Life is not just about...

It's like a page from chicken soup for the soul. Jessup is not just about winning. It's the process, the experience, the people you meet. The toil, the teamwork, the challenges you take.
And so the judges said, and told us to remember to have fun, because Jessup is so much more and so forth. And then they announced that we had lost. To Singapore. And the fact flew out of him and stuck on me like a thorn, just hangin' around, parasytical. And as humans we go through the usual humanic phases. A brave face, a hearty congrats; glued on in the spirit of sportsmanship, and pure ego. A suppressed tear, not so suppressed when alone. And then exhaustion, and a primitive survival instinct groping around for the positive things to stop the pain: The incredible fun. The victory against UK. Against Germany. Against Uruguay. The moment they announced we made the top 24 teams.
The rush. The process, the experience, the people you meet. The toil, the teamwork, the challenges you take. (and there goes the warm chicken soup, tasting slightly bitter)

JKT-SG-HKG-SF-DC

Perhaps sometime after we have arrived I will be focusing on feeling the rush. The uncanny calmness, the sudden tensity, the surging panic, the certainty that I will fail miserably combined with extraordinary confidence.
But for now I am just exhausted. Exhausted, cramped, dry, bloated, unclean, and unpretty. We have been travelling for... well, I'm not sure. Perhaps two days. We've crossed 4 airports, countless baggage checks, and a myriad of immigration officers. Friendly immigration officers, flirty immigration officers, hostile immigration officers, apologetic immigration officers, gay immigration officers (this is not prejudice! the guy was wearing make up >:o)...
And the Americans, they're funny. Strangers smile at each other in a queue. Say, "hello, how are you?". In a brief minute before boarding, before entering the plane toilet or before nodding off to sleep beside you in the cramped plane seats, they manage to tell you about their family, their favourite book, their plans for spring break, topped with an overbright "how are you?".
Amusing. And slightly intriguing.
Our final destination is getting near, and I can't wait to take a warm shower, and sleep on a warm mattress, while the winter is slowly dying outside.

of thoughts revealed

conjuring up the magic
delighting in the play
smiles and silly poems
borne and carried away

and words flip, fling, flit
like images in a book
passing quickly, pausing
catching her eye with a glint

oh, but everything now catches the eye!
a saturday of images
caught between the fire
and she, inside, smiles

the dreamees and the dreamers
whose life takes form and shape
images in the play
and she, crosses her fingers.

Tribute to JavaJazz Festival

It was like a playground, and it was a long time since I’ve felt so alive! Saw, by order: Andi Wiriantono, my feisty, hard-bop-ing mentor; Ello, because he gave me a three-day freepass; Bali Lounge, in which I was surprised to be amazed by the vocals of Tompi… can’t really blame the guy for his name; Chiarra Chivello, who made our heartbeats samba; Jeff Lorber, funky and upbeat; Daniella Schachter, whose chords are slightly reminiscent of Bill Evans; Bob James, collaborating beautifully with a Chinese orchestra; Raphael Gualazzio, who played with so much fun he made me laugh; and Hiromi, breathtaking and out of this world.
And what it all comes down to is Jazz. Pure and Unsimple :)

rage against the machine.

I'm completely jaded.
Say what you will.

100 Mbps.

The rain is peacefully droning outside, as the leaves humbly bow down to its transparent weight. These large glass walls are barely discernible, seemingly blending in with the weather. Amidst the rain Yo Yo Ma’s cello sends a quiver in the air, accompanying my thoughts as the kilobytes filter through my laptop.

The free, unlimited, kilobytes.

This hotspot-like haven is like a breath of fresh air to my sluggish, slow-provider infested life. And where, you may ask, is this utopic place? This saving grace in a city as user-hostile and corrupted as Jakarta?

It’s my new campus library! :)
God I love the new Dean.

It’s like this. When I’m calm I wonder why. When I’m nervous I wish I weren’t. At other times, I feel I haven’t done enough. But I don’t know what more I can do. I’d feel guilty about the little pockets of time I occasionally enjoy by doing nothing. But I also feel I deserve it and would go insane without it. When will this madness ever stop? But I have a sneaking suspicion I would miss it if it stopped.

... I should be more religious. *sigh*

It’s the perfect time of year
Everything set into gear
I’m so happy I ryhme
Prose just seems like a crime

And hence this light airy crap
Can be explained in a short simple wrap
To Washington again, how sublime!
To travel, and moot, and to shine! :)

On any other day we’d be a river
White on the edges, and a shimmer
With gurgles and frolics
We’d run out of topics
And flow anyways, undeterred

On any other day we’d be together
Dancing and slightly less sober
Discuss the semantics
Ridicule their antics
Though now I suppose we can’t bother

On any other day it’d be just swell-er
Time would extend like a rubber
For now, it just ticks
Like mad, should be fixed ..
..But im sure it'll stand in the weather :)

06.

A 1am breeze whips up, softly refreshing, as the wine softly droops my eyelids. An hour away from last year. An inch away from comfort. Perhaps no coherent words were spoken. Perhaps too many things needed to be said. Perhaps nothing at all needed to manifest in words.

Words, you see, are instant. They lift and drop (like a question on your plate) like the glass that you drink from, quench from. Soon enough you’ll need more. And more. I understood that words collapse around you like an unsuccessful dress, unpinned. Temporary at best. Exposing you, an object of observation. An object of objection.

