WRONG ENOUGH TO BE MY MAN [Journal entry, 2002] "I love you more than you have ever known. One day you'll see," he ended the conversation. I wish no one says anything so cliche - but my wishes have been notoriously spacebums, hovering there in zero gravity with all the NASA junk. I once gave the whimsical ideas he tossed into my vacant head a little thought - real thought, unworthy of the ideas themselves which consisted of, among others, robbing the National Bank, hurrying into KLM and leaving everything behind and landing in a smoggy morning, to start things over and blunder and get entirely sick anew - but this time with him. It is normal for him to say (with or without thinking) things like that. I am never made to subsist on a 'good' man. The 'right' man might be just as quick in causing me to reach a repellent. This one, he is wrong enough to be my man. But I trust myself as little as I trust him. It never mattered back when the dinosaurs of regrets never roamed; even if I couldn't have faith in him, I did in me, and that was more than enough for such a soul as mine. When I was young.
[Journal entry, 2003]
"You have too many interests," said Yahoo!® to me the other day. "We suggest you remove some." I stared at the screen and zillions of harmful particles were bungee-jumping into my eyes and straight to my brain and I was too much in some state of 'Huh?' to keep an eye off them. Too many interests. A practical Pennsylvanian has told me approximately the same thing several headaches ago; "Your site is confusing. I have no idea what your main interest is. What is the focus of your site?" That was just one person, and the one person's interest happens to be conveniently singular ('data system programming'), but I rarely dismiss anybody's remark as nothing because, based on what I optimistically adhere to, this species is different from lesser mammals for the ability to think before opening and shutting the mouth for any purpose at all. So the personal opinion stays. Both the Pennsylvanian and Yahoo! dotcom think that I am interested in too many things under and over and beyond the sun. Both the person and the impersonal agree that correction should be made on me. Seems like I have tragically missed the class when civilization taught us this rule. But my problem is I never believe there is such a thing as 'too many interests'. You can live life looking straight ahead and leaving almost no trash for future archaelogists to get disgusted by; but generally this kind of life is as square as goodness and in my inner circle is considered as some grossly wasted time. You can alternately get obsessed with one and a single thing, even if it is something cryptically useful for mankind in general and entirely meaningless to most of the same bulk, such as data system programming; or personally enriching and spiritually enlightening and socially kooky such as coffee mugs collecting; it's all up to your own brand of eccentricity -- but singlemindedness is never a virtue to me. Even a narcist I know needs a break every full moon or so. An obsessive-compulsive painter has his bouts of not needing psychiatrists. There is an extreme case nearby, a 'the opposite of me' case, someone who isn't interested in anything at all, not even in nothingness (such as in the oversimplified, indigested, secondhandedly condensed Californian Zen Buddhism). Now what would you have to say about a person like that? He spends his entire day sleeping and night sitting in front of the TV -- a physical exercise for him, since it involves switching channels like 25 times per minute -- that's why I said he's sitting in front of and not watching the TV. But perhaps there is a dugout for guys like him online -- a group or something that caters to the need of some people whose interest is 'rapid clicking of remote control'. My friend X has alerted me on the infinity -- he has just joined a club for people who grow moss. I'm not sure why I waste so much space for talking about this out loud -- probably I've been, despite the fact that I don't notice it, a bit offended at the thought that too many things interest me. Without the remarks I would never even think it is not the way of the world. But even without Yahoo!'s blessing and with a Pennsylvanian scolding, my interests wouldn't substract themselves from me -- the only possibility is they might still grow or create some substream. "What is the focus of this site?" asked the Pennsylvanian. This, my dear, is a personal site. The focus is me. So "too many interests" is here unavoidably.
