cumi laut

live the moment

2012-01-18T19:30:00.000-08:00

"I try to be strong" is inked backward on John Popper's chest, supposedly to remind him to try to be strong.

"live the moment" will be inked on my chest backward as a reminder of how important it is to live the moment, to see the details of trees, to peel an orange, to forget yesterday and start doing things today as the start of my entire lifetime with a new hype, everyday.

if my chest is in fact a huge bowl of pages, I might be tempted to ink all details of the words. including details of what these guys once said, at the start of their moment.

rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.
Montaigne

if you have one eye on yesterday, and one eye on tomorrow, you're going to be cockeyed today.
Some guy

you can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.
Jan Glidewell

waste not fresh tears over old griefs.
Euripides

Study as if you were to live forever. Live as if you were going to die tomorrow.
Isidore of Seville

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
Sidharta

We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.
H. L. Mencken

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
Some wise Chinese dude

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
Abraham Maslow

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Charles Dederich

We are always getting ready to live but never living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do.
Jean de la Bruyere

I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.
D.H. Lawrence

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.
Abraham Lincoln

Today is life - the only life you are sure of. Make the most of today.
Dale Carnegie

One should count each day a separate life.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Nothing is worth more than this day.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If you are still talking about what you did yesterday, you haven't done much today.
Some dude who got hit by a truck

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
Albert Camus

Learning is movement from moment to moment.
J. Krishnamurti

We steal if we touch tomorrow. It is God's.
Henry Ward Beecher

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
Marcus Aurelius

Today is the blocks with which we build.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I have memories - but only a fool stores his past in the future.
David Gerrold

Life is a succession of moments. To live each one is to succeed.
Coria Kent

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
Leo Tolstoy

If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine.
Morris West

Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.
Sir William Osler

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
Alan Watts

live the moment

Computer hero Dennis Ritchie died a week after Jobs

2011-12-15T20:31:00.000-08:00

no idea who he is?

read this article by Cade Metz on CNN

or read it here

The tributes to Dennis Ritchie won't match the river of praise that spilled out over the web after the death of Steve Jobs. But they should.

And then some.

"When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn't even know who he is," says Rob Pike, the programming legend and current Googler who spent 20 years working across the hall from Ritchie at the famed Bell Labs.

On Wednesday evening, with a post to Google+, Pike announced that Ritchie had died at his home in New Jersey over the weekend after a long illness, and though the response from hardcore techies was immense, the collective eulogy from the web at large doesn't quite do justice to Ritchie's sweeping influence on the modern world.

Dennis Ritchie is the father of the C programming language, and with fellow Bell Labs researcher Ken Thompson, he used C to build UNIX, the operating system that so much of the world is built on -- including the Apple empire overseen by Steve Jobs.

"Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX," Pike tells Wired. "The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel — that pretty much the entire Internet runs on -- is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C.

"It's really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did."

Even Windows was once written in C, he adds, and UNIX underpins both Mac OS X, Apple's desktop operating system, and iOS, which runs the iPhone and the iPad. "Jobs was the king of the visible, and Ritchie is the king of what is largely invisible," says Martin Rinard, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

"Jobs' genius is that he builds these products that people really like to use because he has taste and can build things that people really find compelling. Ritchie built things that technologists were able to use to build core infrastructure that people don't necessarily see much anymore, but they use everyday."

From B to C

Dennis Ritchie built C because he and Ken Thompson needed a better way to build UNIX. The original UNIX kernel was written in assembly language, but they soon decided they needed a "higher level" language, something that would give them more control over all the data that spanned the OS. Around 1970, they tried building a second version with Fortran, but this didn't quite cut it, and Ritchie proposed a new language based on a Thompson creation known as B.

Depending on which legend you believe, B was named either for Thompson's wife Bonnie or BCPL, a language developed at Cambridge in the mid-60s. Whatever the case, B begat C.

B was an interpreted language -- meaning it was executed by an intermediate piece of software running atop a CPU -- but C was a compiled language. It was translated into machine code, and then directly executed on the CPU. But in those days, C was considered a high-level language. It would give Ritchie and Thompson the flexibility they needed, but at the same time, it would be fast.

That first version of the language wasn't all that different from C as we know it today -- though it was a tad simpler. It offered full data structures and "types" for defining variables, and this is what Richie and Thompson used to build their new UNIX kernel. "They built C to write a program," says Pike, who would join Bell Labs 10 years later. "And the program they wanted to write was the UNIX kernel."

Ritchie's running joke was that C had "the power of assembly language and the convenience of ... assembly language." In other words, he acknowledged that C was a less-than-gorgeous creation that still ran very close to the hardware. Today, it's considered a low-level language, not high. But Ritchie's joke didn't quite do justice to the new language. In offering true data structures, it operated at a level that was just high enough.

"When you're writing a large program -- and that's what UNIX was -- you have to manage the interactions between all sorts of different components: all the users, the file system, the disks, the program execution, and in order to manage that effectively, you need to have a good representation of the information you're working with. That's what we call data structures," Pike says.

"To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consist and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge. They needed a way to group all that data together, and they didn't have that with Fortran."

At the time, it was an unusual way to write an operating system, and this is what allowed Ritchie and Thompson to eventually imagine porting the OS to other platforms, which they did in the late 70s. "That opened the floodgates for UNIX running everywhere," Pike says. "It was all made possible by C."

Apple, Microsoft and beyond

At the same time, C forged its own way in the world, moving from Bell Labs to the world's universities and to Microsoft, the breakout software company of the 1980s. "The development of the C programming language was a huge step forward and was the right middle ground ... C struck exactly the right balance, to let you write at a high level and be much more productive, but when you needed to, you could control exactly what happened," says Bill Dally, chief scientist of NVIDIA and Bell Professor of Engineering at Stanford. "[It] set the tone for the way that programming was done for several decades."

As Pike points out, the data structures that Richie built into C eventually gave rise to the object-oriented paradigm used by modern languages such as C++ and Java.