So I closed my eyes and savoured the breeze instead, an inch away. Quick comfort is not my goal this year. I understood that things are not always solvable in an instant (much to my surprise). Some things, like wine, need a bit of patience. So here’s a toast to 2006... and the test of time.

"Graveling"...

...curiously enough, is the word that pops up fairly often somewhere in my head. ‘Tis the season for exams. Teez, tireless and whipsmart, feels defeated. Not so chippy. Not so sunny. And everybody else seems to be doing so well. You know how that is. You get by feeling, well… hoping that the scoring will be as unpredictable as it always is, or that I unconsciously wrote something amazingly brilliant and original out of sheer creativity, triggered by the desperate necessity of the situation. Highly unlikely, but you know how that is. And at night, in the ungodly hours of night I would fall asleep and wake, fall asleep and wake, sleeping guiltily, and waking sleepily... an assortment of haphazard books about me unmemorized. And last night when I slept (guiltily), I had the most beautiful dream. Never before. Amazing. And no, it wasn’t sexual. *so there*. I can’t help but wonder whether dreams really mean anything. *sigh*. Woke up, grudgingly, sleepily, with a most unpleasant shock, that ‘tis yet morning again, that the dream was just... a dream, and that the book remained sadly unmemorized.
So I gravelled through the day.
Oh, help.

Still sober, as it were
Abandoning the giddy rush
Of love, in a mood

a week felt like a year
Emerging, old and wise
Uncocooned

Thoughts are clear
Gravity, lying in Gratitude
Emotions subdued.

spoilsport

With a deceptively quiet aura, he calmly reached out, closed his palm around my bubble of a dream, and crushed it. In an eerily absent-minded way.

A day of misfits.

Cancelled badly-craved piano sessions, yet again, for an appointment. Spent the whole morning arranging the meeting. Turned down offer to visit my friend’s new born baby. (dear god my friends are having babies already).

As the day progressed, one by one people cancelled. The visitor’s flight was delayed. The meeting was rescheduled. The day was spent in vain.
So I slept, fretfully. Assignments could not be focused on. People had not done theirs. Nobody seemed concerned. I was impatient.

As I start to leave Mom would hold me back. Get me to eat first. Perhaps a motherly conscience set straight by the fact I do not leave the house unfed. Perhaps a reluctance to have me rush out again so soon. Perhaps just a habit.
She frets, fusses. I am impatient, late. Tense and cranky, I rush out.

I am the earliest to arrive. The rest, 40 minutes late. Not much to do, when the time comes no time to do. At 11pm boyfriend calls, still at work. As I spill my tired beans, his battery went dead.

The gentle lulls of consistency dampens the mind
Perfect. Darling, just perfect
Isn’t that nice?

The pulls and pushes
Of gravity, gentle as an ebbing tide
Rythmic, like his breathing

Boring, would you say? And impossible
To be this and this and that
at once, a package, sealed.

Carelessly I care less
Though perhaps I do
Well no, when it comes to you.

Tangle untangle disentangle.

On bright sunny mornings, such as this, waking up can be a prolonged pleasure.
Nowhere to go, some things to do, but not until later. Lay…ter.
A slice of sunlight warms my cheek. A fresh morning chill strokes my unblanketed skin.
Blurry thoughts emerge, unfold, untangle… in no particular hurry :)

Forty Winks

Sleep!
Oh sweet and blissful sleep
Two hours at best
It’s anybody’s guess
When next some winks I'll keep!

Beep!
Oh my alarm goes beep
I hardly had rest
In my comfy nest
Now to my feet I must leap!

Weep!
Oh how my poor eyes weep
They seek and quest
To be put at rest
But sleep just don’t come cheap! :(

unvalidated

"it's quite good"
"you could've been better"

my perfectionism is either going to make me or break me.

My heart is beating so hard I find it impossible to sleep. I'm afraid it will explode on me as I lie here. In which case I would die of internal combustion.
And it's not so much nervousness as it is excitement, anticipation.


For Jessup. God I am such a freak.

the subdued driver

First of all, every morning starts with eco-environmental guilt now. Fuel is expensive, toll-roads expensive. And then, current read being ‘the consumers guide to effective environmental choices’, I keep imagining the amount of emission I must produce in that 40 minute drive to campus. And back.

Second of all, I have a bad tendency to speed, out of pleasure. Today, having calculated the distance between the car I wanted to overtake and the car blocking my front, I swerved right, only to be forced to swerve left again because, apparently, the overtakee refused to be overtaken. *bastard*. Sandwiched between two cars by an inch, in the middle of two lanes, at 80 km/hour on the highway, I displayed my middle finger to overtakee, who calmly sped on. Then I thought well, it could’ve been my fault. Later on, I got caught in a lane-war with a bus. Being hateful of stopping behind busses, I sped up to squeeze into the lane the bus was trying to get into, a la previously-mentioned overtakee. But the bus elegantly shoved its butt in and grazed my bumper. The second time my middle finger displayed it’s futile self, but after some thought, it could’ve been my own reckless fault. Meanwhile, the fuel tank is low, again. *sigh*

Driving ain’t what it seems. It’s a friggin’ war out there, accompanied with all kinds of guilt.