On speechifying.

Yesterday was a good day because I spent the entire day (and night) working on a speech.
The only thing I hate about speech-writing is the deadline, but apart from that it’s a lot of fun.

When I received the first draft from the related department, I felt a slight tingle of excitement and anticipation. I rubbed my hands together, and gave them each a blow. Puff, puff. I settle my hands on the keyboard and hungrily open the draft.

Drama drama. Let’s sweep the audience off their feet. Let’s give them the shebang. Let’s show some vision and charisma and leadership. Let’s… let’s… um, hang on.

Upon quickly glancing over it I realized the first draft was, well, difficult. The frown upon my brow gradually deepened as I tried to make sense of it. And (my brow) reached new dimensions at the following paragraph, lovingly crafted for our President to say:

“The main objective is to reduce oil based fuel and subsidy in our economy. In addition with the introduction of the cleaner fuel for household, we improve our woman and our daughter, whom in our society for cooking and most affected by the burning of unclean fuel in the household.”

This quickly dampened my excitement. Apparently I was put into society to cook, and I need to be improved for that purpose. *frown frown*

Now you see why it was a long and exhilarating day.

5 reasons why I am a complete mess.

1. I had planned to study and finish some work over the weekend and managed to instead spend it on shopping, watching TV, and sleeping.
2. I did not attend my friend’s invitation to her brother’s wedding (because, seriously, one should never invite their own friends to their sibling’s weddings unless said friend is actually acquainted to said sibling) and only remembered to notify her effectively four hours after the wedding was over.
3. I received an invitation for a breakfast meeting next week and am at loss as to why I am invited, apart from having met inviter at an all-important conference in which I gave my best all-important front. I feel like a scam. Dear inviter, I am not as smart as you may think I am. Please don’t make me come to the meeting because then I will be discovered for the fraud that I am.
4. My career is at a crossroads to nowhere in particular because I have not taken any of the actions I have identified as imminently necessary for me to take but I cannot start taking those actions now because there are too many choices and I haven’t been able to make any decision regarding said choices for the past month because I am greedy and I want everything.
5. I feel fat and because of that I ate healthy steamed fish for dinner and because of that I felt I deserved a little reward and therefore ate one and a half donuts just now and I obviously still feel fat. (If you’re pissed that I think I’m fat because you think I’m not and you think I’m just being too self-obsessed, you can go eat donuts too. They might make you feel better.)
6. (Yes I know I promised 5 but it’s my blog.) I just wasted an hour on a meaningless post which painfully exposes how normal I am. Ugh.
7. Somebody please tell me where my blog title has mysteriously disappeared to over the weekend.

Speak to someone. Anyone.

Having spent holidays in blissfully traffic-less Jakarta, I’ve managed to spend more time at home, sleeping late, relaxing, (help) cooking, and umm... inevitably being trapped in mom’s daily non-negotiable tv-soap schedule. I know what you’re thinking, you evil bastards. You’re thinking, “Ha! Now you’re addicted too! I knew it!”. Well, excuse me, but NOT. But I know now who the farmer boy’s real parents are, and they’re rich, obviously, except the parents don’t know it’s him yet and he fell and suffered amnesia on his way to tell them. Boohoo.

If there were ample space I could write an essay on why sinetron is tasteless and may ultimately ruin this nation’s future for generations to come (obviously it would be a very over-dramatized and soap-like essay). But on this occasion I’d just like to point out one thing which bothers the hell out of me.

Monologues. Tons and tons and tons of monologues.

Monologues are Shakespearean. Created for the stage, where resources are few and thoughts must be gesticulated to the audience through the sole means of facial expressions, gestures, and thinking aloud. And the monologues were beautiful and wrenching. Which is why Hamlet could get away with 15 minutes worth of solo pondering aloud on whether “to be or not to be.”

But really, nobody does that in real life unless he’s a nutcase. As A.A. Milne (the author of Winnie The Pooh) once suggested, in real life Hamlet would most likely have been alone in deep thought, when suddenly interrupted by Ophelia:

[enter Ophelia]
Oph: “What are you thinking about, my Lord?
Ham: “I am wondering whether to be or not to be, whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer...”

You see my point. My point is that TV is not the place for archaic monologues as it makes the whole show look like a televised stage act. Two, it makes the actors lazy, as private thoughts and emotions no longer need to be conveyed through very subtle and nuanced facial expressions. Three, it makes the screen-writers seem lazy, as they apparently don’t even bother trying to make the dialogues look natural.

If you’re reading this and you’re a sinetron screenwriter, for the love of God, cut down on the monologues!

