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.

Home.

It took a concert ticket to bring me back. It took the words Death Cab for Cutie and some feeble persuasion before I had the guts to confirm my plane tickets for home. This was a month ago.

I thought about staying another year longer to work, to learn and to travel around the archipelago. I had a rough plan worked out. Several months in Jakarta for work and on weekends I’d explore its enclaves like Kwitang, Kemang, Tebet and Tanah Abang. When that is done, I’d travel.

My family is scattered all over Java and Bali so lodging is secured. There are plenty of lonely grandaunts I can visit. My route will be Jakarta – Bandung – Cirebon – Yogyakarta – Bali. I’ll live for a few weeks and move on when I’ve had enough. I can rough it out on the public transportation system. I have enough sense to fend off people who may be attracted towards my kidneys. Elections are coming up. If I needed money I could always send my writing or my design portfolio and pray someone would employ me for projects. I’d live simply, pack light and wash often. It would work!

Part of why I love Indonesia is that my solitude takes on a physical form. The place is claustrophobic which keeps me moving. I love the sense of physical independence it gives me. This is not derived from living in a safe place but that I have to ‘fight’ and be on my feet against the madness of this urban monstrosity to remain alive and sane. The strangers here are different, especially when they are old. You can poke them and they will pour forth with their life. I laugh but never at their expense, just at the thought that each of us are dying with a story encased inside. I listen and that is all I ever do here.

At times, it is frustrating to really feel how alone you really are fenced inside a very dusty house. While I listen, I have no one else to talk to save for the random frenzied bilingually-confused phone calls to the parents. Though I am alike, an Indonesian, and all at once I am too different. I mold myself to fit each little circle; most people can only accept a facet of who I am because all the rest would seem incongruous. So I learned that it benefits to pretend that you are innocent, indifferent and dumb. Paris Hilton got something right. People expect that you don’t listen, read or think critically because that is what most people do – they do not listen, do not read and do not think – and an entire industry devoted to digesting information for you flourishes.

Three months and I have learned so much more than I could ever utter, but for you I’ll say it simply that it was an amazing experience and leave the dark and delicious details for me to keep.

I’m back to doing what 19 year olds do best because I am in danger of getting too far ahead of myself and feeling so much older than I really am. It is getting harder and harder to relate, only to a certain few but they’ve remained constant for the last 2-4 years. Some of them are coming back in a year and I can’t wait!

This process comes with arrogance and arrogance can kill you. I have so much more to learn. There is so much more space for growing up. I may not write as much because I’m still working on the same project I started this summer and I aim to do well. I’m also editing at a discounted rate of $15 per chapter, more as a filial token of how it wasn’t such a waste to put me through education.

For now I need to be nineteen with all its mindless fun and frustration because life passes by too quickly. I have Death Cab for Cutie ringing in my ears, too much durian in my tummy and East of Eden easing me to sleep. All of these things are what makes me feel at home.

Wide Awake.

Have you ever stood on the dawn of something bigger than yourself, just barely at the tips of your own fingers, without any idea what it is and what it could possibly mean? This feels like it.

I can’t sleep. The last three month felt like a dream. I know it was real because the girl who left isn’t the girl who came back writing these words. It’s unsettling. But in the words of The Little Prince:

Straight ahead of one self, one cannot go very far.

I’m still who I am, just a little bit more brave. Maybe this is a different start.

I can’t see where I will be in a year or so. There aren’t any productions to stretch my patience. There aren’t any publicity jobs I’d want to work in. There aren’t any student organization with a worthy enough cause. My responsibility is me and everything else I’ve swept aside in the last 5 years for busyness. There are bigger and better things worth caring for, I think.

So that’s it. If I had a placard as big as an elephant, because elephant-sized placards are most helpful, it’ll say: Under Renovation Something Awesome Coming Your Way Soon. That should do it.

So what so I’ve got a smile on
It’s hiding the quiet superstitions in my head

Don’t believe me
Don’t you dare believe me
When I say I’ve got it down

Dynasty.

Friday afternoon ramblings…

me: eh Adinda Bakrie’s wedding reception’s tonight at Hotel Mulia. She married some dude who’s apparently one of the richest men in Singapore. Let’s go crash the party!

Mas Bayu: Bakrie’s cousin right?

Mas Iwan: The richest man in Singapore?

Me: well no.. son of one of the richest man in Singapore

Iwan: So that means the cousin of the richest man in Indonesia is marrying the grandson of one of the richest men in Indonesia

Me:…..yeaaah probably.

