COUNTER-EXAMPLES [Email. Reply to sandyrox, 1999.] Don't get so disheartened. Your folks might have had just several galons of gin too much that night. I'd say it is stupid to take everything they blurted out to heart. But even if your 31 years of socialization have made you of the same opinion, listen to me, man; the way for your son to grow up is his way, and although conventionally you are a bad father, the thing for him to learn is never singular. Your mom, dad, and LM were irreversibly WRONG. You CAN be an example for kids to learn from. Oh, yeah, I mean it. Your son could learn from you so he won't get so careless in sex when he is 20. He could learn not to leave school when he is only 18. He could learn about Alcolholic Anonymous and why it isn't a good club to be a member of. He could learn to run to music instead of submitting to the delusion that drugs would help. He could learn not to swindle. He could learn to minimize the circumstances that can push him to lie. He could learn a lot never to be you when he grows up.....
SCARE UP, SCORE UP [Email. Reply to Steve Davidson, 2000.]
Me and my sister? I've never thought of what actually differs us. But people for the last 30 years have been saying we are too different to be siblings, so I guess we just take this for granted. Repetition surely means something; at least, if not the truth and not a constant impression of it, then the whole world must have been indoctrinating us. [Click here for pictures] We have apparently agreed upon a few things of the lives we more or less spent in the same circumstances, but it was like we watched the same movie and told two different stories when asked "what was it all about?" That's normal, supremely normal, yet this kind of thing always looks new to me each time around. While history said that the movie thing isn't even a parable. I'm in the very rare mood of being familial, so I'm adding the rest of the bunch, too: Young
Guns Heat Wag
The Dog Buddy
There's
Something About Mary I
Know What You Did Last Summer And those were just old movies. But then again the irreconcilability was indicative of everything else. Sometimes we saw (i.e. being exposed to) the same thing but we comprehended different things out of it (the essence of the spectacle itself came to her as something and to me as another); or we underlined different parts of the whole; or we reconstructed it using different parts, because the significant elements of it were different to us. We scared different things up, we scored dissimilar stuff up. I know none of us could yield an accurate picture; and none of us could be grossly wrong. If we were to write the familial history I can't imagine how fat it would be, everyone has her own version of the same old story. So glad that I was only born with the purpose of letting you know what you should never be. And not to write the national history.
END OF DAYS, SAY THE STARS [Journal entry, 2000.] Two major events today: 1. A letter. An angry letter. A very angry letter. He was so mad at me, that his handwriting had ceased to be hieroglyphic and come to be genuinely readable. He was so mad at me, that his thought became truly systematic and methodical and scientific and correct. It is the end of whatever was still there between us since the last days of last year. 2. SJ had established her reputation as gifted with foretelling people's future and such; unfortunately she always dispatches her predictions unsolicited and with an absolut disregard towards the right not to be read. I'm not superstitious in this particular area though I am very much in football; yet, maybe because my state of being after the postman disappeared has been hard to describe, the message she sent me seems creepy. I quote word for word: "There are 3 men in your life. One is he whom you love, one is whom you will marry, one is going to be dead. Your chance to be with the one you love is none whatsoever. My cards say 'impossible'. The man who will die love you very much, but you will not be with him, either, because he will pass away. The one who will be your husband loves you, my cards say he misses you much and is happiest when you are around. This man is your destiny." Reaction to event #1: I spent all day in a perfect immobility, actually paralysed by the letter. I must have also cried like stupid, though right now I have succeeded in imposing amnesia so I can't positively say I had. Reaction to event #2: I forwarded all the bulk mail, junk mail, porn spam, religious pamphlets and all sorts of advertorial garbage to SJ's addresses.
THE 1000th WHATEVER [Email. Reply to Art Thomson, 2000]
The mushy verse was the thousandth online piece that bears my signature. It could have been attained years ago, I know; if I'm able to sell this republic maybe I'll hire a platoon of secretaries, typists and translators to bring all of my worded stuff later to the cyberspace, old crap dated back to 1978. It's going to be an awesome giant monument of folly. So, factually it was nothing significant -- I have passed the 1000th mark probably a decade ago, offline. Any single second I spent not-writing was redeemed by the dawns of incessant writing. Any day now I expect a stoppage time, maybe with some minutes added on, yet a recess nonetheless, and that was how I know I am human. So -- yup, I did notice that it was my 1000th online piece. I only did not reflect on it.
