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.
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.
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.
Time does not permit me to say much because if I revealed to you the situation where I am writing this you’d understand that it’s rather Unethical! I’m not rocking this city very well but I am learning how to one day at a time. Last night I stepped outside my office to be greeted by a black river of cars and motorcycles. The city plunges into dark within minutes. The roads are lighted by the grace of headlights of the thousand mechanical bees and buffaloes that trickles out of these granite and glass cages. Roughly three people die on the road each day. You do the math.
So far everyday is something new.
On Monday I met with an economist with all the juicy details of this little fledgling democracy.
On Tuesday I learned about our pathetic health care policies, best described as ensuring every citizen is given a cuddle by a public health official before you conk off to Nevereverland.
On Wednesday, I get a glimpse of what the view is like amongst the highest rungs on this society. Though the air is convoluted, it smells really nice.
On Thursday, a smelly old man offers me Korean health products.
On Friday I met with a host of physicists who if they’re not careful with their presumptions, may just make enemies of all economists, anthropologists and political scientists with their arrogance. I can tell you now that it would be a funny fight.
On Friday, I met with a host of politicians who, when tapped on their temples, rings like a hollow amphora. And just like an empty vessel, they’d gladly fill themselves with voices of other people who dare to call themselves an academic. Anyone whose theories they’re able to absorb and with such a limited capacity and limited patience, it’s enough to give you a rude shock into the sheer obscenities in parliament.
Why the heck am I majoring in political science again?
As one friend curtly pointed out, it’s just an incestuous circle anyways.
Last night they tell me the demonstrations have started. My heart squeezed a little glee. I’d imagine it’d smell like sweat. I wanted to see it. I’ve been too long sheltered inside small city-states to get excited of the promise of seeing blood spilling across our national monument: all for the escalating price of black gold.
What does development mean? What about equality and what of equity? What road maps should we follow?
Quagmire is a really funny word isn’t it?
But I was hungry and I was tired and I had a throbbing headache and carrying too many things and I didn’t feel like braving it through the traffic.
So, roadside kids flagged my taxi. Having bought my air-conditioned safety, I made my way home clutching my handbag and my laptop ever closer, feeling my way in the dark.
Whenever I get on planes, I imagine how it would crash. I imagine the kind of airlessness inside a tin can of death and time hovers on the mortal and the ever after. Before I know it, it lands and I’m spared the horrible movie playing inside my head.
In other word I’m alive and well, children! This city has treated me well. Welcome to Indonesia where the food is better, the traffic is worse, the air smells funkier and the people oh so quirkier. It’s been what… 5-6 days now? My limbs are still in their rightful places. I’m okay. I can rock this town.
I came with the father, tagging along wherever he goes. I’ve met with soo many different people. They’re all really really fascinating. Everyday is always something new. Two days ago some grody old man started talking to me on the angkutan kota (a “well-worn” mini bus) and started selling his Korean health machine thingymajig. He had teeth like broken fences, smells strange and had white wisps of cotton for hair. He was creeeeeeeepy. His hand grazed my side at one point. *shudders* haha okay sooo many more stories and I would write it all here. I have it all recorded in my laptop which is beginning to sound like an epic tale about a small-town girl’s misadventures in the city. But NEVERMIND I shall probably tell you more my slight obsession with transportation systems here some other time.
Oh right I should probably tell you that I am writing this in an internet cafe. We’re still looking to set up internet at home so if you know of a good internet plan in Jakarta, drop a comment okays? I am rather enjoying this laptopless life. The electricity tries to get funky with me and I was electrocuted several times. I’m actually secretly enjoying this life without emails and internet. Now you can’t track me down with inane requests when you don’t have a bloody corporate identity detail for me to follow (rawr)!
Hokay. Work starts Monday. I am terrified and really really excited too.
Adios~
p.s. I can cross the road now. A+ for me.
Sayonara!
Most of all, this girl needs to grow up.
“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;… In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.”
- Soren Kierkegaard
This space can be read by all.
How transparent do you think I really am?
How much of it is the truth?
This, my midnight hour? Think.
The purpose of Art is to illustrate. Its aim rests on clarity: to amplify and make vivid an image, a statement or a theme. Its purpose is not to obscure. That is what politicians do. Artists do not make things confusing, rather they untangle the complicated into something coherent. So scriptwriters, whatever dimension you choose to give your characters and your plot, show it in what they say and do. It is the job of the audience to interpret what they have seen but ultimately the responsibility rests on you to illustrate this through the words. A director’s responsibility would be to translate these words into a composition, free to interpret whatever is written. An actor breathes through these words into action. An actor does not act with a mask. Rather the mask is merely a thin veil where disbelief is suspended, confined by the elevated stage. An actor reveals snatches of real emotions, what has been felt before. There your movement is true, veiled and vulnerable all at once.
Before we talk using terms such as “depth” and “between the lines” and “substance” and “complex” recklessly, remember your primary aim - to make visible and make clear a message. My expectation as an audience is that your message is worth its $15 price tag. Is that clear?
