Defining Who You Are

Who are we? Really? I mean, we can pretend to be the one with the mask that no one will never imagine that we’re wearing one. In one moment you are the ugly duck trying to fit herself to the rest of the beautiful community in the pond. At the other, you might feel, no! That you’re the center of everything, the earth is rotating with you being at the center of it.

You can be a wolf disguising himself amongst the sheep. However, you never realize that you’re playing somebody else. Here you say A, there you say B as long as you go along the population you’re in. Hypocrite never comes self-admitted. They just go on, blend in, and follow the group. No complaint ever spoken, no act ever done that gets himself the most distinguished one.  Since they are afraid, afraid that when the sheep take off their fur clothes, and the disguising wolves have to do so, they will reveal themselves. When that happens the wolves will always be the wolves, either they will attack the community that has put trust on him, embraced him as one of them even though they had got suspicion from the very beginning you joined the club (being a hypocrite themselves), or they will simply walk away, realizing that they are best left alone.

Wolves are the lone creatures, walking the night seeking for company that they’ll never find. They just howl towards the full moon at the edge of the cliff. The moon is his only company. Telling her how agonizing it is being a loner and being himself in disguise is the cure for his agony, the bliss that they can get the most. They never expect more than howling towards the moon, when she’s full, when she’s at her best to embrace him the way he really is. No pretense, no complaint, no hypocrisy, just honesty and big heart to accept the truth to embrace him when he’s not being someone else, nothing but himself. So, who are we, really? If we have to change our color every time we come to the different trees.        

Ariel Peter-porn V.S. Parents’ Anxiety

This whole thing about peter-porn and all really gets everybody. It’s all over the news for Christ’s sake! Here’s what I think. Lots and lots of people do the protest demanding that this Ariel goes to the jail, which has been done anyway, and the ladies in the video to join him there (but not to make another video of course!). They think that this guy and his video destruct the young generation’s morality. They’re afraid that their sons or daughters will imitate what he’d done. They burnt the picture of these one-hit-fame porn stars, wrote at the paper that they have to go to the hell. I mean, man! It’s what makes your young generation wants to take a look at the video at the first place. You make it all over the news, make it bigger that what it really is. You do the sudden inspection over your young students’ cell-phones to check if they keep the video. And it involves the police. Jeez! You just treat your beloved young generation as a criminal. And you think that that’s what helps! Please?! You don’t trust them and you don’t even try to help them earn your trust. Instead, you frisk them, at schools! 

And one thing about the extreme protestors; it’s like they never made one single mistake in their lives. Just because somebody made a mistake (a horrible one actually), it doesn’t mean that you are the most saint person in the earth that gets every right to judge and send them to hell. I, instead, begin to think that maybe they just look for someone to blame for their worries and even failure of educating, teaching, or guiding their children to differentiate what’s right from wrong. If they think that they’re successful to guide their children those moralities they hold on to, they actually don’t get to be extremely worried that they will imitate that stupid defiant sex preference. You don’t get to worry since you and your children have been gaining high conscience, they know exactly what to do, what to follow or not. You just believe in your kids. However the world shakes, you guys just stand still.

This thing doesn’t mean that I agree or justify what Mr. Peter-porn did, or that I’m a big fan of his, u-uh no, just so you know. It’s still stupid in so many levels, what he’d done. But, it’s just I believe everyone makes mistakes but they still get to have a second chance, you know. It’s all.

Teaching? Why not!?

“Hey what’s up?”, “What are you up to, now?”, “What have you been doing recently?”, “How’s your thesis?” Ah… those questions again. Seriously, give me a break! It’s not that I don’t want to catch up. I mean, it’s just there was nothing a lot had been going on in my life recently, you know? I would just sit around watching DVDs, listening to the music from my computer, playing that stupid card game. The questions and the fact that I actually got nothing to do were really bugging me. If what you do is just get up from the bed and know exactly that for the next 18 hours you’ll get nothing exciting to do and eventually will end up on the same bed with the same feeling; useless, you’d really want say the same thing as I do. And the most awful thing is that I haven’t got any new direction where I’d bring my thesis. And there was no willingness to carry it on. And Jesus!  Make them stop talking ‘bout this peter-porn thing all the time. Man, he’s a f*cker! Yeah, yeah, here I go again, a whining b*tch mode ON! Pardon the language, Sir, Ma’am!? 

But, anyway, thanks to my friendship with my senior in debating club I got a job to apply to. Just like an unlikely angel she suddenly texted me letting me know that the place she’s been working in as a teacher happened to need new teachers. And boom! I got to come in. I got to get thru’ the application letter things, interview and set of tests of course, (you know the basics) but somehow I passed them. Now I got the break! Ha ha ha     

It wasn’t my first interview of course; I’ve been in several interviews for my scholarship, albeit all of them just brought me failure, alas! But not this one, I was worried that I was going to be nervous and suddenly do some sort of stupid things like breaking something in the room, crying, or peeing on my pants. But thank God it didn’t happen. In fact it went well, not really the way I’d imagined before but it went well. I like the place, it’s clean, not as big as my campus though but it’s a good place to begin with. I know that my desire to be a teacher will never die. Though thru’ times I’ve been doubtful, unfocused about that. I want to be a journalist, then a news anchor, then go back again to be a teacher, then change again, but somehow it eventually will end up to being a teacher. I am not really certain about why I end up at that profession. Maybe it’s simply because I just get no any other talent?! Laugh at that!

My first day in a classroom with a bunch of adult students wasn’t really bad. In fact it was fun. I honestly had prepared for the worst. I’d imagined several possibilities. You know, since I’m a way younger than they are, I imagined it’s going to be hard to earn some respect, that they probably will despise me, underestimate me! Not that I hold on to a bad prejudgment, no. It’s more like I want to be well prepared for the unpleasant things. And I know it’s seriously hard to just accept that a supposed-your-son-or-brother kid teaches you, not to mention that some of you are the secretary, or the staff of this company and that company and all. But then again it’s nothing like I’d imagined before. Like I said we had so much fun. We learned, me and my older students. And despite their ages, they were just like kids, you know. I could see their eyes widened as I said the lectures in English; I could see they try to grasp them, to understand them. I could tell that they put effort to be able to do the assignment I gave. And one of them asked me whether I’m married. It really amused me. 

And they wanted to go home before the end of the class. See!?

And I like my outfit when going teaching by the way. A shirt with a pair of pants and a pair lack shiny shoes. I feel like respecting myself and earning it from other people. Does it work? Well, I don’t know that, but at least I appreciate and respect myself.

So, now when I wake up in the morning, I know that for the next 18 hours I’ll be doing things in prioritized order as I just did at that moment. And I’d love to catch up with my friends about what’s going on with our lives.

Five TV Shows You Wanna Watch

Been a long time since my last posting, for I’ve been crazy about my internship, to be quite honest; not really in a good ways though. Ok, not so much for the talk, I’m going to review five most recommended series I ever watched. Yep it’s American-TV-Series we’re talking about, not some sort of local soap operas in some local TV. So here come the undeniably entertaining shows. Let’s begin with 

Chuck.

Major idea is that a civilian that out of sudden is to be involved in national security matters in undercover. The show focuses to the life of Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi) (a.k.a. special agent Charles Carmichael) who in all of sudden becomes a spy for that he receives an e-mail from his former “best” friend back in Stanford five years ago, Bryce Larkin who not only gets him kicked out of the university but also takes away his girlfriend. Apparently the e-mail that Chuck gets and reads is not a hey-so-long-buddy-you-come-to-the-reunion e-mail, but it’s got the ‘intersect’ with it that contains a big deal of secret information that the government’s to keep, which downloaded into his brain during the process, that later allows him to access information through flashes he gets.