[Journal entry, 2001]
Is a literal mop. A bunch of lunatics raided bookstores, mopped and shoveled and threw out books, and burned them on site. Automatically anything with the word 'communist', 'socialist', 'atheist' were considered the same. Books written by 'communist people' such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer were invariably turned to ash, no matter the subject. If Pram published The Indian Culinary Art, it, too, would have been set on fire. I can't even think, let alone think about it. Apparently I have been cradling an unpardonably high hope about us to act like civilized mammals. These people who came from God knows which rock call themselves The Anti-Communist Alliance, name 33 independent organisations under its wings. Just like most people I know, like MJ whose stores were victims of this barbaric action, I suspect some fishy mastermind there behind the numbskulls. But really my mind doesn't want to work on this problem. Insanity is so old-fashioned. Every wacko had burnt books since the last time God came down here to say hello.
[Email to Gordon Stanton, 2002]
My hypocritical self wouldn't let me to say this anywhere. But I think nonetheless I must. Because, like G said, it is good to dismiss the arrogant notion that someone heavily schooled like him is not a soulmate candidate for V who got dropped-out in her very first year of college. Yet by far civilization has been overloaded with icky maxims and unwritten rules like that; which are virtue, condensed; which are never the attitude we do have in practice, but they are merely our wish to have had. It's very simple to me. It never works. Most virtues just don't. I am not against of all people myself; I said formal education doesn't matter and it does never matter as long as our grey cells do their job. You certainly don't need to transfer thousands of bucks to colleges just to be let to know about Aristotle and Descartes and who's behind the silly lycra of Spiderman; you don't have to get schooled to know ethical considerations and systematic mode of decision-making. You don't even require formal learning to master the art of business negotiation and human resources development and company management. There is, though occurence is seldom, some skills that others might have to take from schools but which you have been born with; there are other skills that your best tutor to master is the old man across the street or the sidewalk superintendent around the corner or yourself. But knowing the alphabet and what is universally agreed as the result of 2x5 are (even if not always) mostly gotten from schools. Unless forced by schools a lot of us wouldn't even read anything at all. The increasingly chaotic households couldn't give the sense of order, sportspersonship, camaraderie in general and the sense of belonging schools can yield. There is such a thing as miseducation and faulty upbringing; but there is a difference between one who had known what it's like to study in a college with one who never got there: the latter isn't saved from unnecessary trial-and-error in plunging directly into the stream while the first is, having the time to get prepared. Higher formal ed depends on none but the student himself. The stairs below this stage depend upon the student's friends. The social set. What 'everybody else' does. You go to primary and high schools because other kids go, too - while in most cases you go to universities because of you. So stupidity won't change at all even if one has gotten enough college tutorial to elicit premature ageing if one's brain takes its job-description as being a catalyst of learning. Ignorance can stay stable on for life no matter how many degrees accompany one's name if it is a part of the personality. Narrow-mindedness doesn't have anything to do with being a bachelor of sociology if one has stopped the will to learn. But I believe that we simply can't, since it would be against nature and commonsense, start right from the roof when building a house. Say, you got out of a German gymnasium eighteen years ago and had never seen any classroom afterwards at all, then today all of a sudden you try to teach yourself by reading Lyotard's La Condition Postmoderne Rapport Sur Le Savoir - without being pretentious I still can say I'm sorry you're going to fail. The basic of the typical knowledge shared by the educated worldwide has to be appropriated first, piecemealy, step by step. Only terrorists or their exact opposite enter the building via the roof. Yes, it might be said as a conspiracy to fend off the uninitiated, but that's the way of the world for the past two thousand years. You can stay out of school and educate yourself, but in lingering around the amazon.com you still have to do what students do: start from the fundamental and slowly climb to the experimental. This is a complexity unexplained by just a few paragraphs, and I'm having a migraine now - but I really do hope I have made myself clear in this limited spot in time. Disney is the only one left to blame if you still so far couldn't see that I have, Sir Teacher, been on your side. It then must mean my English isn't sufficient. I might have been totally miseducated there.