I did not submit my piece on hope for my homeland. To put it simply, I think it’s icky - for lack of a more appropriate word. It’s not that atrocious. But framed in a book? Even if the only readers are the writers and the editors themselves, I don’t want it. This is the condensed version of what I wrote:
Someone called me a traitor for having lived most of my life outside of my homeland. That jerk.
How can I lay claim to having hopes for my homeland when it is not my home?
My relationship with my countrymen revolves largely around guilt, created by the false notion of identity that is incongruent with who I am. I’m going to pretend that made sense, thankyouverymuch. What does it really mean to be a Citizen of Some State? Is it level of contribution to our dear GDP? Is it cultural consumption? s it political participation? Is it possession of capital? Is it about family?
I think it’s about family. If so I belong to a large complicated family connected by legal strings and hereditary diabetics. I do not belong to a country. What have I to inherit? I may just be a product deficient of civic education or national education or what have you. I consider it a blessing frankly. I just feel out of place in the national sphere, be it here nor there.
Andrew Largeman in Garden State said it best:
“You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone….You’ll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day one day and it’s just gone. And you can never get it back.It’s like you get homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. I mean it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.”
It’s just a constant state, not of anger or pain but just longing. It’s about wanting to have roots for all the frivolous, and all at once the most humane, reasons: just so you could never float away too far from gravity and too close into the sun.
All the strings that tie to me are those of by kin or by friendship. They pull me closer to the ground. But all the spaces that makes me feel like home? They lie beyond these political demarcations suspended in the international airspace: an enclave of 300 square feet in the sky.
This is life of the modern nomadic: feeling like you belong to Someplace Somewhere Somehow but never here nor there. With “internationally mobile work force” and “globalization of labour” and “transnational flows of human capital” - terms that mean the movement of people - I’m sure you’ll feel it too. In the coming generation, this is what we’d all come to.
Does this make me a traitor to my own country? I think not.
Let me float on the margins. I’ve found some of the most wonderful misfits here.
This is where I belong.
Meant yes yes yes! Oh bunions here I come.
HAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAAHAHAHA
What on earth did I get myself into?
Today I spoke with a boy after 6 long years, a boy whose name had meant furtive phone calls, shy smiles and then some. We talked about the people we used to be, the places we left and the people we knew. We talked about how we faded into the silence with all our awkward growing pains. I think I’m the jerk who stopped talking first. I’m sorry!
So we talked about the things we missed out on in each other’s lives. He tells me he misses this country. But it’s not the country that you miss. It’s our little colony atop Toh Tuck and Bukit Tinggi. From up above, our microcosm was sheltered from the ground below. I know so. I live here and I feel home sick for that place on a hill that no longer exist. Its constituent parts had dispersed with a burst, lodging the shrapnel pieces all over the world. I miss it too.
We’re a little taller, a little less shy and a whole lot different and yet we’re still two kids talking on MSN late into the night because neither one of us can sleep. Words flowed out easily like an open faucet because like Corrinne Bailey Rae once said:
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Don’t you think it’s strange?
There is a greater magnetic force that’ll bring us back to a place somewhere in the world just for a little while. It’ll happen when all of us have grown a little more and garnered the ability to jump on planes on a heart’s whim. Because that’s what families do: reunite and disperse in bursts of laughter, tears and pain.
You know what happens in seven days? A week happens in seven days. Did you know this? I didn’t.
And in a week I shall be shedding my responsibilities one by one, packing everything important that’s portable into a suitcase and I will set sail on a pea shell boat, on feather sails, on to my very own Boston where no one knows my name, on to a new town where I’ll see too much of the sunrise, on to another penknife-clutching heartstopping adventure, on to a place where they really don’t care much that this is one horrendously long sentence with too many unnecessary clauses.
In seven days I’ll be gone. I don’t know when I’ll be back. I hope when I do I’ll come back without missing parts.
After 7 years, I need a new start.
Has it always been this terrifying?
you don’t know me
you don’t wear my chains
It’s the second week of summer and I’ve projects lining up for me. I’m excellent at finding things to do, especially when it doesn’t pay me any money!
I’m adding final touches to the zero limits website. I had fun doing it up even if I was feeling my way in the dark with CSS. They’ve asked me to design their biking jerseys too. You know those tight shirts that bikers wear? Mwahahahaha… oh the possibilities for drawing obscene things.
I have to start making drafts for the smoob press kit as well. The proposal for Gaya 09 should be rolling out in a week and I have no idea what I have to do yet. I’ve got two articles to start and another to finish (yes, Kristia, I’m writing something!). Eurythmix have asked me to do something for them again this year. I have a canvas shoe and t-shirts that are screaming to be painted and yards of cloth to be cut and sewed into more nifty things.
I should stop running a charity. So if you have a problem that requires a design solution, come to me! With a pinch of fairy dust, I shall make you happy! …..and uh… this time… I charge my services for a fee.
I design most print collaterals with plenty of experience in advertising events. I have designed corporate identities which is a fancy way of saying I’ve drawn logos made with an attentive thought process. I generally avoid large format printing as it has the potential to kill my computer. Sometimes I design and manage websites, but only for projects with very small demands. So leave a comment (it asks you to submit your email address anyhow which can only be seen by me) and let me know if you need any help! (=
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