The revolution began in 1973, when Ritchie published his research paper on the language, and five years later, he and colleague Brian Kernighan released the definitive C book: The C Programming Language. Kernighan had written the early tutorials for the language, and at some point, he "twisted Dennis' arm" into writing a book with him.

Pike read the book while still an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, picking it up one afternoon while heading home for a sick day. "That reference manual is a model of clarity and readability compared to latter manuals. It is justifiably a classic," he says. "I read it while sick in bed, and it made me forget that I was sick."

Like many university students, Pike had already started using the language. It had spread across college campuses because Bell Labs started giving away the UNIX source code. Among so many other things, the operating system gave rise to the modern open source movement. Pike isn't overstating it when says the influence of Ritchie's work can't be overstated, and though Ritchie received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998, he still hasn't gotten his due.

As Kernighan and Pike describe him, Ritchie was an unusually private person. "I worked across the hall from him for more than 20 years, and yet I feel like a don't knew him all that well," Pike says. But this doesn't quite explain his low profile. Steve Jobs was a private person, but his insistence on privacy only fueled the cult of personality that surrounded him.

Ritchie lived in a very different time and worked in a very different environment than someone like Jobs. It only makes sense that he wouldn't get his due. But those who matter understand the mark he left. "There's that line from Newton about standing on the shoulders of giants," says Kernighan. "We're all standing on Dennis' shoulders."

Additional reporting by Jon Stokes

----

the last image courtesy of artist juan osborne, I hope he/she won't sue me for using his/her work with no prior notice and consider this an advertisement of his/her work instead.

this is the reason why I'm going to get myself the new fiesta :p

2011-12-11T22:45:00.001-08:00

nuf said

review : Mattias Eklundh live in Jakarta (clinic unfortunately) back in 11/18/2008

2011-12-11T21:26:00.000-08:00

The mad professor of guitar science explained two things throughout his two-hour Laney clinic this Tuesday: That being crazy is cool for geniuses and that every guitar player wannabe should grow their own mustache.

It was almost seven o'clock, and the steep climb to the second floor of Balai Kartini didn't look inviting to those coming late. Two excited looking guys waited for the elevator with one of them holding the cassette cover of Freak Kitchen's fourth effort in 2000: Dead Soul Men.

Rushing toward the Mawar conference room, the annoying bunch blocking the entrance was the consequence of Planet Musik's generosity, as it had displayed 20 new, flashy guitars and basses, from Cort to Music Man Stingray.

The inside, nevertheless, was predictably overflowing, just like the Ciliwung River in December.

Feeling like one had just stepped into a guerrilla meeting in a typical balai kecamatan before an important ambush, all the chairs were full. The rest were hovering in the back of the hall, with more than 20 people on the floor on the left side of the stage, facing stacks of Laney amplifiers.

The space between the stage and the seats was gone, replaced by the boney faces of guitar mongers.

"The sales number of cassettes and CDs in Indonesia has reached around 10 million per year -- fought over by not just local, but also international artists. Passband survived by building a solid fan base; fans who love our music, love watching us live and love buying tickets to our concerts," the voice of Passband's Beng-Beng bounced off the high ceiling of the room, in answer to a question about the band being different from mainstream, mellow, lovey-dovey Indonesian music.

Along with Beng-Beng, local bass hero Indro Hardjodikoro opened the clinic for Ia (Mattias' nickname; poetically meaning "him" in Bahasa Indonesia) that night. And though missing Indro's performance, Laney made a good call choosing the two skillful players as its local endorsers.

It was about eight when they killed the light. Soon a giant statue of a golden-haired man came forward waving his yellow signature guitar. "JAKARTAAAAAAA!!!!!!" he growled. "IT'S GOODY-GOODY TIME!!!!"

Wait -- what?

The crowd was of course cheering like maniacs on death row, and after he briefly introduced himself with the help of a guy named Chucky as translator, he plugged the cord of his Caparison Apple Horn into the massive Laney amp.

Born in 1969 in Gothenburg, Sweden, Mattias "IA" Eklundh quit school at about age 15 to spend the rest of his teenage years in his basement, goofing around seriously with his guitar and his four-track machine.

After joining bands like Frozen Eyes and Fate in the 1980s, he went back to Sweden to form a prog-rock power trio named Freak Kitchen with fellow Swedes Joakim Sjvberg on drums and Christian Grvnlund on bass in 1992.

Their 1994 debut album Appetizer appealed to critics as "the best debut album a Swedish band has produced in both this and the last decade".

Currently working on their seventh album, Land of the Freaks, the lineup for the trio changed in 2000 with Bjvrn Fryklund replacing Sjvberg and Christer Vrtefors replacing Grvnlund.

The vegetarian guitarist has so far released three solo albums: The lesser known Sensually Primitive in 1997 -- under the pseudonym Mr. Libido, the highly acclaimed Freak Guitar in 1999 and Freak Guitar-The Road Less Traveled in 2004 -- the latter two under Steve Vai's Favored Nation label.

His 2007 project Art Metal combines the mastery of Swedes bass-god Jonas Hellborg with the tabla maestro Selvaganesh in a tight Southern Indian flavored prog-rock.

Kiss was his favorite band and his playing has often been described as influenced by the likes of Frank Zappa and John McLaughlin. But nothing sounds like the way he plays -- technically and lyrically.

He plans to release a third solo effort in 2010 -- hopefully a double album.

"I'm left-handed, but I play guitar the right way -- everyone else's way is the wrong way!" he jokingly said, explaining his use of a distinctly Swedish-made fretboard, directly plugging it into the amp without effects or pedals.

He tried to cover as much as he could into the clinic from the very beginning, packing the session with both excellent music examples and complete play-along tracks from his Freak Guitar solo releases and a couple of new tracks.

Beginning with a new tune, he continued onto the theory of guitar harmonics and where to find them on the fretboard.

And after playing "There's No Money in Jazz", he demonstrated how to use five-string arpeggios to emulate the sounds of a "urinated" Nintendo and played "The Battle of Bob". He also demonstrated how different interpretations of bar and phrase counting can be interesting, even at full speed as long as the beat is maintained. A power chord song such as "La Bamba" was also played meticulously.