MELANCHOLY REPRISE [Journal entry, May 10, 2003]
There is, so I always believed, no possible connexion at all between the MTV and emotions -- as far as I knew, the plastic lexicon only contains emoticons. But X cried today watching MTV. It surprised me more than a World War III. "It's so sad," she said, "I was younger when I liked this song, and now I still never asked anyone to listen to it although it is what I should have said." It was You Make Me Feel Brand New [words & music Thom Bell & Linda Creed, produced by Stewart Levine, published by Mighty Three Music/Carlin] on the nostalgic section of today's MTV, that she referred to. Nowhere around non-average pop tunes -- it is just another clot of ordinarily composed verses replacing the simple words 'thank you'. But I understand. I'm in the lowest level of melancholy myself, so I didn't say anything to X and just threw her some tissue paper. What I understand is the feeling that you, too, would have gotten upon silent nights on your own, when you remember how many 'thank you's you have neglected to say to certain people all your life. You know it might soon be too late to say. Your conscience claws its way into your worldly mind, your guts get on some icky guilt, your eyes start to mist. And then you fall asleep and forget the entire stuff in the morning. I have tried to avoid that sort of night. Perhaps because of the way I was kicked into adulthood, it has never been so hard for me to thank people -- Grandma always reminded me to when I was too young to deem it necessary. And in whatever way, I thank God for things and deeds that I couldn't find people to thank for. Yet, I'm sure there is still a winding list unattended in my head; some people I consciously refuse to thank for some reasons; some self-centeredness that heaps the credits to myself when it might have also been someone else's due. I'm just -- in a bad way -- human. So X and I sat there in front of N'Sync, saddened to pieces. What a planet of incongruency. My melancholy also comprises of laments of why some people never thanked me.
Footnote:
[Journal entry, 2002]
The three people who meet me everyday in all weather just said, at 10 o'clock this morning, that this is a financial sin, which I, of course, disagreed. I did some translation last week when I felt a little unsick. Yesterday morning I got paid. At 3 p.m., I was stone-broke. I used all the money to pay an international call to listen to JG's stories of fishing. Oh, yeah, I am this sort of insane. All the few who know me more than ten years in a row - and those rare mammals who somehow did in ten minutes - surely have been familiar with my list of aversion. Fishing is among them forever. It is never a sport, never a hobby, never anything to me but cruelty to animals - unless you are the Apostles I see no reason why you must fish, even if you are a seventy year-old Navy veteran with absolutely nothing to do but rheumatism. It started a week ago. I was trying to reach JG's wife to reach my very own sister who had been scarce in her very own apartment - she wasn't there, and instead of hanging up I talked to the husband until the last dime. He and his entire family is 'ordinary' in BJ's words and 'nice, modest, good' in Mom's and 'no one there plays chess or tennis or karate' in Dad's - whatever they are, the man of the house, this one fisherman, gave me peace during the probably half an hour of phone conversation. While the subject was trout. Occasionally he strayed to bass. And it isn't so against my character, unlike what those trio of critics at my heels keep saying. On the contrary it is my character. Whatever the subject is, if I can sense that someone really does love what he does, I respect him boundlessly; JG in fishing is such. And it is some kind of a supernatural feeling that I got from listening to his tales. The subject is so remote from everything - it gave me a break from this life, it made me a little kid at the foot of a rocking chair in a windy winter morning. I'm almost happy.
WINDBURN [Journal entry, 2002]
I'm more than officially ill, so I asked E to check what was clogging my Inbox and have them printed for me, but surely I didn't suspect that she would faithfully hand me a bulk of "Win A Summer in the Caribbeans!", "Join Us For $3,000 To Make Millions", "Pinky Girls New Hottest Pix", and God knows what this is, because I certainly don't: "Brigand Monk In Action". Sometimes it is so hard to be thankful even for something we really are, that way. If someone said he or she would do somethign as I requested, but they never did, I, like anyone in my shoes, would have gotten mad; but I don't know if this is normal or not, I also got mad when they did it with a complete lack of initiatives. Or something like WR several times had committed - asked to fix the back door, the roof, or such, after finishing the job he always gave me back the whole rotten wood planks, rusty iron sheets, crooked nails from perhaps 1945 and every little piece of garbage from the old structures. In this age, this is very touching - he just wanted to show how beyond the stratosphere his honesty in business was. But, you know, excessive good things are oppressive. No email of any importance, among the ones I got this month. A request to anglicize a painter's catalog, but it's ancient by now, too late. One short message denoting nothing from Z ("I miss you"), already one month old. Nice message, but he didn't even do. One younger email from Mrs. X, telling me she would call - like always, she never did. The genes that run in her family consists solely of this characteristic: promises to call, to write, to visit people, and to break every one of them. The similar hereditary perversion is had by the Kennedy clan, reinforced by whoever was the writer of their campaign speeches. The Bushes tend to keep their promises, because they always promised the worst people can get. I think to pour empty promises out of some genuine good will is the most dangerous habit of all. This reminds me of Carter and Gore and Clinton. Nothing from the genius attorney Von X who swore he'd send a legal briefing of what had been going on there in Hamburg while I was sick, but this somewhat is no surprise - I still keep the message promising the act: "I going to sent as soon in short notice" - direct quote. If this were last year I would have forwarded a petition to propose that Germans should be penalized for speaking English. If I am to know nothing whatever of what people like Mr. Lawyer here is talking about, probably it's better if they speak their own tongue - because my total illiteracy would save me from getting confused. But among the emails from either companies or people I don't know, there was one cryptic either poem or song sent by someone or something that signed it by the name of Kanginan - a Javanese word which in this case might be equal to 'Windburn' (literal translation would have been 'windswept'). The date is two weeks ago. The message, in original Indonesian, reads: Kala
senja berangin Translation: In
windy twilight Cliche melancholic reverie was my job when I was young; maybe this is the time for whoever sent me the words. It's the only email I plan to reply.
