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.