While effortlessly performed, these theories are of course unplayable without causing serious damage to your fingers.

One thing that stood out about Ia was his wonderful sense of humor and the way he carried himself. He would growl like an injured death metal monster, shriek like a fat lady opera singer from hell or yell "GOODY-GOODY!" in the hopes of a unison reply -- while most of the time making scary faces and stupid gestures.

Every time he would ask the soundman at the back to play a track by number and long pauses would occur. And during these time he would do a waiting posture, say ludicrous things and occasionally take a peek at his watchless wrist.

A group in the audience on the left side of the stage once complained that they were unable to see the lesson on the big screen, and he responded nicely by demonstrating the lesson right on their face -- literally.

He didn't seem to mind sharing his knowledge or revealing his signature sounds. "Absorb as much as you can, but find your own sound. Grow your own mustache, and have fun with your music," adding that playing with fun and imagination is much better than just speed.

He told the audience to be both creative and resourceful. And then he magically revealed a cheap play phone, played it with his guitar and threw it at the audience. Next came a chopstick, he hit the strings with it before throwing it also to the audience and said "I only got one" to a kid who wanted the other stick.

And then he played "Father" from his Freak Guitar-The Road Less Traveled, a ballad dedicated to his late father Bernt.

"Putting a purely emotional song on a record, I think, will ultimately make an album more powerful for the listener. It's all about dynamics and working on different layers within a song," he once stated.

And after playing "Minor Swing", complying to a request from the audience, he closed the clinic at about 10 p.m. with a new track called "Sharsce", a witty composition with a Frenchman saying over and over "you're so beautiful," and "you're a beautiful man".

Waiting about 20 minutes after the show with about 30 other fans, this writer finally got his signature on two Freak Guitar cassettes and said, "Ia, you're the best guitarist ever!!" to the man personally.

"This is an exhausting night; the crowd here is just wild!" he said, promising to come back with Freak Kitchen soon. Ia head down to Bandung the following morning. Knowing the crowd there, he's in for another exhausting night.

The writer is an avid devotee of the Mattiasology, acknowledging Mattias as God and the likes of Ron Thal, Buckethead, Paul Gilbert and Steve Vai as prophets.

review : balada ching ching, shots through the heart

2011-12-11T20:58:00.000-08:00

Maggie Tiojakin is not funny. In fact she’s rather serious, particularly in making everything sound serious.

While she doesn’t seem to have any intention of drawing tears from our eyes, her forte lies in the ability to give us that pause, making us stop for a moment to ponder life, and do so again after another read.

And she’s really good at it.

Maggie’s exploration of her surroundings breathes into most of her short stories the soul that’s deemed necessary to keep them afloat. Most of them are interesting, some of them unbearably heavy, but all of them deploy the perfect ingredients that work: not so long as to be boring and not too short to come up empty.

Balada Ching - Ching could be the defining collection of Maggie’s best works so far: 13 short stories, including six published previously, one in schedule and others not specifically written for the collection.

This is excellent stuff, and Gramedia Pustaka Utama has made a laudable effort to enrich our literature. If this isn’t nice, we don’t know what is.

One thing is for sure, Maggie managed to avoid the problem of translated literature. Previously published in English, a second language for her, these short stories shot out to receive positive reviews from critics at the time of their release. And when it was required to have them rewritten in Indonesian what came through in her personal interpretations was slightly different, slightly more engaging in details, mostly appealing, and formed a group of new literature that stands on its own.

The plots of her stories do not drag on or slump like those of many Indonesian writers who dwell too long in explaining the unnecessary. Hers are indubitably brave with topics as simple yet as complicated as the fractions of life itself.

Titles such as Liana, Liana (Waiting for Mother), Dua Sisi, Luka (Crush) and Kawin Lari (He Said, She Said) can otherwise reveal the paradigm of everyday events through Maggie’s eyes, making us question the usual and unusual, making common occurrences interesting and engaging.
The theme of racism is huge, but a child desperately waiting for her mom; a foot massager falling in love with her client’s foot; and what a dying 15-year-old child brings to the world are elements of life’s colors we may have previously ignored.

However, this doesn’t mean Maggie’s way of storytelling is maxing out. Obviously there is room to grow. Simplicity is working nicely for her, and though some of her stories could soar to unquestionable heights, readers’ common expectations after the big entry points are often cut short by following events, by forced romance and immediate continuations that are somewhat less natural. She worked them out OK, but they could have been up there.

But still, it’s hard to count this as criticism. These stories, if not well spawned, are often crafted brilliantly as explorations with sufficient research and depth to give us not just knowledge, but an emotional, personal understanding of what truly happened — although sometimes she chooses to blur the endings, hinting with a bag full of flowers or a heart pinned with needles.

Readers will love this collection. Some will be glued to your eyes like contact lenses and some will stay in your minds for a following read the next night. Whatever happens, Balada Ching-Ching is definitely that type of book that keep on your bedside for some time.

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

a review of a short story collection by a dear friend of mine Maggie, did it for the post back in the hey days :p

how to perfectly enlarge uploaded pictures on blogspot

2011-12-08T22:32:00.000-08:00

I just found this cool workaround to posting bigger pictures on your blogspot without uploading them first on other image-hosting websites like.. shit forgot their sites -did remember that one with frogs..

anyways, this has been bugging me for quite sometimes before I actually find this loophole, though admittedly will require you to do the work twice -but uploading to image hosting websites and link your post to the image you've uploaded is no fun either, some of these sites periodically crashed when you need them to work, which in order to work okay, they will need to do some maintenance which basically erasing images they don't think is good or some shorts -fyi I made this assumption myself :p.

enough talk and let's go on with the how-tos.

basically, to have your photo published on your blog, you would have to do the usual thing. you make a new post, press add-image, browse an image, chose setting (center, fixed or left/right, float) you also chose the size of the image (small, medium, large). but more often than not, your supposedly large image only turned out too small on the screen, which is suck.