CEDAR GROVE [Email. Reply to Melinda Shaw, 2003] Prelude: If you were Buffallo Bill and his circus of Native Americans, if you were to sail away from the prairie to England, if you were to perceive startled faces and if you were taken as a novelty, you would, for the sake of Mammon, probably love it. Tickets wouldn't sell any other way. Thank God I never know your cyberpal C -- and she, although thank God is unaware of it, would thank God even more profusely for never knowing me. But the point is, what she did was what is taught and not for free in Public Relations schools -- knowing well what sort of an audience she had, she deployed the right stunt and she got the attention she craved. Not easy to arrest anybody's mind on anything, these days, amidst the loud noises when the whole planet is speaking and no one is listening. I'm not offended as you thought I would get (you were, as you said). Basically my automatic reaction to this sort of thing is -- I shrug. From what you told me, looks like the entire populace of your favorite room is backwater sediment -- Indonesians call it 'frogs under a coconut shell'. You probably told it to me because you know how much attached I have been to this sort of beings; they're gold mines to me, the same shallowness over and over again, that I could exploit to get, out of it, a few dollars. It is the same old story, my dear, the same old dance along the same old tune. What you don't know is intriguing if you possess a somewhat healthily open mind; curiosity prevents you from living a zombie. In their very narrow path, enclosed within their very small lives, they, anyhow, still want to know about things they will never ever experience, witness, or understand -- it won't add anything to their clunky little minds already full of homebaked and handed-down ideas that never evolve beyond the original shape since formulated by the Puritans landing in Philadelphia, but it will be some ammo to attend the next community-gathering event armed with. ("You'll never believe this. I know a gal named C, she's seeing a Chinese and --") I am a Javanese [click here if you have no idea what I meant]. It is the land where getting excited, all worked-up, amazed or being in a mental gaga in general is the opposite of virtue. So I surely agree with you that the scene was unsightly in your chat room. But for C and all characters in your story, I feel nothing but sorry. How hollow is a life when things devoid of characteristics to be newsworthy like interracial relationship is taken as a topic of discussion. They might as well have a lively talk about laundry. But what do you expect? These people have never even known there is life outside the Galloway County.
[Email. Reply to Edda Fairfield, 2000.] None of the names here is the real name, unless you only take the initials. I know that among the people in my address book there are such names, but I hope they recognize via the description attached to each name here that the persons I talked about are not them.
Your
question was, no matter where I look at it from, an entirely new one
for me. I have gotten some experience of being asked to help someone
selling her car, to babysit a socially misfit 3 year-old boy, to be
a judge in a cooking contest, to take a dog on a 120 miles ride, etc.;
but any sort of matchmaking is never there in the archive so
far-- until now! That's why I am really happy writing
this! For your information, I always failed whenever I tried
to hatch a nuptial scheme for any of the cats that lived with
me, from 1975 to 1999, but they are cats, so I guess they tend
to get naturally picky! So here is the Bachelors' Party in my vicinity. I deliberately dismiss social facts pertaining to their being because I want you to focus on the men and nothing whatever else; the important thing is, they are all eligible for getting divorced from their present bachelorship. Raymond: 26, a perfect candidate for noisy evenings that involve at least two galons of liquid illusion. A bit hotheaded at times, but he cools off quicker than an Indonesian afternoon this midyear, and he isn't a miser when it comes to apologetic gestures -- he would, or so I suspect, even apologize for any mistake you make. He loves American football indiscriminately, he loves rock music, but he only loves guitars that he couldn't afford. He loves riding an old truck, walking his dog, getting sick by too much Mexican food, and his mom, approximately in that order. Earl: 25, a very romantic guy. Severely addicted to ordering dewy roses, pink-wrapped chocolates and aromatic candles. Admirers are always among the hordes of email-dispatching people on his screen daily, chief among them are the florist, the candyshopkeeper, and the Korean aromatherapist. He's not into any kind of sport -- but he watched Tiger Woods on TV once. Milo: 44, main interest is [I'm only quoting] 'strange oriental dishes', but not including washing some. Collectors of antique ceramic works, he loves fine pottery, his son, his job, his sisters and his 1977 baseball ball (I never know what to call the object). Looking for security first and foremost in both business and personal relationship -- or so he keeps on telling me. I guess this means you must be a Pentagon-trained bodyguard or something. Guy: 47, actually never knows that he needs a woman around, not even now. Totally absorbed in musical compositions, he lets his cat do the shopping, run the household, file complaints to the Internet Service Provider, and return the tax forms. Jack: 32, made of nothing but emotions, and they tend to burst out of the blue upon virtually anything; but some people might think of it as charming (they say so about unstable minds in general in Hollywood). He loves nothing but RPG, so you better start asking people what the abbreviation means. Mark: 31, tends to keep all emotions to himself, so it would be useful if you have known what it's like to keep pet turtles. He loves his mom, jazz, romantic comedy movies, and vanilla ice cream. What he needs right now is, actually, a lawyer -- but perhaps he could give you some concession. Lenny: 32, whose idea of romance involves unprintable words; he believes that swearing at people is a unique way to show you care. Pickier than a cat, or so he says about himself, he nonetheless hopes that you would somehow attain the standard. He loves anything related to the beach, especially Pamela Anderson. Bill: 29, easy-going and laid-back, and loves to talk about anything (and it means anything, from UFO sightings to NATO statistics), but your problem is, he doesn't speak English. Casper: 30, shy and never talks more than three words a day ("I don't know"). Willing to split household chores unequally, as long as you don't talk to him at all. Well? That's the best I can do for you. Real steps towards whatever it is that you have in mind must be taken without an assistant; and under whichever circumstance don't you ever tell them what I just told you about them. I'd tell them myself. Good luck! |
Indonesia:
