To travel is to...

I was just goofing the net, trying to muster up the willingness to start writing. I stumbled upon a crazy load of quotes in one page about traveling and here are some of my favorites:

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road.

They are the destination, and the journey.

They are home.” 

― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.

I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.” 

― Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,

and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men

and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” 

― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It

“But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.” 

― Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again;

we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life” 

― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” 

― Gustave Flaubert

“Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.” 

― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.” 

― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost.” 

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” 

― Cesare Pavese

“I didn't know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.” 

― Justina Chen Headley

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” 

― Pico Iyer

If everything isn't going your way, I pray that you at least get to travel...

Compartmentalizing

There's comfort in boxes. One for this, one for that. One for you, one for me. There. Everybody's happy. No fuss. No mess. Hurray. But there's a point where it's unbecoming and simply... messy. (I know, what an paradox) Note that this is coming from me, who is the queen of organization and order.

I think I'm currently hitting a certain wall where I have far too much boxes than what my head can handle. Pick an aspect of my life and I assure you that there are some form of boxes there. For instance, social media. Ah, easy! I have not one but THREE Twitter accounts and another one that I manage. I have an email address for personal use, school-related things, and fandom matters. Even in my phone, I have folders that categorizes each app according to my preference.

See what I mean? I'm an organizing maniac. It's getting to the point where even my bookmark bar's folders are giving me headaches.

Do I stop, though? Because frankly, I'm not sure how well I'd be able to function without these boxes. I'm not ADHD but I get as fidgety as they if things aren't categorized. It's as if my brain refuses to process things if it's not yet labeled accordingly.

Sigh.

La la la.

There I go again.

Poof!

Tentang Rindu

Gue belum pernah ngerasain kangen seumur hidup gue sampai gue akhirnya pindah ke negeri orang. Mungkin ketika gue di tanah air, rasa kangen nya masih manageable karena segala sesuatu dalam jangkuan. Tapi begitu pindah ke tempat lain, rasanya kangen nya seperti di kuadrat seratus dan munculnya sporadik, seperti ngga ada pola nya which means mengatasi nya susah.

Tapi gue salah.

Ternyata ada pola dalam kangen. At least, pola ini berlaku buat gue pribadi.


Kangen gue menjadi-jadi ketika gue lagi sarapan pagi di hari Minggu, karena biasa nya gue selalu makan bareng keluarga dan/atau teman-teman sepulang gereja. Kangen gue meningkat drastis ketika gue lagi scrolling timeline dan teman-teman di Indonesia pada nge-tweet tentang makan malam mereka. Kangen gue bertambah ketika gue lagi ngobrol sama teman gue yg lagi kesusahan atau lagi merayakan sesuatu, karena gue kangen berbagi. Kangen gue jadi nyelekit ketika gue lagi naik sepeda sepulang kampus, di bawah matahari yg menyengat, dan pikiran tentang orangtua gue and everything (everyone)  I'm fighting for melintas di kepala. Dan kangen gue ada di puncak paling tinggi ketika gue sendirian, berusaha menyelesaikan tugas dan kerjaan, sementara temen-temen gue asik menikmati liburan mereka.

Sejauh ini, gue belum berhasil menemukan formula buat mengatasi isu ini. Dan konklusi gue cuma bahwa kangen itu ngga pilih-pilih dan selalu ngga enak.


Buat semua yang lagi rindu, I feel you. 


Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

On Not Getting What You Want and the Hardship of Finding A Job

Here's an equation for you:

2C = GROWING UP

2C + 4(H + M) = GROWING UP

C = change | H = hardship | M = Money loss

All you brainiacs, you're free to correct my flawed formula.

A Time To Kill, A Deal To Seal

Don't you just love it when you come up with a catchy and rhyming title for your post? :-)

I have about half an hour before I have to leave again so I decided to type this post up.