[Email to Ryan Kane, 2002]
It shames me that we are starving and that we are denying it and that the whole world seems to know it nonetheless. The World Food Program has just launched US$ 65 million to do something about it a couple of days ago. We are to buy food for 21 million of Indonesian poor with the money. The focus is like Taring Padi's field of annoyance, the urban poor, which it said comprises of 1,5 million of empty stomachs - this is somehow a flatenned number, I think - it can't be this small. And the WFP dubs the target of its aid 'the ultra poor'. Oh, my. This ultra-noisy country has not a thought of the ultra-starving part of it; the parliament is haggling over personal and partisan power everyday, corruption has become even worse than Suharto's time, and 21 million are hungry noiselessly out there. Kedaulatan Rakyat said an orphanage in Prambanan, a district where our worldclass stone temple of the first millennium stands, the money for food for each kid is 125 IDR a day - 0.013 US$ -- now you try to eat that! For that sum, you can only get one piece of soybean cake, 0.5 inch thick and 1.5 x 2 inches wide - and you must eat it raw, because anything you need to have it cooked cannot be gotten at 25 IDR - the sum which is left after you buy that one single piece of soybean cake. I've never had anything good to say about Taring Padi - I only know a small number of its active and former members on individual basis, and noises it made got here mainly through them and via E's constant reciprocal disdain. A few weeks ago I translated Dr. MX's essay on this organisation into English to adorn an exhibition catalog that never be (the commercial gallery of NB's cancelled it, because the Taring Padi kids demanded a ludicrous percentage of the money that the two unreasonably hoped to get through the sale). Dr. MX is an admirer of this club - though he is notorious for admiring anything that could get his ever-expanding family deposits (he's forty-something and ardent Catholic and keeps on getting kids - now it's 6 already). The club's fixed attention is more or less food, as is denoted by its name (literally anglicized Taring Padi would mean 'Rice Fang') - a fierce way to fuss about the lack of it. A theatrical protest typical of it consists of creating a paper rat several feet long and wide to symbolize pest and to burn it in a public place; planting rice on asphalt streets, and the like. I can't clap my hands on these humane gestures because the money they got from various foreign grant-giving bodies would certainly be better-spent on food than to finance the so-called 'populist art' that always gives the town's cleaning-service agents (with some ridiculous low wages and unbelievable hard work) undeserved extra trash to get rid of. But even some heartful but brief, long-standing but half-hearted, or forever yet fake, concern about starvation pays off in the overall scene of national life here. Besides the luck of such clubs in generating caucasian grants, they keep the thing we want to forget on the surface of the sea of willful ignorance. I believe Taring Padi and its kin and kith would never get a chance to bask under spotlights for the cause they stick to is severely unpopular; they're never going to grow up organisationwise because their programs are pathetically idealistic and nobody with means to support himself would stay long in this communal daydream -- once in your relatively long, tedious, boring, meaningless life, you would invariably got an episode of 'me saving the world' somnambulism, and once you have lived it through there is bound to be a painful awakening sooner or later: you grow up, your so-called 'society' never will. So your hitherto vacationing mind says "Get outta here, man!". Pseudo-populism is largely unenforceable in any social system - not even in their own. Adherents are street-dreamers who have nothing to do with getting real - all socialists are utopians. But I admit that the idea (regardless of the supporters) is something saintly, something useless but great to be had, like a golden crucifix that you can also carry to a pawnbroker in rainy days. Meanwhile, a few miles away down the very same street, the right-wingers -- I really try not to name the name -- have been busy with literal destruction of anything they dub infidelist. Clad in black, they used to patrol the town two-by-two on motorbikes which license-plates were thoughtfully covered to prevent individual identification. Merging into one single will and might they were out to cleanse the soul of the godless. A seminar on HIV/AIDS for transgendered people was violently smashed (literally) to pieces, while they also looted the participants, only less than a couple of years ago. Last year the Taring Padi, believed as communists, was ransacked and a hapless guest (tragically not even a member) who happened to be the only human around when this happened was brutally beaten. The group of ultra-believers (or so they claim