(this is what I'm talking about)

and when you try to enlarge them, by editing the html code, you got yourself the size you want, but of blurified lesser quality, and sometimes jiggy, boxy, pixelated dipshit images, which is -for lack of a better word- suck.

(see my point? blogger had done improvements on layout, but things used to be worse..)

and weird, because when you actually uploaded an image from the web, or add url, the outcoming image looks exactly like it's supposed to be, with the perfect size -sometimes even too large, which is okay- and the perfect dpi's -proven by the correct resolutions.

that's the key right there..

so it's actually very simple.. when you uploaded an image, the small image coming out on your blog we're talking about before, blogspot has already saved the correct image by size and resolution somewhere in their cloud -or something like that.

so all you've got to do is open that image on another page, by right-clicking the down-sized image on your blog and chose 'open link in new tab', and copy the url. this is the tricky bit, sometimes the displayed url on the address bar is not similar with the exact url blogspot can use, the work around for this is to right click the already enlarged image on another tab, and choose "copy image url".

then edit your post, erase your image html and upload another image. but this time, chose 'add picture from url/web' instead, paste your link on the url slot, chose properties (center, large), and press upload..

(this is it! as usual I'm using a pict of my Kaezee because the purpose of this post is to make him famous :D)

and problem is solved -see the quality increase on the enlarged image even when the size is the same at 800x600?-, you would see that when you hover your mouse on all images, they all leading to one url source. the best part about this is that as long as your blog is running, your image will remain available for access..

I hope this works for you as this works like charm for me, and if you've known about this shit long before I did.. dude.. you could have been a saint you know?!

goofing around seriously

2011-12-08T21:56:00.000-08:00

done back in the hey days when notturno was still alive and kicking -not that they aren't now, I just lost track of them.

the idea is to put the trio in a combination of anthropomorphic imagery possessed by each of its members (or is it the other way around?)

I think I did good with both pianist and bass player, but failed flat with the drummer. I did say that I kindda notched up his level of cool in this work, which is anthropomorphic in its own, whatever the exact meaning of the word..

anyways, the first image was done on paper with pen, the second one is done with the always dependable photoshop.

colors are not really my strength, in addition they said they were planning on using the image on T-shirts, which explains the limitation to power colors (as in power trio).

I have one of those things called dissatisfiedbysecondlook kindda thing where I will stop and think how some images I did simply suck and will need to be redone.. this is one of those things.. but heck, I don't have 36 hours in a day like I don't have extra pair of hands..

taca back in the days

2011-12-08T21:44:00.000-08:00

I did this a while back.. probably four or five years ago. the subject was a family who was a bit messy but has the kindest heart that's almost too naive and child-like. she now works in a bank -not that it has anything to do with anything.

done using pen on paper

iron and wine - fever dream

2011-12-08T21:15:00.000-08:00

some days her shape in the doorway
will speak to me
a bird's wing on the window
sometimes I'll hear when she's sleeping
her fever dream
a language on her face

I want your flowers like babies want God's love
or maybe as sure as tomorrow will come

some days, like rain on the doorstep
she'll cover me
with grace in all she offers
sometimes I'd like just to ask her
what honest words
she can't afford to say, like

I want your flowers like babies want God's love
or maybe as sure as tomorrow will come

-for mom-

Some Skunk Funk Indeed

2011-12-07T02:55:00.000-08:00

amidst the piling works for my new magazine, I stumbled upon this blog by a guy whose apparently related to both Michael and Randy Brecker.

two of them are awesome, and Michael Brecker, if you haven't realized it from my previous blog -not that you care I suppose-, will remain my personal hero.

in this particular page, he talked about the memories of his uncles, including how they are as persons with real personalities -and not just random mutherfuckas (as Miles put it) who can nail the hardest licks and patterns.

here's a picture of boogiewoogieflu and Michael, his uncle, my hero

funny how I got stumbled on his blog. I was googling about Michael the other day, finally getting some shots about his Pilgrimage sessions on his page -though lack parts where he's actually saying anything-, and finally reaching the part of his memorial service, where supposedly James Taylor said to the attendees that Michael Brecker had saved his life, literally..

that's the phrase I was googling today, though it brought me nowhere. but as fate does -if you're dramatic enough to call finding a page on the world wide web a fate- this brought me to Boogiewoogieflu's blog instead, particularly to his reminiscing-type page.

I remember how I cried profusely upon learning of Michael's death back in the day, previously contacting a webpage responsible of finding him a bone donor -from Indonesia.

well..

since the departure of my mother, leaving for a better place up there, through a long tunneling road which access door is actually located down there, I made a promise that no death will worth any tear from my eyes, unless it happens to families who are greatly close to me.

so there..

but the thing that amuses me was how he's got a catch phrase under his blog.
the phrase says

this blog kills fascists

and it has successfully inspired me to put somewhat different -as I don't really understand the meaning, as in real meaning, of fascists- but similar -as in trying to exclamate my principles in life- catch phrase..

and will do so pretty soon.

blogspot.. yaa begitulah..

2011-12-02T10:18:00.000-08:00

barusan nambah gambar di post terakhir yang panjang banget ga ketulungan..

trus sempat mikir kenapa blogspot ini ga bisa full nampilin semua bagian website di layar, ga kaya website blog lain.. soalnya barusan nemu templete joomla yang super duper keren di yoo.. apaaa gitu :p website gitu deh.. trus rada nyesel.. (jangan bilang google yak he, kayanya ni blogspot emang punya google deh, tapi terabaikan tanpa seri pengaturang website yang bagus gitu..)

contohnya tadi gue di tawarin masuk ke.. yang kalo bahasa indonesianya jadi pengaturan baru, halaah, ga penting gitu, trus ga embedded kaya model tumblr gitu yang semua templete udah tersedia, padahal kalo liat chrome beeh, semua udah di desain sedemikian rupa sehingga enak di lihat dan bisa langsung di applikasikan dengan sekali klik.. mungkin nature blogspot yang punya banyak data tersimpan ga gitu kali yak..

tau juga lah..

dan setelah gue balik lagi nyariin templete blogspot ini, aseli susah banget nyari yang dari layar samping kiri ampe samping kanan ketutup dalam templete nya gitu

ya kecuali emang templete yang udah gue pake..

tapi apa daya.. kadang gue rada berasa ni desain ga menyatu gitu, ada bagian bagian yang terpisah jadi keliatan patah patah gitu, untung bekgroundnya putih, jadi kalo upload gambar macam..

apa kaya gini

pokoknya yang bekgrund nya putih gitu

aseli ini lucu bgt

udah udah

hayaaaaah..

keliatan menyatu gitu bok.. tapi tetep, rada nyesel dikit..