As of the all e-mail and the intersect things, Chuck becomes the asset of the NSA and CIA, so valuable that he has to be protected by a hot, blond, breathtakingly beautiful CIA agent Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski) and a muscly, edgy, cold-hearted NSA agent John Casey (Adam Baldwin). With them, Chuck plays all the spy and secret agent things, jumping from one dangerous, but funny mission to another with his naiveté and ridiculousness yet the thing that keeps him human, living a never ending romance with agent Walker, not to mention his protective big sister Ellie Bartowski (Sarah Lancaster) and her boyfriend, Captain Awesome, his lifetime best friend Morgan Grimes and co-workers in the Buy More (an electronic store in which Chuck works as a computer technician as well as a TV set installer in Nerd Herd unit) who are annoyingly funny. The series is just like a mini action, romance and comedy movie in one package served not in just two-hour long. I guess four and a half is not overrated. 

Dexter.

 

This series is rather dark, and so is the joke. It’s adapted from Jeff Lindsay’s novels Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Dearly Devoted Dexter. This crime thriller series focuses on the life of Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), a blood spatter analyst in Miami Metro Police Department, with his sister, Debra Morgan and his deceased foster father (who somehow still lives in his mind) as a police officer and a former police officer, respectively, in homicide unit.

Dexter is depicted to have a seemingly normal life at the day time. He is supportive to his sister, has a steady girlfriend with two children who love him. However, at the night he has another kind of “productive” life. He is a hunter, he has another life that no one close to him has ever known; that he is a night hunter. He hunts down criminals who escape law for crimes that they’ve done. Following the code his foster father, Harry Morgan, instilled him, which is some sort of basic rules; he tracks down his prey, and terminates them in a traceless and particularly constant method. Well okay, a crime-detective-themed series narrated through the cold-hearted, two-faced murder’s viewpoint, think it kinda gets into me. I guess three and a half for Dexter.

30Rock.

 It’s a comedy series created and acted by Tina Fey as Liz Lemons. Liz is the head of creative team for TGS (The Girlie Show) described airing in NBC starring Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) and Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) with their executive producer Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin). The series shows the entire stupid and funny thing that happens amongst the characters and the creative team from TGS, mostly from the insecurity of Tracy and the stupid attention-seeker artist Jenna Maroney. And at the end of the day Liz Lemons comes up to clean up the mess in also ridiculous and sometimes hard ways. The series is funny for its sharp comments, stupid action, which sometimes lead it to be found slapstick, which is also very “Tina Fey” to me. The show has won a great deal of awards one of which is from Emmy for the best drama comedy category. Four certainly is not overrated for this show. 

Grey’s Anatomy

With focus on scared and insecure yet a great surgeon Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) (well, at least until fifth season it is), the series tells the story of several surgeons in Seattle Grace Hospital. There are a hot blond emotional Izzy Stevens (Katherine Heigl), an ambitious hard-core Christina Yang (Sandra Oh), an edgy closed-personality Alex Karev (Justin Chambers), a kind-hearted quite George O’Malley (T. R. Knight), a brain surgeon also known as Mr. McSomething and Meredith’s love interest Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey), a hard-working, kick-ass surgeon Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) and other characters that keep coming in through the seasons, some of them are an attractive neonatal surgeon Addison Montgomery (Kate Walsh) who later becomes a main character in another series Private Practice as the same person, and an orthopedist Calliope Torres (Sara Ramirez). The series is all about drama, love life amongst the characters, life lesson derived from their patients’ stories that have been told to them during the medical process, surgery and all. The series has won lots of awards from Emmy Awards and Golden Globe and now been in its sixth season. Well, I give three and a half for Grey’s Anatomy. 

Lost. The story starts as Oceanic Flight 815 from Sidney to Los Angeles crashes somewhere on mysterious tropical island in South Pacific. The story developed in both primary stories in the island about the survivors to find their way out of there, the island that’s not located in the map, and secondary stories about their lives outside the island. Those survivors are a man of logic, spinal surgeon Jack Shepherd (Matthew Fox), a brave tough fugitive Kate Austen (Evangeline Lily), a “bad boy” conman James Ford also known as Sawyer (Josh Holloway), a paralyzed destiny-believer John Locke (Terry O’Quinn), a pregnant girl Claire Shepherd (Emily de Ravin), a former Iraqi torturer Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews), a likeable lottery winner Hugo Rayes a.k.a. Hurley (Jorge Garcia), and Korean spouses Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) and Sun (Yu Jin Kim). Together they are thrown to the adventure on the island to find their way out facing the deadly mysterious black smoke, finding a hatch that leads them to the fact that the island has inhabitants called Other and former researcher community of Dharma Initiative, not to mention the mysteriousness of the island itself.

Through the seasons, the story of the series developed ramifying, that tells not only about love, devotion, redemption, life choice, but also mystery and science and at the same time about conflict between all of them and more specifically between science and belief. And each episode gives unpredictable twists. Just like Grey’s Anatomy, it is in its sixth season now, which turns out to be its season finale. The series also won lot of awards from Emmy and Golden Globe for several categories. Four is given to Lost.

That’s five shows amongst many that you might want to watch. But hey, here I give you another five worth watching TV series yet without a review. There are musical drama Glee, science-fiction Fringe, comedy-science-fiction Warehouse 13, medical-themed drama House, and detective-themed drama The Mentalist. And oh yeah, the rate that I give for each show above is in the scale of five. Well, then, that’s it. See you guys at another review…

x.o.x.o.

Date Night: A Date that Jeopardizes Souls

What’s going to happen as the queen of comedy meets her king from the different realm? There you can witness the ridiculous affair they will serve in Date Night. Tina Fey (30Rock TV Series) will play the wife of Steve Carell (The Office TV Series) in this action comedy movie.

It’s told that this couple, Phil Foster (Carell) and Claire Foster (Fey) have a moment in her marriage in which they start to feel saturated by all the routine they have. Work, house, each other, work again, then house, and each other. There, to regenerate their love and to spare the saturation, they decide to visit places where their love used to grow as they began the relationship.

However, the trouble begins as they change their identities to be the other couple Mr. Tripplehorn and Mrs. Tripplehorn, who appear to be criminals. The dangerous and breath-taking yet ridiculous adventure then begins. They, Foster couple, have to deal with the fact that police will be after them for they are now the bad guys. Not to mention that they also have to deal with the big boss of criminals and being chased in the taxi with its nuts driver. Their date time obviously will be the most unforgettable date ever. But, will it spare them the saturation (only if they can get through all the dangerous parts of their date night safely)?

If we see the casts of the movie, there’s no doubt that they will make such entertaining comedy. Tina Fey herself is known as a prominent comedian for her career as a writer for Saturday Night Live (SNL) and the creator and main protagonist in Emmy-winner TV series 30Rock for her role as Liz Lemon (the head of creative team for The Girlie Show (TGS) who is a funny, overbearing and opportunist woman). While Carell is known for his role as Michael Scott, the overbearing, strict, yet clueless and ridiculous boss in The Office TV series. Besides those two protagonists, the movie is also supported by the young promising actress Mila Kunis (That 70’s Show TV Series, The Book of Eli), as Mrs. Tripplehorn. Her experience as a comedian is also unquestionable for her role in That 70’s Show TV series for her role as Jackie Burkhart, a wealth-and-social-status-centered and narcissist cheerleader girl. Not to mention the others prominent actors in Hollywood Mark Wahlberg (The Lovely Bones), James Franco, and the beautiful young actress Leighton Meester (Gossip Girl TV series). 

Based on the premise of the story and the actors and the actresses in it, the movie is interesting. It’s lightly entertaining and might be able to be accepted easily by the wide watchers for its simple plot of the story. You can prove it at April 9th for its release in both US and wide. Can wait to see it!

My Traveling Tale: the Exotic Ujung Genteng

Adventurous, an adjective; I find the meaning in the dictionary as

/fond of adventures/ or

/full of excitement/

And for me it means that you have enough gut to just go outside your house and go out of your comfort zone, wander and find new comfort in new place. You’re familiar with surprises that might happen outside, you’re ready to enjoy anything the world might offer, not to mention its beauty, kindness, and sometimes ugliness.

