Shine.

I was never a very patriotic person. I had teenage dreams of living abroad where there are civilized pavements and subways and teachers who admire you for having an opinion. I was also slightly disappointed that we only have two seasons and everybody has the same hair colour. We also have poverty, illiteracy, corruption, societal gaps, and dreadful, dreadful sinetrons.

But these past few years have been a bit different, although I didn’t notice it at first. People work hard and are generally happy. There’s been more good news about Indonesia in the media than I have ever remembered. Even without government facilities, the Indonesian art world, movie industry, and music industry is blossoming with new talents of international marketability. You hear people annoyed that ignorant western media coin jargons like “The Rise of Asia” but upon further reading they only mean China and India. We become like hungry scavengers clinging on to every shiny object we can find, only to find that there are many, and many more to create. And then we start creating our own shiny objects. Every team I coach, every transactional advice I give is tinged with a desire to prove our professional savvy. In conversations with foreigners, I find myself slipping casual anecdotes on the liberal, intellectual, tolerant, and colorful people that we are. Just in case they hadn’t noticed. And there are so many others working hard to establish our place in the world. And then we start to gain pride and momentum, as a nation and as an individual.

And that is what the terrorists destroy.

-In memory of Garth McEvoy, may he rest in peace-

The Ruthless Dictator of My Weekends

Again stepping on rather a lot of toes here, but one must do what one must do to ensure the delicate balance of sanity prevails. My own personal balance of sanity hangs delicately by a thread titled “Please Do Not Take Away My Weekends”. I once had a lengthy debate about how we should define “MY weekends”. Is that a day where you only do things by yourself? Or is that a day where you can drop the veto on all other plans but your own? Or is that a day where you impose a prohibitive ban on all things “work-related” but keep your plans open for everything else outside and in-between? It is by no means definitive. It thus comes down to personal preference.

In my perfect world, I would be the grand designer and ruthless dictator of my weekends. But alas, we are gregarious creatures, and one must make room for dissent, democracy, compromise and relationships. Which leads us to weddings.

Weddings??

Yes well, the shocking truth is that I dislike weddings. Shocking because, in a world where wedding invitations arrive at your doorstep for every weekend within the foreseeable semester (via post, e-mail, sms, or lately via facebook), and local tailors build impressive empires out of sewing wedding-party outfits, and wedding parties create traffic jams within a 1 km radius of the venue, it is shocking indeed that I am not enthusiastic about weddings.

If I had my way, I would attend only the weddings of my close friends and relatives, where I could genuinely rejoice in their joyful moments. I would happily get a new dress tailored, put my hair up at the hairdressers, battle through the weekend traffic, and walk from my faraway parking lot to the venue in my stilettos to achieve this. But for the 70% of other wedding invitations from people not classified as “close friends and relatives” which I attend due to the commonly accepted norm that invitations must be fulfilled unless there is Force Majeure, I feel cheated out of My Weekends by society.

My personal preference is not that I could reject invitations at ease, because invitations are a goodwill gesture which one must appreciate. Rather, it is that people should not feel obliged to invite as many people as they can and hold the biggest weddings they can afford. This idea may not gel well with prevailing cultures, but at least consider how the traffic and limited parking space challenges one’s delicate balance of sanity.