Banned Books: Challenging our Freedom to Read by Robert P. Doyle, ALA 2010.

2011-11-24T05:57:00.001-08:00

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Challenged at the Baptist College in Charleston, SC (1987) because of "language and sexual references in the book."

The Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger

Since its publication, this title has been a favorite target of censors. In 1960, a teacher in Tulsa, OK was fired for assigning the book to an eleventh grade English class. The teacher appealed and was reinstated by the school board, but the book was removed from use in the school. In 1963, a delegation of parents of high school students in Columbus, OH, asked the school board to ban the novel for being "anti-white" and "obscene." The school board refused the request. Removed from the Selinsgrove, PA suggested reading list (1975). Based on parents' objections to the language and content of the book, the school board voted 5-4 to ban the book. The book was later reinstated in the curriculum when the board learned that the vote was illegal because they needed a two-thirds vote for removal of the text. Challenged as an assignment in an American literature class in Pittsgrove, NJ (1977). After months of controversy, the board ruled that the novel could be read in the Advanced Placement class, but they gave parents the right to decide whether or not their children would read it. Removed from the Issaquah, WA optional High School reading list (1978). Removed from the required reading list in Middleville, MI (1979). Removed from the Jackson Milton school libraries in North Jackson, OH (1980). Removed from two Anniston, AL High school libraries (1982), but later reinstated on a restrictive basis. Removed from the school libraries in Morris, Manitoba (1982) along with two other books because they violate the committee's guidelines covering "excess vulgar language, sexual scenes, things concerning moral issues, excessive violence, and anything dealing with the occult." Challenged at the Libby, MT High School (1983) due to the "book's contents." Banned from English classes at the Freeport High School in De Funiak Springs, FL (1985) because it is "unacceptable" and "obscene." Removed from the required reading list of a Medicine Bow, WY Senior High School English class (1986) because of sexual references and profanity in the book. Banned from a required sophomore English reading list at the Napoleon, ND High School (1987) after parents and the local Knights of Columbus chapter complained about its profanity and sexual references. Challenged at the Linton-Stockton, IN High School (1988) because the book is "blasphemous and undermines morality." Banned from the classrooms in Boron, CA High School (1989) because the book contains profanity. Challenged at the Grayslake, IL Community High School (1991). Challenged at the Jamaica High School in Sidell, IL (1992) because the book contains profanities and depicts premarital sex, alcohol abuse, and prostitution. Challenged in the Waterloo, IA schools (1992) and Duval County, FL public school libraries (1992) because of profanity, lurid passages about sex, a nd statements defamatory to minorities, God, women, and the disabled. Challenged at the Cumberland Valley High School in Carlisle, PA (1992) because of a parent's objections that it contains profanity and is immoral. Challenged, but retained, at the New Richmond, WI High School (1994) for use in some English classes. Challenged as required reading in the Corona Norco, CA Unified School District (1993) because it is "centered around negative activity." The book was retained and teachers selected alternatives if students object to Salinger's novel. Challenged as mandatory reading in the Goffstown, NH schools (1994) because of the vulgar words used and the sexual exploits experienced in the book. Challenged at the St. Johns County Schools in St. Augustine, FL (1995). Challenged at the Oxford Hills High School in Paris, ME (1996). A parent objected to the use of the 'F' word. Challenged, but retained, at the Glynn Academy High School in Brunswick, GA (1997). A student objected to the novel's profanity and sexual references. Removed because of profanity and sexual situations from the required reading curriculum of the Marysville, CA Joint Unified School District (1997). The school superintendent removed it to get it "out of the way so that we didn't have that polarization over a book." Challenged, but retained on the shelves of Limestone County, AL school district (2000) despite objections about the book's foul language. Banned, but later reinstated after community protests at the Windsor Forest High School in Savannah, GA (2000). The controversy began in early 1999 when a parent complained about sex, violence, and profanity in the book that was part of an Advanced Placement English class. Removed by a Dorchester District 2 school board member in Summerville, SC (2001) because it "is a filthy, filthy book." Challenged by a Glynn County, GA (2001) school board member because of profanity. The novel was retained. Challenged in the Big Sky High School in Missoula, MT (2009).

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Challenged in many communities, but burned in Drake, ND (1973). Banned in Rochester, MI because the novel "contains and makes references to religious matters" and thus fell within the ban of the establishment clause. An appellate court upheld its usage in the school in Todd v Rochester Community Schools, 41 Mich. App. 320, 200 N. W 2d 90 (1972). Banned in Levittown, NY (1975), North Jackson, OH (1979), and Lakeland, FL (1982) because of the "book's explicit sexual scenes, violence, and obscene language." Barred from purchase at the Washington Park High School in Racine, WI (1984) by the district administrative assistant for instructional services. Challenged at the Owensboro, KY High School library (1985) because of "foul language, a section depicting a picture of an act of bestiality, a reference to 'Magic Fingers' attached to the protagonist's bed to help him sleep, and the sentence: 'The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the fly of God Almighty."' Restricted to students who have parental permission at the four Racine, WI Unified District high school libraries (1986) because of "language used in the book, depictions of torture, ethnic slurs, and negative portrayals of women." Challenged at the LaRue County, KY High School library (1987) because "the book contains foul language and promotes deviant sexual behavior.” Banned from the Fitzgerald, GA schools (1987) because it was filled with profanity and full of explicit sexual references:' Challenged in the Baton Rouge, LA public high school libraries (1988) because the book is "vulgar and offensive:' Challenged in the Monroe, MI public schools (1989) as required reading in a modem novel course for high school juniors and seniors because of the book's language and the way women are portrayed. Retained on the Round Rock, TX Independent High School reading list (1996) after a challenge that the book was too violent. Challenged as an eleventh grade summer reading option in Prince William County, VA (1998) because the book "was rife with profanity and explicit sex:" Removed as required reading for sophomores at the Coventry, RI High School (2000) after a parent complained that it contains vulgar language, violent imagery, and sexual content. Retained on the Northwest Suburban High School District 214 reading list in Arlington Heights, IL (2006), along with eight other challenged titles. A board member, elected amid promises to bring her Christian beliefs into all board decision-making, raised the controversy based on excerpts from the books she'd found on the internet. Challenged in the Howell, MI High School (2007) because of the book's strong sexual content. In response to a request from the president of the Livingston Organization for Values in Education, or LOVE, the county's top law enforcement official reviewed the books to see whether laws against distribution of sexually explicit materials to minors had been broken. "After reading the books in question, it is clear that the explicit passages illustrated a larger literary, artistic or political message and were not included solely to appeal to the prurient interests of minors," the county prosecutor wrote. "Whether these materials are appropriate for minors is a decision to be made by the school board, but I find that they are not in violation of criminal laws."

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck

Burned by the East St. Louis, IL Public Library (1939) and barred from the Buffalo, NY Public Library (1939) on the grounds that "vulgar words" were used. Banned in Kansas City, MO (1939). Banned in Kern County CA, the scene of Steinbeck's novel (1939). Banned in Ireland (1953). On Feb. 21, 1973, eleven Turkish book publishers went on trial before an Istanbul martial law tribunal on charges of publishing, possessing and selling books in violation of an order of the Istanbul martial law command. They faced possible sentences of between one month's and six months' imprisonment "for spreading propaganda unfavorable to the state" and the confiscation of their books. Eight booksellers were also on trial with the publishers on the same charge involving The Grapes of Wrath. Banned in Kanawha, IA High School classes (1980). Challenged in Vernon Verona Sherill, NY School District (1980). Challenged as required reading for Richford, VT (1981) High School English students due to the book's language and portrayal of a former minister who recounts how he took advantage of a young woman. Banned in Morris, Manitoba, Canada (1982). Removed from two Anniston, Ala. high school libraries (1982), but later reinstated on a restrictive basis. Challenged at the Cummings High School in Burlington, NC (1986) as an optional reading assignment because the "book is full of filth. My son is being raised in a Christian home and this book takes the Lord's name in vain and has all kinds of profanity in it." Although the parent spoke to the press, a formal complaint with the school demanding the book's removal was not filed. Challenged at the Moore County school system in Carthage, NC (1986) because the book contains the phase "God damn." Challenged in the Greenville, SC schools (1991) because the book uses the name of God and Jesus in a "vain and profane manner along with inappropriate sexual references." Challenged in the Union City, TN High School classes (1993).

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Challenged in Eden Valley, MN (1977) and temporarily banned due to words "damn" and "whore lady" used in the novel. Challenged in the Vernon Verona Sherill, NY School District (1980) as a "filthy, trashy novel." Challenged at the Warren, IN Township schools (1981) because the book does "psychological damage to the positive integration process" and "represents institutionalized racism under the guise of good literature." After unsuccessfully trying to ban Lee's novel, three black parents resigned from the township human relations advisory council. Challenged in the Waukegan, IL School District (1984) because the novel uses the word "nigger." Challenged in the Kansas City, MO junior high schools (1985). Challenged at the Park Hill, MO Junior High School (1985) because the novel "contains profanity and racial slurs." Retained on a supplemental eighth grade reading list in the Casa Grande, AZ Elementary School District (1985), despite the protests by black parents and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who charged the book was unfit for junior high use. Challenged at the Santa Cruz, CA Schools (1995) because of its racial themes. Removed from the Southwood High School Library in Caddo Parish, LA (1995) because the book's language and content were objectionable. Challenged at the Moss Point, MS School District (1996) because the novel contains a racial epithet. Banned from the Lindale, TX advanced placement English reading list (1996) because the book "conflicted with the values of the community." Challenged by a Glynn County, GA (2001) School Board member because of profanity. The novel was retained. Returned to the freshman reading list at Muskogee, OK High School (2001) despite complaints over the years from black students and parents about racial slurs in the text. Challenged in the Normal, IL Community High School's sophomore literature class (2003) as being degrading to African Americans. Challenged at the Stanford Middle School in Durham, NC (2004) because the 1961 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel uses the word "nigger." Challenged at the Brentwood, TN Middle School (2006) because the book contains “profanity” and “contains adult themes such as sexual intercourse, rape, and incest.” The complainants also contend that the book’s use of racial slurs promotes “racial hatred, racial division, racial separation, and promotes white supremacy.” Retained in the English curriculum by the Cherry Hill, NJ Board of Education (2007). A resident had objected to the novel’s depiction of how blacks are treated by members of a racist white community in an Alabama town during the Depression. The resident feared the book would upset black children reading it. Removed (2009) from the St. Edmund Campion Secondary School classrooms in Brampton Ontario, Canada because a parent objected to language used in the novel, including the word “nigger."