Well, to be quite honest, I was not really fond of adventure as I was a little. I tended to spend my time reading or just playing my favorite music home (not that I was a nerd). I went out once in a while, for sure, but that didn’t include exploring the neighborhood, or going to the preservation forest. But, quietly, I have passion of an adventurer of doing that. It started as I read books by Gola Gong (an Indonesian author with his iconic character named Roy). Somehow it inspired me to also do traveling, okay maybe dream about traveling. I begin to feel the need to see the world, by my own, you know. I need to figure out what’s out there. I need to know, the world outside mine, so that it will open my new perspective. I need to get out of my shell. Meet a lot of people, learn something new, see new places, know what God has given us, and praise it, okay, this one sounds cliché, but that’s probably true.

My first (I’d say a real) adventure of traveling was as I went to Lampung with my friend about a year ago, I’m sure I have written it in this blog, you can find out in the blog’s archives. See the excitement about going off the island for the first time. But now I want to talk about my trip, couple months ago, to Sukabumi. There were three places that we visited, Pelabuhan Ratu, Ujung Genteng, and Cisolok hot spring.

Let’s see the details.

Ujung Genteng

Practically it takes six hours to get Ujung Genteng from my friend’s house in Sukabumi, we went by motorcycle. The road is so sinuous and narrow that you have to be very careful if you drive your own vehicle. It’s about 16 KMs from Surade, the closest sub-district, since Ujung Genteng is quite rural. We may find the tea plantation, at the mountainous part of the road, and coastal forest near the spot.

Ujung Genteng is really gorgeous. The shore is complete white sand beach. There’s place like a lagoon before the high seas. It’s quiet out there, both the entire place and the lagoon, so you can swim safely. Cottage that we checked in was exactly in front of it, not to mention the gazebo nearby (we baked fish there at night and got fresh coconuts at mid sunny day, over the blue sky and green sea, good Lord!). 

You know the concept of virgin, right? Well then, you might categorize the place into that. Oh yeah, there’s also tortoise preservation in Ujung Genteng. You can come and visit then you can release a baby tortoise to the ocean and feeling that you’ve saved them, saved the earth. Isn’t that a great feeling?! I should say that the exhaustion of the trip will be worth it, seriously. I’ll tell you how to get there.

 If you go there by public vehicle, here is the direction. Supposed you go from Bandung, there you take the bus to Sukabumi taking about four hours trip, then in the bus station in Sukabumi you take another bus to Surade, another around four hours long. You’re almost there as you arrive in Surade. You might want to reload your supplies here, since you might find no big stores in Ujung Genteng, neither restaurant. From Surade you take public minivan (angkot), the red one which will lead you to the exotic heaven on earth.

Pelabuhan Ratu

There’s not much to tell from Pelabuhan (maybe because my hometown is, at some part, the same, though mine is cleaner and more beautiful hehehe). I do not really reckon the place, for maybe I came in the wrong time, sometimes it happens as you visit beach you know. It is dirty there, trash at the coast line, inconvenient waves, and so on. I did not even bother to swim there. So, I did not really enjoy the place.

Cisolok

It’s a hot spring. Here is the thing, hot water spurting from the rocky small river (there the hot spring, I guess), but oddly, the water around the river is not hot, really. There is nothing more I can tell from the place though; meaning that I don’t reckon this place either. You probably will want to spend your holiday in Sari Ater, Subang instead.

So that’s my traveling tale to Sukabumi. So eager to tell you another traveling trip that I ‘m going to do.