Oh hello nosy Indonesians looking for gossip on socialites! Let me save you the trouble: I don’t write about them here. I don’t even know Adinda Bakrie! This was just a piece of silly talk on a slow friday afternoon. You are better off staking out her house than to go look for her here.

Batavia.

Dear you,

You make me feel like one pre-menstrual mess. You place my closest relative two hours and a traffic jam away. Grandmother is only 5 hours away. That’s only about 2 additional hours, give or take. Do you realise how close I am to jumping on a train each weekend to run away from your neon lights?

I know I’m stubborn to insist on walking on your streets despite running into a pathway of flies and rubbish, rebelling against a land development authority that doesn’t exist. I skip the potholes and the rubble you call a pedestrian walk like it’s a game I used to play on colored tiles. Grey means safe. Black means I just walked into a pile of trash. But I still do it just because it gets me a little angrier each day…. which inadvertently makes me happy.

Like a nanny, you take care of the kids and the lazy on the sidewalks of your junctions. So you raise resilient children, living on the margins of your capitalists, wanting the very same things. And every year or so when they feel like playing around with economics and welfare by increasing the profit margins of their oil companies, your roads are swarmed with demonstrators without a cause. You can do better than this. How can you let the machinations of these emperors run?

Still, you do things each day that tilt my head skywards with every passing skyscraper. I’m transfixed by the glass panes which in the morning seem to absorb dawn’s rainbow coloured skies and in the evening seem to preserve its turquoise and blue afternoons within its panes. The little things you do: a row of flags flirting with the wind in jewel shades across the highways to greet the coming of another president and another trail of disappointment. How will you break our heart?

At least this empty house contains my hollowness. And I know when I leave it’ll follow me there. It’ll contain all the things you make feel and you make me feel so angry, giddy, alone, frustrated, enchanted and overwhelmed. I think it’s called feeling alive.

I want to be in five places right now, at the same time. But that’s half a lie.

I have 11 days left and all those 11 small little days would rather be spent here within you.

What’s Wrong.

I’m not writing as happy as I used to be. It could be deadlines. Wherever I go it’s tinged with this pervasive kind of sadness and futility. It chokes you in odd moments. And I cannot understand where all of this is coming from.

I was in a taxi last night, going home for the second night in a row with my laptop. I had my empty lunchbox beside me. My taxi slowed at a junction close to Tugu Tani. A little street girl in a grubby yellow t-shirt pressed her nose onto the windows. A seat and a taxi door separated us. She was asking for money. I waved my hand away as usual. She looked down and saw the little purple bag. She asked if she could have some, whatever was in the bag. I turned my head away. There were two uneaten oranges inside. But she wouldn’t have seen them. I couldn’t move.

In that moment, I don’t understand why I did what I did. I would have given her the oranges but I couldn’t move. In a rewind, I may have rolled down my window. I’d give her the oranges. She’d run off into the concrete sidewalks amongst the headlights and disappear out of my life forever.

But she stays with me, hands and nose pressed against glass just looking with her empty eyes and wanting things, not even knowing what they are.

It was there, the gulf. A meter of emptiness and something else far worse.

Paralysed.

I have questions that cannot be answered, that ought not to be asked. I feel things that ought not to be felt, that cannot be touched by words. I cannot move. I cannot speak. I am suspended.

Despite the Ought and the Cannot, I’ll piece together a distant dream and tie it to a pretty cloud on some faraway sunset. It’ll float above me, tied by an ordinary plea. It’s just a dream.

We think of compulsion as the opposite of dreams. But it isn’t. Dreams are born out of compulsion. They grow out of the finite to live in the infinite. Fantasies feed on the margins of our limits, always a little out of reach like a helium balloon tied to the end of your little finger.

Maybe it’s this place. Or maybe it’s about time.
Maybe it’s you, you, you or you. Or maybe it’s just me.

This is my diving bell and it’s my butterfly.

I have plans drawn with toes grazing the ground. When my heels are firmly planted, I know it’ll be the road less traveled by. It’s alright though. I’ll be alone, mostly, and oft misunderstood.

But I think I’ll be okay.

Ancestry.

I wrote that I’ll be leaving for a place where no one knows my name. I was wrong. They know me by a different name. I am Someone’s Daughter… and sometimes Someone’s Granddaughter.

It matters here. It matters because it’s clear to me what that actually means within this space and time. I am the daughter of a teacher’s daughter and a farmer’s son. These are my ropes for they have climbed so far above their rungs. I am the daughter of overachievers. These are my chains for I am always compared inevitably if I am half as smart, as creative, as talented or as hardworking. Their shadows are larger than life, cast against their books and echoes of distant lectures. Still, I am the byproduct of their accumulated wealth, their failed marriages, their unprofitable degrees and their nomadic life. Without them, these words would be written differently, probably with less insolence, less eloquence and less prudence. Because of the difference, I understand the indelible parts of what I am and the parts that are left to be.

Maybe if you would look a little closer and see the difference between their shadows and mine, you may see who I am.

Then you will know my name.

The One Where She Got Locked Out Of Her Own Home

Alright, I haven’t written a post about how stupid I can be in a long while. I got locked out of my house this morning. Nothing tragic. I slept over at my uncle’s house and didn’t tell my maid when I’m coming back. So I was left stranded. I wrote things in my notebook for company. It’s long. This is what I wrote verbatim as time passes, every thought recorded. Structure is horrid but it is what it is…

So, I’m Alive.

Does aerodynamics apply under water? What actually happens in an aqua landing? The metal nose would crumple up like a plastic cup as it hits the deep blue. Yellow puffs of lifejackets would trickle out of its tiny holes, if it could. The afternoon sea would seep its way into bones, wrapping itself around muscles and nerves with its icy hands till hearts are numbed from pain. This inflight entertainment was brought to you by 2 hours of staring into space, courtesy of my morbid imagination.

In other words, I’m alive! Once again I’ve escaped the jaws of having my death turned into mere statistics by doing the heroic thing of doing absolutely nothing at all!… like all the other functional socially-adjusted human beings out there.

I’m back. This is all too surreal as if I am living two very separate and different lives. I feel like a superspy! *whoosh!* A friend once said, there’s a difference in visiting a place as a tourist and living in that very same city. You’ll see its surface best in the former, carefully curated facts preserved under a plexiglass. But in the second instance the city would pull you in, grab you by the ankles if you will, and it’ll show you its most grotesque and its most beautiful features.

Tonight I’ll probably feel the same hollowness as the first night back in Singapore with empty walls of a very dusty house echoing the silence in my head. I know better now, I think.

It’s good to be back. The fried chicken here is better.

This Is Kind Of A See You Later.

14 days till my temporary all-growed-out period ends! Holy mother of crabs! That’s only two weeks!

I have to actually finish this paper! There’s still postponed interviews, more stealth photography and colourful diagrams to be done. Not to mention the whole part of writing the damn thing into a cohesive mammoth, beyond the dribs and drabs accumulated over the last two months. And then there’s the review -editing process and rehearsals at home, tripping over my Indonesian words in a bid to make some sense of all this better in another language if I get to present it for the Higher Ups in Seventh Floor.

In a nutshell, I’m behind my deadlines.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

I’m leaving in two hours and tomorrow I’ll be back to being mature, hardworking and responsible again. wahaha. So I’m going to hibernate for my own good. I may not post as frequent but I will once in a while to let you know I’m alive and free of mosquito borne diseases.

Adios!

When You’re Heart Is an Empty Room.

I’ve been awake since six. The house is quiet with Sunday sleep. I’ve been staring into my ceiling through eyes that feel a little worn and a little more certain. I’m back in my old bed, back inside my cosy little home from a large dusty one. Somehow things seem a little out of place or out of proportion. But I’m pretty sure it’s me who has changed.

My head is still alphabet soup. It’s trying to string together what my days would be like for the next four months where Political Philosophy and Democracy exist on paper. I need some warming up to get excited about school again. It’s a little difficult right now. I am off my meds today. I hope the unpleasantness don’t come back again.

I am home, back in the soft crook of my mother’s arm.

Somehow I’m still on my pea shell boat, ebbing along in the same aloneness. I can’t feel the difference.

Burn it down
Until the embers smoke on the ground
And start new when your heart is an empty room
With walls of the deepest blue

Flames and smoke
Climbed out of every window
And disappeared
With everything that you held dear
But you shed not a single tear
For the things that you didn’t need
Because you knew you were finally free

And all you see
Is where else you could be
When you’re at home
And out on the street
Are so many possibilities
To not be alone

- Death Cab For Cutie, Your Heart Is an Empty Room.

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 VALS 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.

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.

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.

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. 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 cubicles have got to be filled somehow! Gigantic portions of Indonesia’s largest earners funnel their way into this small area every morning. 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 beneath you. Oh you won’t go back.

Morning traffic is regulated in some of these areas. 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.