

That’s why we seek to possess one another…. but it’s all a futile pursuit.

People will leave you. There’s nothing you can do to stop them. Sometimes they come back if they want you and if you let them. It’s all a matter of time and circumstance when everything falls into place.

I can never possess you.  You can never have me.

We are free. Or are we?

“He saw the strange entanglements of passions and circumstance and compulsion everywhere, but always the dread insomnia of compulsion. It was fear… that made men mad…. There was nothing he could touch, for all, in a mad assertion of the ego, wanted to put a compulsion on him and violate his intrinsic solitude. It was the mania of cities and societies and hosts, to lay a compulsion upon a man, upon all men. For men and women alike were mad with the egoistic fear of their own nothingness.”

- The Man Who Died, D H Lawrence

Flight Tickets To The Future.

Dragging a girl through town looking for a graduation dress, shoving her into dressing rooms and watching her dislike each one is my idea of nostalgia. Nothing much have changed though we’ve moved on from Daniel Yam to Coast. There won’t be any prom queens in this ceremony just valedictorians.

hahahahah. awkward much?

Zomg we are getting old.

Off you go on your six-year adventure in Boston. Decorate your crib, snag that job at the grocery store and find your tribe. There’s probably too many Asians there. Please get out from the lab once in a while. I’m gonna crash one of your classes and make fun of you. That’s a threat and a promise.

Take pictures of your shiny furnished condominium. We are going to have our reunion at your wedding, you know the one you will invite us in a year or two or three. Kidding! We’re not rushing you. She’s fantastic. Let me know where it is so I can dress for the season and the hemisphere.

I think among us you’ll take root to Kingston. Medschool pretty much seals the deal, didn’t it? I am not around for you and I know this could be your last visit. I am sorry. We are not going to fall out of each other’s lives, okay?

Law school. Do it! All your natural feist would be wasted in the hospital. Bioethicist sounds good no? Just like ‘Political Marketing’. We’re going to have to develop a knack for defining our own job description.

You and I? We’re still a little lost aren’t we? Our waking hours are difficult to coordinate when I am currently living in Australia’s timezone . We will figure out this e-tea shindig before summer’s over.

Brew those ideas and I’ll stew in mine. We’re not in a hurry to run. Stay in New York for as long as you can so I can crash your sofa when I bring you the draft of a proper business plan. But out of all of us, I’m pretty sure I’ll see you again soon soon soon.

I don’t know when I’ll see any of you again. I guess this time it’s my turn. You’ve got your big plans and I’ve got less than a year to figure things out too. I don’t have much of a goal except this: I’ll earn my own wings and traverse the East Coast of Anglo America, soonest three years from now. Maybe sooner. I’m holding on to this for my ownsanity.

You are top of my list,

the not-quite-twelve-years-old inky

Sabar & Ikhlas

Tough to remember, to understand and to actually do it.

Maybe it’s just another way of saying how to be true to yourself so that you may live with a sound conscience. Breathe and hope that in that exhalation you find relief. No one actually tells you how hard it really is.

What if the cornerstone of complete surrender is actually choice and uncertainty? That you have no bloody clue if what you’re doing is right. No one else knows it either and they can’t really tell you what’s right or wrong. So feeling self-righteous is just as bad and equally misled.. merely conforming to the social construction of how society ought to be as dictated by those in the top rungs to preserve order, even when it buckles under your feet.

Ikhlas means doing things with the proper intention and with follow through.

I am confused because I can’t see any further than the tip of my nose.

This isn’t helpful.

So what do I do now? Where should I go? Who do I want to be?

Here we go.