Settling in a reconciliation just to avoid the (probably necessary) confrontation: thing I am so, so often found guilty of.

It's long past it; it's no longer relevant; but in some way the fact that I shoved all of it at some corner deep within means that no matter how much I claim myself to be 'past it' I will never thoroughly be.


Just face it, let go of the baggages, et laissez-passer ce qui s'est passé, it's no longer time to keep settling in a half-hearted reconciliation.

If there's one thing I can take from getting into what is essentially a 9 to 5 routine without much room to vary your days, it's that you gotta take whatever form of non-work stuff you can sneak into those 9 to 5 hours (and the customary 1-2hrs daily commuting time before and after).

So here is my daily cup of tea: podcast. Tried to get into it the other day when every song in my music library didn't seem to be clicking, and reaaaaallly got into it! Seriously, I wondered how the hell did I just get into podcast stuff right now and never really cared about it before. But as the cheesy idiom so cheesily put it: better late than never, huh?

I am really still getting a hang of this stuff so I'm still pretty sure I've only just discovered the tip of the mountain. But so far, those are my subscriptions, my daily dose of audio comedy / news / design bits / linguistic bits. Looooove having those thrown in my day every now and then!

For the past couple of weeks, moving about the city on mornings and evenings has been interesting. You try to muscle your way past people, who are trying to muscle their way past other people. It's like there's a rope dangling around their neck, there's a ticking clock numbering their time left; they're moving as if their lives depend on it. And when their lives depend on something, humans are inherently a predator - a mightily feral one, too.

Each time I find myself in the crowd, pushed and bumped to no ends, I am wondering to myself: just what are we contesting anyway? Just what are we turning feral for? A space earned? Some time saved? The sense that you manage to escape just in time before the rope clings around your neck tighter it starts to suffocate you?

We know it is there, the invisible rope dangling around our neck. But sometimes I get the sense that the more we run to escape it, the tighter it held onto you. Some of us thought it is a race against time, maybe it is not; after all, when we're at our own pace, it is just a rope dangling around our neck. Perhaps, we only feel the stranglehold because we're stretching it to its limits. Perhaps, it is a threat us only because we let it be.

Sastra dan fotografi sama-sama memecah-mecah aliran realita ke dalam unit-unit yang bisa disimpan. Dengan cara demikian, unit itu bisa dikuasai, dipergunakan, disusun ulang, dikembangkan. Memang, sastra tidak punya problem etis yang ada dalam fotografi, karena bahasa tak pernah betul-betul menyalin realita. Tapi persis di situlah problem utama bahasa. Ia tak pernah betul-betul menemui realita. Ia adalah sepenuhnya sistem tanda, yang tak pernah bersentuhan langsung dengan kenyataan. Fotografi mencuri, menjiplak, menyalin realita. Bahasa membangun model sendiri tentang realita, tanpa persentuhan dengan realita. Para linguis era modern telah lama memetakan bahwa tak ada kontak langsung antara kata dengan referensinya. Apapun yang diketahui melalui bahasa adalah palsu belaka. KW dari suatu ORI yang tak terjangkau.

Kalau katanya Nietzsche, one must have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star.

I spent all my life going through a stream. And when you spent so much time moving along the stream, you'd inevitably long for the ocean; the open, calm water where you're the one who lead your own way.

But when the stream eventually ended, when the river I'd been floating in eventually met its ending ocean, suddenly I was idle, and unmoving, and it scared me. I was always led by the stream, I was never the one who swims; like every amateur swimmer, I curled up in fear in view of the ocean.

I couldn't be still, though, lest I want to be drowning, and I had no choice but to swim.

It was scary, I was afraid, and I was frantically trying to swim in this vast ocean, trying to reach the distant island. And it wasn't at all pleasant; it was unsettling, but it was the chaos I had to have. It was the chaos I had to have.

http://lantaikedua.wordpress.com

Maybe a tad too ambitious, maybe this is created just to be left hanging dry a year or so down the road. But there's no shame in trying, and sometimes to do that you need a clean sheet, a new beginning. Right now there's only one little writing, not even a story, but you get the idea.

Untuk cerita-cerita kecil yang bukan sehari-hari, silahkan ke lantai kedua.

Buatku, percakapan-percakapan paling menyenangkan selalu terjadi antara tiga orang.

Dua orang dapat bercakap, tetapi setelah beberapa lama mereka menginginkan suara ketiga. Sebab dua tidak membangun; dimensi hanya terbentuk saat ada tiga sudut.

Sedang empat orang dalam percakapan bagiku sering terasa satu terlalu banyak. Terkadang percakapan terasa penuh ketergesaan, dan kehilangan bentuk sebab ditarik dari terlalu banyak arah.

Hindu punya tiga dewa, Kristen lekat dengan trinitas, Filsuf menyukai trikotomi. Buatku ini bukan kebetulan; tiga adalah keseimbangan, kontinuitas, jumlah yang lengkap dan tak berlebih. Segala kualitas yang kucari dari sebuah percakapan.

I hope whatever lies ahead will be worth the bumpy ride.

Kamu tahu, kamu tidak pernah berjanji. Tidak pernah berhutang. Tidak pernah bersepakat.

Tapi setiap tahun, marka di kalendermu terasa seperti janji yang harus dipenuhi. Hutang yang harus dibayar. Kesepakatan yang harus dijalankan.


Mungkin kamu merasa bersalah. Karena itu kamu lingkari tanggal hari ini. Entah untuk berapa tahun sampai rasa bersalahmu habis. Janjimu penuh. Hutangmu terbayar.

Aku setuju; kata maaf terlalu klise dan membuat canggung percakapan. Karena itu di kalenderku sendiri, aku punya tanggal-tanggal yang aku lingkari.

The combination of the cause of phenomena is beyond the grasp of the human intellect. But the impulse to seek causes is innate in the soul of man. And the human intellect, with no inkling of immense variety and complexity of circumstances conditioning a phenomenon, any one of which may be separately conceived of as the cause of it, snatches at the first and most easily understood approximation, and says here is the cause. In historical events, where the actions of men form the subject of observation, the most primitive conception of a cause was the will of the gods, succeeded later on by the will of those men who stand in the historical foreground—the heroes of history. But one had but to look below the surface of any historical event, to look, that is, into the movement of the whole mass of men taking part in that event, to be convinced that the will of the hero of history, so far from controlling the actions of the multitude, is continually controlled by them. It may be thought that it is a matter of no importance whether historical events are interpreted in one way or in another. But between the man who says that the peoples of the West marched into the East, because Napoleon willed they should do so, and the man who says that that movement came to pass because it was bound to come to pass, there exists the same difference as between the men who maintained that the earth was stationary and the planets revolved about it, and the men who said that they did not know what holds the earth in its place, but they did know that there were laws controlling its motions and the motions of the other planets. Causes of historical events—there are not and cannot be, save the one cause of all causes. But there are laws controlling these events; laws partly unknown, partly accessible to us. The discovery of these laws is only possible when we entirely give up looking for a cause in the will of one man, just as the discovery of the laws of the motions of the planets has only become possible since men have given up the conception of the earth being stationary.