“Traveling—It leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”

-Ibn Battuta-

Ten Things Singlehood Has Done to Deserve Hatred

Being single certainly does not always bring such happiness, if you know what I mean. Some people may sing a song about being happy as a single, but SERIOUSLY? Here, I give you some actual and vivid descriptions why singlehood does suck. And these might make you aware of disaster you are dealing with. So, let’s begin:

1. Enduring an unbearably disgusted feeling as you end up with your DVDs or Play Station at Saturday night as your best friend is hanging out with their dates

2. Suffering from self-quality degrading, since no body seemingly wants to be with you

3. Being accused as a gay for you’ve never been with any boy or girl since like forever

4. Suffering from heavy stress due to the crappy feeling of loneliness or yearning for your ex. God, this one does suck!

5. No one checking on you as you get fever or fall from the stairs and broke your leg or maybe you fall from your stupid little bike

6. No one to spend time with while skipping the tedious lectures

7. No one to hold hands with when you walk to the movie as you see some lunatic little high school students embracing their hands to each other

8. No one to call or to text to for a just trivially sweet talk till very late though you’ll be broke since then

9. No one to support you when your GPA keeps declining and be the reason you survive college

10. The last may be nasty, but no one to kiss as you feel like cherishing love, LOL…



Well, after all, d’ you still think that being single is very happy? You tell me!

Okay-okay! For the sake of balancing I’ll give ten awesome things of singlehood in the next posting, so keep on reading!


X.O.X.O.

Percy Jackson and the Lighting Thief

it's the movie i watched couple weeks ago. i kind of think the movie was really childish but thanks to Alexandra Daddario who keeps the movie more interesting.

Being Critical: What’s That Supposed to Mean?

Being critical. That’s the thing that I’m confused about up to the second I write this. There’s actually thing in which I do not really understand about being critical. In what side I should be on, what dose of being it I have to swallow, so that I’m becoming neither overwhelmed nor lacked of it. When I joined a debating club, I 102% agreed that being critical was what the most required to be a debater, considering the things that I knew about it were merely about finding the loophole(s) of my opponents’ argument, about you question everything, about how could you make theirs so hideous that yours will remain the most convincing and making sense of all, for debating is not the place where you find the truth or the right things. But now, I somehow doubt it.


There’s sometimes moment as I begin to ask a lot of questions that I have no answers for, I begin to be like okay, as you stop asking questions then you stop facing confusion then live happily ever after (or silently ever after). But then, oh c’mon you, no questions asked then no, nothing! You will probably live in denial, stupidity at the worst.


Well, I’m not really sure that I share such dilemma with my fellows in debate or any of my friends. They seem fine, all of them; the ones that, I consider, are highly critical and the other that are less critical or even do not care of anything at all “Hell, take it easy, just live a life” they probably will say.


Here are the things about being critical I’m basically confused of. You begin to despise people, disrespectful. Somehow you always see or try to see (by the habit) something lacked of one’s performance, their talks, you think, do not make any sense, (through your shoes) they are not supposed to be like what they are. You know, there’s a certain point in which you put high expectation then you just get nothing or far below what you have anticipated before (as the result of you being critical, you think you know exactly something that’s supposed to be, you think you know the standard), and then at that moment you become unappreciative and disappointed all at once for the things in front of you, even sometimes for yourself. You also become skeptical of anything, you are not naïve (it’s a good thing), but you’re exceedingly realistic.


Becoming cynical is another result of being critical, it’s a sign of cleverness I was once told. But then again, if that means that you fail to see any single good thing in anything or anyone, I don’t think so. Life is too short to be used to judge, criticize, and despise people or yourself. It’s also too short to be seen cynically or skeptically just because you are smart enough to do so.


I don’t want to end up that way. But I don’t want to be so naïve that becomes an absolute believer, either; one who swallows any given thing without asking. The thing is I want to spare all the overwhelming side effect of being a superfluous inquisitor. Just want to be critical without despising people or ungrateful, to be realistic yet not to be skeptical, and to get wits instead of excessive cynicism. I know that sounds impossible, too perfect to be true, “nobody’s perfect” an old saying screams, but everybody can try to be perfect, don’t they? Well then, I guessed the point’s been made here.


“There couldn’t be a good guy if there wasn’t a bad guy who set the standard”
Jodi Picoult The Tenth Circle