themselves to be) have been destroying businesses like VCD rentals and Playstation-addicts' hangouts; sometimes they met armed resistance (they are always armed, I forgot to mention) and then civil wars were staged somewhere with some cost extracted on public property. One morning I passed a scene of this sort of brawl, it looked like an earthquake had been visiting the area on some exclusive mission to destroy everything on the ground. They even plucked bricks out of nearby houses. I'm scared of what these young men represent, as much as my nausea beholding their actions. No one - not one soul - dares to interfere or to even raise a voice against them - how could you say anything bad about 'God's soldiers'? Public officials tend to mend the broken pieces quietly and as quickly as possible to be able to shove it behind their minds immediately - because they can see no solution and can't risk an even larger turbulence which will elicit longer lists of victims - minorities, especially churches and the Tionghoan businesses will surely get the backlash and this prompts everybody to just shut up. Even their own elders don't have any meaningful influence within the club of the young generators of chaos. The street that was utterly destroyed didn't stay the way it was for long; in a few hours everything was cleaned up and new flower pots and traffic signs and such were installed - everyone then could forget the scenes of last night. Yes, that was not right - but I believe that we have no choice at the moment. Really. You have to live our lives to understand how this be. Just try to see it this way - will you risk a regional or even national political pogrom in quenching a localized skirmish that still was not 100% based on a conflict between religions but more of just criminal actions distanced from politics? So in a way I have something in common with the likes of Taring Padi, beyond the color red of their banners and my football addiction's. We're all minorities. While my minorityism doesn't have anything good to offer to the public realm, Taring Padi does; they keep reminding us of what we actually are - the people starves.
Footnotes:
SKY OF DUST [Email. Reply to Thomas Erskine, 2002]
Prelude: My sister [click here for a glimpse of what she is] went to live and work at some Northern spots of this rickety decaying globe on organisational grants. She did live and work there and in due time came airsickly back. Because she lived there, there was scarcely any penny left by the time she mounted on the steel bird destined to land in the soil of her shady roots; only her baggage swelled like volcanic mountains ripely pregnant with keepsakes for everybody she knows. And everybody she knows told her what she did was abnormal. Normal is to get back here with just the very same size of luggage as at departure, once landed then assuming the same ol' life as before, except for the longer brag at lunch and dinner and weddings and funerals ("So when I saw this moron in Harvard -- oh, and in Berlin I got so pissed when -- it reminded me of what happened in Paris --") -- and except the fact that you have gotten richer. Acknowledged or not, residency programs, researches, higher education abroad, as long as they are for free and for which you are required to spend approximately nix from your own purse, essentially could be a living. And I think it is quite factual that many people take it as such. Personal greed prompted this slanted view -- national economy sharpens it. The dollar and euro and pound and yen if measured in IDR is an awesome monetary cloud nine; no other way to get the sum unless via free foreign funds. A family man could abstain from everything while residing or studying abroad, and the untouched monthly cheque he gets from the foundation, for the purpose of living like normal locals there, could be stored away for home. Once he's safely back, he gets his kids a swollen deposit in the bank, or renovates the house from a shack to three-storeys building, or buys a new piece of land for future offsprings. That way, they got not just a slight new experience, an artificial cultural exchange, and a dubious higher academic degree, but also some undisputedly solid hard cash. Nice, isn't it? Classical look at this would of course yield a snapshot of intellectual sin. But these people believe in getting real. Useless research papers unfit for anything at all have been crowding universities and research centers -- what's the difference in adding some more? Real life says it's not just alright but A-O.K. You get the fund for examining or exploring the field of study you major in, you get the side-effects of projects, such as mobile phones, computers, fax machines, digital cameras, or at least stacks of paperclips, for free, for yourself, when the research is over. And you also get the proposed pay for doing it, plus the extra cash put into the proposal for nothing actual. Super nice, isn't it? I can imagine you frowning. At least I am. |
