Most Persuasive Reason To Send Me On A 3-Hour Trip to Bandung at 7AM

Okay I’m convinced.

My Little Life.

I rant too much. Then I write it in the most confusing way possible. So I should write simply and happily and tell you a little about what goes on in my life.

I go to work and it is fun. The people are really strange. They all have their quirks. The work is nice and confusing. I read a lot, write too little and attempt to comprehend marketing diagrams with all its inane triangles, circles and figure eights. If you have ever seen a VALSII diagram, all modern society fits neatly into 8 diamonds. I think it’s funny. I live simply: eat, watch tv, shower and then sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat!

On weekends, various family members come to kidnap me for sleepovers, birthdays, weddings and picnics. It almost always requires a 4 hour road trip to somewhere. I kinda like it. Away from the city, you’d see horizons of greens from paddyfields, sugar canes and goodness knows what else. On a clear day, you can see the sky sparkling on the ground peeking out in between the newly planted shoots of paddy. Sunsets on the highway are soft candyfloss-coloured swirls. The sun directly behind a tower of clouds would paint this beautiful shimmering outline like an eloquent argument in the ethereal.

When you put together a dozen grandmothers and grandfathers, they make a lovely noise. I have a theory that when you get older, people develop some sort of sophisticated calibration system that can determine if your grandchildren went up or down a dress size simply by hugging them. The minions, a. k. a. cousins, are sprouting out of aunts at a rate of two a year, growing up too fast and becoming way too smart. I haven’t been here long enough to establish my regency as head chief of minions. That ought to be fixed.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m doing okay. They’ve been talking about bigger things for me, things that may require the sacrifice of several forestfulls of trees and months of wringing my hands my insane ideas into words. The Almighty in the highest floor of this building has given an unofficial nod too. Kinda frightening. If I leave, I’d have to let it go. Who knows what will be printed in its place? And if I stay, well I don’t know if I’m ready to accept the consequences. I’m still wavering.

When my plane takes off, goodness knows how many days from now, I’m not sure if I’m coming home or leaving one behind. What should I do?

Modern Condition.

I’ve lost count of how many weeks have gone by. I do know that there are 43 days left. One entire month and a bit left. I’m okay. I’ve managed to settle down alright, partly because global cities are similar wherever you go:

The glamour. The dirt. The glazed and averted eyes. The cliffs of chrome and glass. The marble fortresses. The rivers of tin and steel. Different flavours of the same pollution. The kabuki faces. The nomads. The pot bellies and the empty stomachs.

The irony.

The distance between squalor and Department of Justice & Human Rights is roughly four metres. In four metres lies an abyss of letters and punctuations. I’m losing faith in the Bureaucracy. I still believe in Democracy though. I have been reminded where I came from and that has tempered much of my ideals. Identity is an individual expression but it is more contextually sensitive than we readily admit. It is defined by the spaces we occupy, always defined in contradistinction to this…Other. I think I’m making sense.

I don’t know. I’ll always be a strange kid wherever I go. That’s okay. There’s plenty of misfits here. Most of them seem to be working under the same office.

So it’s alright. I’ll be fine.

I can do this adulthood thing.

Gutterflower.

There are people here who live at crossroads: street children, women and men who live at the junctions. When the lights turn red they hawk their wares - whatever they can sell - from songs, toys, water and warm bodies. When the cars desert the streets they walk back to their houses made of zinc roofs and thin sheets of wood. From far away they look like matchboxes stacked one on top of the other, hidden behind the bushes just off the highway.

111 Tips on Writing

I’m bored…well more precisely, procrastinating. I have things to do, lots of it but i have noooo idea what and where to start. Sheer inertia. But i stumbled onto this! Helpful things to remember about writing… and I am nowhere near writing a complete coherent sentence.

So procrastinate away fellow interns (=

Got it from here.

Sentinels.

As my bus turns around the roundabout this morning, Monas rises into view. Grey outlines emerge against a gauzy radiant white sky as though they were transparent shadows flipped upright. To the left the bulbous dome and minarets of the Istiqlal Mosque nudge through. To the right the intricate spires of the Cathedral thrust itself upwards as if in answer. Like sentinels standing quietly in silence, they face the giants of Bureaucracy and Business. It’s squat in comparison. But against a pearly canvas, they gleam ethereal and luminous with all its faith and all in harmony.

The discords you hear are the din of the little people and the little day. If they would tilt their head skyward and gaze upon this light and surrender to its height, maybe they’d hear it too.

Enclosure.

It is an island, unwilling to accept its smallness. You can touch one tip and its furthest end at the same time with your hands. It is fenced in with walls of water and aloof neighbours. The body has a way of getting used to airlessness. With its smallness, it believes it is a nucleus – the Hub of Everything and Nothing. These are man-made shores, less inspiring than the dramatic sunsets that touches its waters each day. Its inhabitants are too busy to notice it. There is so very little you could care about here, beyond the reaches of your hands, which breeds indifference for the immaterial. All the same, it’s good for the island. It’s good for the people. Indifference, not compliance, is a necessary prerequisite for control.

These are not my hands and these are not my walls. I cannot accept my own smallness.

So I will set sail from here in half a decade. You’ll see.

Aye, Miss Schlegel.

“I always understood that those supermen were rather what you call egoists”
“Oh no, that’s wrong,” replied Helen. “No superman ever said ‘I want’, because ‘I want’ must lead to the question ‘Who am I?’ and so to Pity and Justice. He only says ‘want’. ‘Want Europe’ if he’s Napoleon; ‘want wives’ if he’s Bluebeard; ‘want Botticelli’ if he’s Pierpont Morgan. Never the ‘I’; and if you could pierce through him you’d find panic and emptiness in the middle.”

“Miss Schlegel, the real thing’s money, and all the rest is a dream.”
“You’re still wrong. You’ve forgotten Death.”
Leonard could not understand
“If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real things if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love Death – not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier in it than the man who has never learned to say: ‘I am I’”

- E. M Forster, Howard’s End.

Stereotypical.

“Hey Singaporean!” he said.

The day before he had denounced to the entire floor that Singaporeans are frigid, pompous, think too highly of themselves, gives awful service and is made of fake smiles. I’m guessing that was an insult to me but I have no reason to be offended. I laugh.

Stereotypes are a form of survival mechanism. It allows us to judge beforehand and approach situation carefully when we don’t have the complete information. But that does not justify its truthfulness, or rather lack of it. I thought about what Singaporeans think of Indonesian: how we’re hardly punctual, messy, childish, inconsistent, corrupt, easily deceived and has a dysfunctional state. Non-chinese Indonesians overseas are maids. Our Muslims are militant and narrow minded. How we’re so horribly uneducated. They may reflect a grain of truth, but it is just a grain amplified by ignorance and xenophobic hostility. They are not universal laws.

Remember that.

I have met gracious, funny and lovable Singaporeans as much as I have met punctual Indonesians who follows the law. Our Muslim population are predominantly tolerant, open-minded and educated lot. They just don’t make the evening news, internationally.

Bigotry is an argument that cannot be appealed by logic. I don’t quite grasp why these adjectives attach themselves so firmly to nationalities. What does that make me? I am neither of these things. Similar life conditions in the same country create a series of repeated response mechanisms that over time become the norms of its society. But individually? It’s a fallacy of composition and division. Are they relevant? Are they valid?

I think not.

Mall-Walking

I visited 7 malls yesterday. 7 malls! While you might think that is nothing compared to a trek through Orchard Road, these malls are gigantic okay and twice as glamorous. It’s equivalent to visiting 7 Vivo cities but they are miiiiiiiiiiles apart from each other. Count the i’s. That’s how far they are.

Cecil and I got into all sorts of shenanigans. Really, freaking, hilarious. I don’t think I can divulge them, lest I reveal the actual nature of my job (which by the way gets more amazing and more confusing each day). Between the two of us we ended up buying yummy juices, fancy biscuits, a really fudgy slice of chocolate cake, underwear and a belt. The job dictates it, we say. Haha this internship is causing me to go into deficit. The parental subsidies are barely enough to keep me safely afloat, covering me in cases of food and transportation emergencies. And this? This is costing me more than I thought it would!

Let’s just say this is like espionage combined with a little bit of paparazzi and plenty of writing and magic dust. I’m probably making this up. It’s frustrating, excruciating and bloody bewildering. Sometimes I’m unsure why they’ve picked me to do this. But it’s fun and it’s exciting and it’s ridiculous. So… it’s okay, it’s all good. It’s all good, really.

In the end, we were very tired by the time we reached the office at 7-8ish. My feet shriveled up into raw pink slabs inside my heels. We ordered up some noodles for dinner in the office, took cabs home. I collapsed into my bed in my work clothes. Disgusting I know.

So that’s my day.

Be Still My Heart

This could be a brand new start.

Compulsion

“So he went his way and was alone. But the way of the world was past belief, as he saw the strange entanglements of passions and circumstance and compulsion everywhere, but always the dread insomnia of compulsion. It was fear, the ultimate fear of death, that made men mad. So always he must move on, for if he stayed, his neighbors wound the strangling of their fear and bullying round him. 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.”

” A dangerous phenomenon in the world is a man of narrow belief, who denies the right of his neighbour to be alone.”

- The Man Who Died, D H Lawrence

I’m trying to understand what this means. What does it mean to you?

Lie, Live & Let Go.

When it comes to you, I’ll get bored, repulsed, distracted or forgetful one day. It’s a matter of hours. When it comes to me, it’s a matter of seconds to flit from one fancy to the next.

But those are awful little lies and in white lies, we dearly trust.

I am bored, thoroughly repulsed, easily distracted and, soon enough, forgetful.
This is not a lie and in truths, we doubt.

So long.

This Is How We Roll.

You cannot say that you have lived in Jakarta until you’ve tasted, smelled and felt what the public transportation system is like. I don’t mean the legendary traffic jams where cars really do slow down to the speed of a nonagenarian with arthritis in its knees and bunions on its feet. Combine that with the mass rapid transit and now you know how to really live. So let me describe what the transportation system is like:

At 6 o’clock I must leave the house. At best, I can leave at 6:15 because at 6:30 EVERYBODY gets in to their car and make their way to work at the same bloody time and I would be very late. I flag an angkutan kota, a tiny tin can on wheels to take me to the main road at Pulo Mas for Rp 2000. With the rise in fuel prices, it’s costing me Rp2500 now. You do the math okays?

Then I take Transjakarta all the way to Harmoni. The Bus Way, as the local calls it, is an adorable bastardization between a tram, a bus, a subway and a regular train. I’m probably confusing you. Let’s just say that it operates on an exclusive dedicated lane like a tram, but it is demarcated with bricks. Buses travel on them. It has automatic doors like a subway. It has a dude who guides people out and regulates the people coming in like a train station master. Tada!

At Harmoni, I get off the bus and join the mass of people heading over to Block M, one of the primary corridors. Here you really notice urban planning at work…. Or rather lack of it. Both the administrative and financial centers congregate along Thamrin-Sudirman stretch and Rasuna-Said which lies parallel to it. Those many cubicles need to be filled somehow! Gigantic portions of Indonesia’s largest earners funnel their way into this small area. The little people stuff themselves on to their Bus Way, the Bis Kota and the Mikrolet. Those higher up in the food chain come rolling in their cars because once you can afford the installments for an air-conditioned rhinoceros, public transportation is oh-so-beneath you. Oh you won’t go back.

Morning traffic is regulated in parts of these areas where you can only enter if you have at least 3 passengers in your car. Evening traffic is not regulated. These cubicles have to empty themselves at the end of the day remember. Thus we trickle out on to the streets to join the molasses of tins and wheels.

In the evening, all of these people unite at Harmoni again. Harmoni interchange, as sweet as it sounds, is a small tin can of death suspended on metal stilts over putrid grey waters. Overcapacity is not a quantifiable limit by weight or by number of commuters. Overcapacity is a fervent prayer that these sheets of metal would not fold unto itself like a house of cards. I laugh but it wouldn’t be very funny really.

The queue here is like human Tetris, each piece filling whatever empty space before them. These little sardines push their way with their baggage, their insecurities and their weary self so they can get a little closer to home. It’s a test of patience. You feel so utterly helpless. All you can do is step a little forward as the mass moves along. There really is no point in getting angry or sad. It would be a waste of energy. You want to learn Zen? Here’s the best battlefield.

Clutching your bags and fearing for pickpockets, you sway along as the bus careen forward and swerve into clumsy curves. I expect my biceps and triceps would be well toned by the end of all of this. They better be.

It takes up a huge chunk of my day, like every single one of orang Jakarta. This is how we live. So pardon me sir if we haven’t thought about these faceless enemies of terror. Our daily terror lies on our roads. I hope in time you’ll see that we’re not so dysfunctional after all but that we operate excellently on the margins.

There are some things that do not require an explanation. I’m not sure why I’ve chosen to accept to get paid at less than 5 dollars a day and get physically assaulted by the transportation system daily. I had the choice to stay comfortably numb or to have my head and my cardiac muscles ache a little too much each day. This was a calculated whim. I trust the powers of cognitive dissonance to tell me that there is no place I should be but here.

It’s working.

Dangnabit.

Arrogance in Peach-Flavoured Light

Everyday I make my way through the heart of this capital, coursing through the administrative and financial artery of Indonesia. It’s a tiny stretch, really, in comparison to the scale it commands. It is studded with skyscrapers, prerequisites to our dear development. The new ones shoots from the earth like cliffs of glass but its foundations are still the same, a compact of blood and mud. Look at Sampoerna Strategic Square, a bastion of concrete furnished with the Imperialist touches. Perhaps it’s true that behind these fortresses lie panic and emptiness.

Still it’s a pretty sight. And in the morning light, they look like alien sentinels. Morning light has a way to make things more poignant that they should. It hides away the many corners of urban life to reveal something new. I seem to notice different buildings as though they had sprouted out overnight even though the mold and rot tells me it has been there longer than I have been. Today I noticed this beautiful grey cathedral with its ornate turrets rising round the corner. In the peach-coloured light, the ditch turns a glassy bluish grey, like translucent jade. But as the water shifts in eery stillness, it swirls the detritus from its bed and the leaves and the trash seem to sparkle green, orange and yellow. Like opal. Peach flavoured opals. In the army base, rows and rows of dusty green shoulders are awashed in the same soft light, softening hard muscles underneath.

If I have to see too many sunrises, it’s not so bad.