It's two weeks away from my Christmas getaway. It's crazy exciting but it also means that I have to finish ALL high school assignments before I leave and I have to finish ALL the final projects and papers for my college classes. Sounds fun? Umm... not really. But I brought this upon myself and each day, I remind myself to stay focused on the task ahead and not let myself slip into a hole.

Because Christmas is just around the corner, I'm going to spill my thoughts on the holiday itself. Yes, I celebrate Christmas but I'm not going to preach to you about what it means religiously or anything.

Christmas, to me, has always been simple.

It's about family and love. Growing up in Indonesia, we've never really made a big celebration of Christmas and I think, my family have only actually put up a tree thrice in the 15 years that I've lived at home. It's not that we don't appreciate Christmas. We just see Christmas as celebrating it with our family, without the fancy ornaments and gifts.

As you'd imagine, moving to the United States where EVERYTHING is about decorating and gifts and shopping for the occasion, I experienced quite a bit of a culture shock.

My first host family was your typical American family and they too celebrate Christmas like every other family in America does. We decorated the house, although the word 'decorate' wouldn't really represent the activity since we completely revamped the whole house with Christmas decorations. We had Christmas sheets, towels, plates, pillows, mats, and other household items that you can name. We also put up a huge Christmas tree and spent a whole evening decorating it.

...and then come the gifts.

I've always been taught to give and spending a sum of money for gifts have never been a drag for me. But it was so heartwarming to see a tree with boxes and boxes of beautifully (and Christmas-ly) wrapped presents under it. To be honest, I don't think I've ever received so much gifts from such few people in one day than I did during the two Christmas I was with the Edwards. The inner child that I am yelped in joy seeing that many presents and for a second (a loooooong second), I felt ungrateful because I wished I've celebrated Christmas this way all my life. By celebrating Christmas this way meaning the abundance of presents, of course. Such a selfish thought indeed.

But as I go through each day of my life in the past six months, I've been constantly reminded that I'm able to stand and breath because of grace and that Christmas is really about gifts. A gift, to be precise. It's important for me to remember that the best gift I could ever give to anybody is by loving them and to constantly remind them that they matter, and the best gift I could ever give to myself is to stay thankful no matter what.

I know that last paragraph is mega cheesy and mushy mushy. But as I listen and let my mind be swayed by Christmas songs that talk about nothing of the true meaning of the holiday, I can't help but to realize what I privileged life I've been living to be here, in tiny Twin Falls, Idaho with the wonderful classmates and friends that I have, and to having an amazing group of people just a BBM away in Indonesia and all over the world.

Sometimes, we forget that the little things we have matters. That the people we have around us matters. More than anything, we should be focusing on how we can make others feel loved and important during this month.

So if any of you readers is feeling exhausted or lonely or hateful during this most wonderful time of the year, remember to look around you and set your eyes away, for once, from yourself but to others. I guarantee that once you start worrying less about what you're going to get or what you're going to do or what's going to happen to you, the world will be much much brighter.

Because it always has been and it always will be.

So here's the deal I'm sealing with this post: Christmas was, is, and will always be about loving others.

"Christmas is love in action. Every time we love, every time we give, it's Christmas."

Dale Evans

Growing Older, A Day at A Time

No, this is not my birthday. In case you've missed it, it was June 7th. Drop me a word and I'll send you a message of my home address so you can send your long overdue birthday present to me (preferably a 13" MacBook Pro... or a Nikon D700... or a new stereo system)

Just kidding.

I've made a promise to my Twitter account that I will update my post as soon as I'm done with my summaries, and here I am!

Yesterday, a friend of mine sent a message, asking about a picture of us singing in a YouTube video. I was singing Dewi Lestari's Grow A Day Older while he played the piano. The video was made on the occasion of Azrina's birthday (August 10th, ladies and gents. Do not forget!). But somehow, as I start singing the song in the shower, thought swirled around my head about the true meaning of the song.

