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