Lebaran

The day is sweltering hot. It is quite insane in its own right.
The family is as usual. Just more offspring than last year.
The food is default. Rich fatty stew with coconut milk.
The elders look old. Some age gracefully, some don’t.
Some seem trapped in a stale attitude which was perhaps attractive or passable at some point in their lives, but no longer. It is too ingrained for them to change. I wonder whether I will age gracefully.
I will probably not bother with the tiny children of nephews and nieces coming to visit. I will probably skip town and go traveling instead.
Or maybe I wouldn’t, because I would have already traveled far and wide, and I would want to just be useful to others, and family.
That would be aging gracefully, wouldn’t it.

I don’t want to grow old and unattractive.
It scared me today. I don’t want to be like everybody else.
“But eventually you will”, said bf, “Inevitably you will lose beauty and lose sex appeal, but something else will appear to replace that.”
And of course he is right.
I want to be permanently attractive, no matter what age does to my physique.

White Envelopes

Several things confused me when I first started work here, one of which was that nobody asked for my bank account. Naturally this worried me a bit. I wasn’t given a written work contract, and nobody asked for my bank account. Crikey. I approached the end of my first month with some trepidation.

Apparently I didn’t need to worry. My salary comes in cash. In an envelope. Received from the accountant, who retrieves it from a big iron safe-deposit from behind his desk in his dodgy office on the second floor. Every month.

Apparently that’s not the only thing I’m receiving. On my way out from a meeting at another department, the receptionist in front of the meeting room beckoned for me to approach the desk, indicated a spot where I was to put my signature, and then proceeded to shove me a white envelope. On a different occasion, after completing a power point presentation where my sole task (and please note extremely important task) was to press the next-slide button on the laptop, I was again shoved a paper to sign and a white envelope.

You may call it a pleasant surprise, or “rejeki nomplok”. But it is all still rather confusing. The very first thing of course was to clarify whether this was legal, and after asking around made myself content with the fact that it is “normal”. Besides, obviously it wasn’t under the desk, as in it was literally handed over the desk. I am sure that out there somewhere, lies a decree which renews a previous decree which re-confirms a previous decree (as is the nature of Indonesian law) that says this is legal. *fingers-crossed*

But the next question is, why should I be given “extras” for the conduct of my professional work, which my (meager) salary supposedly already covers? It’s quite silly and unnecessary. An even more irritating question in my head though, is why the #$%* doesn’t anyone up there know and take into consideration the amazing invention called the bank account? Say hello to computerized, fast, efficient, and uh… transparent?

Carrying around white envelopes, no matter how legal and deserved, make me feel like the mafia.

Present that bf got me from NY! Andy Warhol poster! Love it!

Tribal Sous Chef

The “cooking class” event my brother hosts has become a regular thing of late, where we invite over a handful of friends to cook around a central theme and then settle down to enjoy the results. We’ve done barbecue and we’ve done Japanese, and so this time we decided to do “traditional”, seeing as it’s Ramadhan and all that.

“I can’t cook Indonesian” I said resolutely. The thought of countless spices give me cold feet. Memories of the best maid we ever had, years ago, came back to me, with her much-missed out-of-this-world fried chicken and the secret recipe: her chicken was marinated in 11 kinds of spices, each spice an odd number. E.g. to have 4 pieces of bay leaf and 6 stalks of lemongrass, would be sacrilege and ultimately disastrous. How would I be able to work my way through spices I don’t even know the looks of, let alone meticulously count them? And besides, Jamie Oliver never cooked Indonesian, so why should I bother? (Yes I am far too obsessed with ‘western’ über-trendy lifestyle cooking).

But the others seemed determined. They came up with wondrous delicacies as follows.

Rice-cakes in smooth beef coconut-curry soup.

















Tender grilled chicken satay marinated in light peanut sauce.

So I finally agreed to do a joint brother-sister project on a seemingly easy recipe: Tofu-Omelette in peanut sauce and shrimp paste (affectionately known as Tahu-Telor). It’s tofu wrapped in omelette. And then you pour peanuty whatsits over it. Sounded like child’s-play. As it turned out, I was utterly deceived.

Exhibit A:

The pre-sauced tofu + omelette which dear brother completed with minimum fuss.

Exhibit B:

Say hi to prehistoric stone-age kitchen utensil, also known as The Grind. It’s not your normal mortar and pestle, which may be due to the fact that it weighs 10 times more and is carved out of solid rock. I felt rather tribal as I crushed the peanuts together with the garlic and chilies and shrimp paste and soy sauce. The peanut sauce turned out very tasty, and with all my biceps working it damn well better be.

I only hope the gods have mercy on my soul for not counting the peanuts.