The song is simple, really. It's about growing (yes, you've guessed it) a day older. It was written in correlation of the short story Lestari wrote and compiled in her book, Recto Verso. A brilliant piece, really. Definitely one of my favorite. But being the literature enthusiast and logophile that I am, I've highlighted some lines that stuck out to me in that piece.

"We still have our bitter sides that we share from time to time, and that's what I love the most about our connections. For me, a perfect chocolate bar should be bitter sweet, not all sweet, and certainly not all bitter, for then you lose all the fun." (Pg. 70) 

"He had appeared in my night sky like a white dwarf, a star feeble in light but so dense that I was sucked into a gravity field where my normal self was either shattered or flattened." (Pg. 71) 

"...But deep down, I'm just in love." (Pg. 72) 

"Love is surely blinding at a certain range. Better just shut our eyelids and join forces with the darkness." (Pg. 72) 

"...not wanting to come across as too eagerly seeking closeness. It was such a lame idea in the first place, now that I realize even a skyscraper of a fence wouldn't work either. I need a line of faith as the real border between us. A strike of amnesia, perhaps." (Pg. 73) 

"But I can only carry one romantic connection in this claustrophobic heart of mine. And once I anchor my heart, I'll be heading to a destination from which there will be no return. It's going to get ugly." (Pg. 75)

Clearly, she was in love and to me, nothing is more beautiful than witnessing the expression of love. You're open to disagree but Recto Verso, both the album and the book, is one of Lestari's best work yet. Whatever stage of life you're at, you can relate to it one way or the other.

The past couple of months, I've been drowned in school work due to the choices I made in the beginning of the year in choosing my classes. I'm not gonna lie, I regret my decision just about every other day. The image of what's ahead keeps me going, along with the endless verbal and non-verbal support from my loved ones.

But even with that, this newfound busy-ness of mine has caused my tendency to worry to magnify by a thousand, and the last little piece of line in that song has that sigh and smile effect. Like when you're rambling on and something stopped your words, and you then sighed and smiled because you realize how silly you're behaving by complaining and worrying about things you don't have power over.

So to all of you who's struggling, I'm going to leave you with that powerful little piece of line:

"If everything has been written down, so why worry, we say. It's you and me with a little left of sanity..."

Happy Thanksgiving :-)

P.S. Here's the video I was talking about earlier in the post

Falling Into Fall

I had the day off and had a chance to take a walk around my neighborhood with my baby Kenobi. The title of this post may not be completely appropriate because everything hasn't turned completely orange and brown yet. But it will have to do.

My fetish towards nail polish still persist

Imagine how I felt when I saw these flowers on my drive way when I walk out the door

Don't you just want to make leaf angels?

A little burst of red

My lovely and somewhat tilted neighborhood

The blurriness and the bokehs just makes this picture... perfect (in my amateur-photographical eyes)

The remnants of summer

I sent my college application this afternoon and I feel like a thousand ton of weight was lifted off my shoulders. But I did receive my quarterly progress report and I must say that I'm not particularly happy with one class' grade. An Asian F is simply unacceptable! Pffft.

On lighter note, I made my first Indonesian fried rice ever since I moved to my new house and it was a success! Even though it was lacking shallots and sweet soy sauce, it was regardless quite delicious. I was more than happy to have a little taste of home.

A little snack that've been chewed on repeatedly by my brain: Twitter is cool. Twitter is fun. Yes, it's a freedom of speech. Blah blah blah. But not everything that comes out of our mind is pure gold. Thus, we should filter what we're going to tweet multiple times before we hit that Tweet button.

I speak from personal experience that your tweet can bite you in the ass before you even have a chance to delete it. In other words, Google and think before you tweet. It's bad enough if you're tweeting stuff that nobody cares about, the least you can do is make sure that your grammar (punctuation, capitalization, word order, verb tenses, etc) is correct. That should leave you a little dignity ;-)

Have a great weekend!