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.

Jakarta

Consume consume consume. With 10 new malls, there's not much else to do.

-------------------------------------------------

The smell invites a spark beneath the skin. The smell of the New. In addition, the sight teases the eye, ignites imagination. A perfect salmon pink top that drapes softly round the shoulders, could be perfect with the chocolate brown skirt that falls lightly, and cleanly, beneath the knee. Perfect for afternoon dates, and somewhere in my head a bubble emerges, depicting the scene of me, pretty in pink and chocolate. The eye scans the entire store, picking things up, pairing them. The sexy shoe with daring heels and a teasingly narrow strap that accentuates the bare skin beneath; the elegant clutch bag, its minimalism interrupted with a delightful detail of beads. Countless bubbles appearing and bursting at a dangerously tempting speed.
Tempting. Despite my usual inappetite for fashion.

I'm glad i can't buy everything i want, otherwise life would be boring ;p

Therapy

She’s afraid of darkness and silence. Combined. Afraid to hear things, or see things that aren’t supposed to be there. But if she sleeps with the lights on, she wakes up exhausted. Fear imprisons, heavier than her blanket, tighter than her bra-strings. Sleep a luxury she cannot afford.
She turns on Coltrane. Silence lifts its shroud. She imagines instead herself creating those notes; eyes closed, mind at rest. Fingers moving… moving, soul following, or the other way around she can’t really tell nor care. Believes it so well it’s like a memory that she recalls. Sharp then blur. Sharpens and then blurs again. Fingers tapping her blanket, long after her mind falls asleep.
She wakes up exhausted.
Smiling.

revenge is sweet

“Grey”, he thought, as he pushed through the haphazard array of people and wares at Mangga Dua, the epicenter for cheap shopping. Slam-down prices, they call it. The overwhelming sights and colours were overkill, churned together like a melting pot and leaving a distasteful grayish-ness at the bottom. He saw nothing he wanted. He only came to accompany Marla, who stood beside him now with an unmistakable glint in her eyes. Marla was animated, an excited, ready-to-bargain expression on her face, her lush hair tied defiantly high on her head and swishing merrily as they moved along. Wearily, he followed, squeezing through shop-keepers on either side, shouting and promoting their ware. Marla came to a halt at a tiny stall filled with cosmetics. He absent-mindedly gazed down at the dirty glass counter, rather interested by the subtle blends of colour the cosmetic makers had created. Reminded him of the colour palette he used in his last design for a pamflet order.

“Eyeshadow, how much?” he could hear Marla saying beside him.

“only 30.000”

“So expensive!”, she had an irritated tone to her voice. “Bring it down to 10.000”

“Can’t do”, was the reply, “that one’s an original. It’s really good. Good colour. I always use it myself.”

He looked up to see what the chinese shopkeeper was using. She was smiling, curved scotch tape stuck on to her eyelids to create a folding-eyelid effect when her eyes were open, and above that, her eyebrows were tattoed in a blue-ish hue over her original eyebrows. She wore red plastic earrings, two hoops on each ear. He couldn’t see any eyeshadow.

“25.000 is the best I can do”, she said, her eyebrows curving bluely at him.

Marla’s lip curled down slightly as she shook her head, took his arm, and marched off. A split second later, the shopkeeper had hailed them back and wrapped-up the eyeshadow Marla wanted for 10.000.

In good form today, Marla had told him, gleefully rubbing her hands together a short while after her seventh purchase, all of which he carried now. He now had a slight throbbing headache, and was about to gently suggest how the day was getting late. They were passing a narrow linking corridor, through which he could glimpse another vast space beyond, filled with stores and neon lights.

“Where does that lead?” he asked her, absent-mindedly.

“Oh electronics. Computers, stereos, you know. Boring stuff.” she replied, tugging at his arm towards a fake leather-bags store she had just spotted.

But she couldn’t. He had stood still. Turning around to face him, she opened her mouth to say something when she suddenly stopped. He was staring through the corridor with an odd glint in his eyes, his eyebrows raised ever so slightly.

“I think” he said slowly, a smile forming on the corners of his lips “that I could put your bargaining skills to good use”.

Mom.

fusses, tenderly
anxious
she questions
presses
pushes…
turns.

myriads of
misunderstandings
drawing, magnet-like
she sighs, hurting
stabbing…
knives, at conscience

scrambling
knowing my mind like
her omelletes
still
I sigh, understanding…
denying.

at night, at dawn
she prays
silent murmurs
drip, drop
like precious pearl but…
warmer

hair, hands
caresses
she frets, gestures complicating
ironically simplifying
loving…
Lonely.

Love makes you Fat.

Theories:
1. to love is to feel secure. To feel secure is to feel comfortable.
Physically as well.
2. to love is to make love. To make love is to feel sexy.
No matter how fat.
3. to love is to be content. To love is to be “taken”. To love is to not care about attracting other men.
4. to love is to go on dates. To date is to eat.
5. to love is to flatter, and be flattered in return. To love is to be blinded.
To love is to say, “Oh darling you have the most adorable baby fat”.

...inspired by a friend who gets fat (er) everytime she’s got a guy. Lol :D