The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

Challenged as appropriate reading for Oakland, CA High School honors class (1984) due to the work's "sexual and social explicitness" and its "troubling ideas about race relations, man's relationship to God, African history, and human sexuality." After nine months of haggling and delays, a divided Oakland Board of Education gave formal approval for the book's use. Rejected for purchase by the Hayward, CA school's trustee (1985) because of "rough language" and "explicit sex scenes." Removed from the open shelves of the Newport News, VA school library (1986) because of its "profanity and sexual references" and placed in a special section accessible only to students over the age of 18 or who have written permission from a parent. Challenged at the public libraries of Saginaw, MI (1989) because it was “too sexually graphic for a 12-year-old.” Challenged as a summer youth program reading assignment in Chattanooga, TN (1989) because of its language and "explicitness." Challenged as an optional reading assigned in Ten Sleep, WY schools (1990). Challenged as a reading assignment at the New Burn, NC High School (1992) because the main character is raped by her stepfather. Banned in the Souderton, PA Area School District (1992) as appropriate reading for 10th graders because it is "smut." Challenged on the curricular reading list at Pomperaug High School in Southbury, CT (1995) because sexually explicit passages aren’t appropriate high school reading. Retained as an English course reading assignment in the Junction City, OR high school (1995) after a challenge to Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel caused months of controversy. Although an alternative assignment was available, the book was challenged due to "inappropriate language, graphic sexual scenes, and book's negative image of black men." Challenged at the St. Johns County Schools in St. Augustine, FL (1995). Retained on the Round Rock, TX Independent High School reading list (1996) after a challenge that the book was too violent. Challenged, but retained, as part of the reading list for Advanced Placement English classes at Northwest High Schools in High Point, NC (1996). The book was challenged because it is "sexually graphic and violent." Removed from the Jackson County, WV school libraries (1997) along with sixteen other titles. Challenged, but retained as part of a supplemental reading list at the Shawnee School in Lima, OH (1999). Several parents described its content as vulgar and "X-rated." Removed from the Ferguson High School library in Newport News, VA (1999). Students may request and borrow the book with parental approval. Challenged, along with seventeen other titles in the Fairfax County, VA elementary and secondary libraries (2002), by a group called Parents Against Bad Books in Schools. The group contends the books "contain profanity and descriptions of drug abuse, sexually explicit conduct, and torture.” Challenged in Burke County (2008) schools in Morgantown, NC by parents concerned about the homosexuality, rape, and incest portrayed in the book.

Ulysses, by James Joyce

Burned in the U.S. (1918), Ireland (1922), Canada (1922), England (1923) and banned in England (1929).

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Challenged at the St. Johns County Schools in St. Augustine, FL (1995). Retained on the Round Rock, TX Independent High School reading list (1996) after a challenge that the book was too violent. Challenged by a member of the Madawaska, ME School Committee (1997) because of the book's language. The 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning novel has been required reading for the advanced placement English class for six years. Challenged in the Sarasota County, FL schools (1998) because of sexual material. Retained on the Northwest Suburban High School District 214 reading listing in Arlington Heights, IL (2006), along with eight other challenged titles. A board member, elected amid promises to bring her Christian beliefs into all board decision-making, raised the controversy based on excerpts from the books she’d found on the Internet. Challenged in the Coeur d’Alene School District, ID (2007). Some parents say the book, along with five others, should require parental permission for students to read them. Pulled from the senior Advanced Placement (AP) English class at Eastern High School in Louisville, KY (2007) because two parents complained that the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about antebellum slavery depicted the inappropriate topics of bestiality, racism, and sex. The principal ordered teachers to start over with The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne in preparation for upcoming AP exams.

The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

Challenged at the Dallas, TX Independent School District high school libraries (1974). Challenged at the Sully Buttes, SD High School (1981). Challenged at the Owen, NC High School (1981) because the book is "demoralizing inasmuch as it implies that man is little more than an animal." Challenged at the Marana, AZ High School (1983) as an inappropriate reading assignment. Challenged at the Olney, TX Independent School District (1984) because of "excessive violence and bad language." A committee of the Toronto, Canada Board of Education ruled on June 23, 1988, that the novel is "racist and recommended that it be removed from all schools." Parents and members of the black community complained about a reference to "niggers" in the book and said it denigrates blacks. Challenged in the Waterloo, IA schools (1992) because of profanity, lurid passages about sex, and statements defamatory to minorities, God, women and the disabled. Challenged, but retained on the ninth-grade accelerated English reading list in Bloomfield, NY (2000).

1984, by George Orwell

Challenged in the Jackson County, FL (1981) because Orwell's novel is "pro-communist and contained explicit sexual matter."

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

Banned as obscene in France (1956-1959), in England (1955-59), in Argentina (1959), and in New Zealand (1960). The South African Directorate of Publications announced on November 27, 1982, that Lolita has been taken off the banned list, eight years after a request for permission to market the novel in paperback had been refused. Challenged at the Marion-Levy Public Library System in Ocala, FL (2006). The Marion County commissioners voted to have the county attorney review the novel that addresses the themes of pedophilia and incest, to determine if it meets the state law’s definition of “unsuitable for minors.”

Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck

Banned in Ireland (1953); Syracuse, IN (1974); Oil City, PA (I977); Grand Blanc, MI (1979); Continental, OH (1980) and other communities. Challenged in Greenville, SC (1977) by the Fourth Province of the Knights of the Ku Klux KIan; Vernon Verona Sherill, NY School District (1980); St. David, AZ (1981) and Tell City, IN (1982) due to "profanity and using God's name in vain." Banned from classroom use at the Scottsboro, AL Skyline High School (1983) due to "profanity." The Knoxville, TN School Board chairman vowed to have "filthy books" removed from Knoxville's public schools (1984) and picked Steinbeck's novel as the first target due to "its vulgar language." Reinstated at the Christian County, KY school libraries and English classes (1987) after being challenged as vulgar and offensive. Challenged in the Marion County, WV schools (1988), at the Wheaton Warrenville, IL Middle School (1988), and at the Berrien Springs, MI High School (1988) because the book contains profanity. Removed from the Northside High School in Tuscaloosa, AL (1989) because the book "has profane use of God's name." Challenged as a summer youth program reading assignment in Chattanooga, TN (1989) because "Steinbeck is known to have had an anti business attitude." In addition, "he was very questionable as to his patriotism." Removed from all reading lists and collected at the White Chapel High School in Pine Bluff, AR (1989) because of objections to language. Challenged as appropriate for high school reading lists in the Shelby County, TN school system (1989) because the novel contains "offensive language." Challenged, but retained in a Salina, KS (1990) tenth grade English class despite concerns that it contains "profanity" and "takes the Lord's name in vain." Challenged by a Fresno, CA (1991) parent as a tenth grade English college preparatory curriculum assignment, citing profanity" and "racial slurs." The book was retained, and the child of the objecting parent was provided with an alternative reading assignment. Challenged in the Rivera, TX schools (1990) because it contains profanity. Challenged as curriculum material at the Ringgold High School in Carroll Township, PA (1991) because the novel contains terminology offensive to blacks. Removed and later returned to the Suwannee, FL High School library (1991) because the book is "indecent" Challenged at the Jacksboro, TN High School (1991) because the novel contains "blasphemous" language, excessive cursing, and sexual overtones. Challenged as required reading in the Buckingham County, VA schools (1991) because of profanity. In 1992 a coalition of community members and clergy in Mobile, AL requested that local school officials form a special textbook screening committee to "weed out objectionable things." Steinbeck's novel was the first target because it contains "profanity" and "morbid and depressing themes." Temporarily removed from the Hamilton, OH High School reading list (1992) after a parent complained about its vulgarity and racial slurs. Challenged in the Waterloo, IA schools (1992) and the Duval County, FL public school libraries (1992) because of profanity, lurid passages about sex, and statements defamatory to minorities, God, women, and the disabled. Challenged at the Modesto, CA High School as recommended reading (1992) because of "offensive and racist language." The word "nigger" appears in the book. Challenged at the Oak Hill High School in Alexandria, LA (1992) because of profanity. Challenged as an appropriate English curriculum assignment at the Mingus, AZ Union High School (1993) because of "profane language, moral statement, treatment of the retarded, and the violent ending." Pulled from a classroom by the Putnam County, TN school superintendent (1994) "due to the language." Later, after discussions with the school district counsel, it was reinstated. The book was challenged in the Loganville, GA High School (1994) because of its "vulgar language throughout." Challenged in the Galena, KS school library (1995) because of the book's language and social implications. Retained in the Bemidji, MN schools (1995) after challenges to the book's "objectionable" language. Challenged at the Stephens County High School library in Toccoa, GA (I995) because of "curse words." The book was retained. Challenged, but retained in a Warm Springs, VA High School (1995) English class. Banned from the Washington Junior High School curriculum in Peru, IL (1997) because it was deemed "age inappropriate." Challenged, but retained, in the Louisville, OH high school English classes (1997) because of profanity. Removed, restored, restricted, and eventually retained at the Bay County schools in Panama City, FL (1997). A citizen group, the 100 Black United, Inc., requested the novel's removal and "any other inadmissible literary books that have racial slurs in them, such as the using of the word 'Nigger.'" Challenged as a reading list assignment for a ninth grade literature class, but retained at the Sauk Rapids Rice High School in St. Cloud, MN (1997). A parent complained that the book's use of racist language led to racist behavior and racial harassment. Challenged in O'Hara Park Middle School classrooms in Oakley, CA (1998) because it contains racial epithets. Challenged, but retained, in the Bryant, AR school library (1998) because of a parent's complaint that the book "takes God's name in vain 15 times and uses Jesus's name lightly." Challenged at the Barron, WI School District (1998). Challenged, but retained in the sophomore curriculum at West Middlesex, PA High School (1999) despite objections to the novel's profanity. Challenged in the Tomah, WI School District (1999) because the novel is violent and contains obscenities. Challenged as required reading at the high school in Grandville, MI (2002) because the book "is full of racism, profanity, and foul language." Banned from the George County, MS schools (2002) because of profanity. Challenged in the Normal, IL Community High Schools (2003) because the books contains "racial slurs, profanity, violence, and does not represent traditional values." An alternative book, Steinbeck's The Pearl, was offered but rejected by the family challenging the novel. The committee then recommended The House on Mango Street and The Way to Rainy Mountain as alternatives. Retained in the Greencastle-Antrim, PA (2006) tenth-grade English classes. A complaint was filed because of “racial slurs” and profanity used throughout the novel. The book has been used in the high school for more than thirty years, and those who object to its content have the option of reading an alternative reading. Challenged at the Newton, IA High School (2007) because of concerns about profanity and the portrayal of Jesus Christ. Newton High School has required students to read the book since at least the early 1980s. In neighboring Des Moines, it is on the recommended reading list for ninth-grade English, and it is used for some special education students in the eleventh and twelfth grades. Retained in the Olathe, KS ninth grade curriculum (2007) despite a parent calling the novel a “worthless, profanity-riddled book” which is “derogatory towards African Americans, women, and the developmentally disabled.”

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

Banned in Strongsville, OH (1972), but the school board's action was overturned in 1976 by a U.S. District Court in Minarcini v. Strongsville City School District. Challenged at the Dallas, TX Independent School District high school libraries (1974); in Snoqualmie, WA (1979) because of its several references to women as "whores."

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

Banned in Ireland (1932). Removed from classrooms in Miller, MO (1980), because it makes promiscuous sex "look like fun." Challenged frequently throughout the U.S.as required reading. Challenged as required reading at the Yukon, OK High School (1988) because of "the book's language and moral content." Challenged as required reading in the Corona-Norco, CA Unified School District (1993) because it is "centered around negative activity." Specifically, parents objected that the characters' sexual behavior directly opposed the health curriculum, which taught sexual abstinence until marriage. The book was retained, and teachers selected alternatives if students object to Huxley's novel. Removed from the Foley, AL High School Library (2000) pending review, because a parent complained that its characters showed contempt for religion, marriage, and family. The parent complained to the school and to Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. Challenged, but retained in the South Texas Independent School District in Mercedes, TX (2003). Parents objected to the adult themes—sexuality, drugs, suicide—that appeared in the novel. Huxley's book was part of the summer Science Academy curriculum. The board voted to give parents more control over their children's choices by requiring principals to automatically offer an alternative to a challenged book. Retained in the Coeur D’Alene, ID School District (2008) despite objections that the book has too many references to sex and drug use.

Animal Farm, by George Orwell

A Wisconsin survey revealed in 1963 that the John Birch Society had challenged the novel's use; it objected to the words "masses will revolt." In 1968, the New York State English Council's Committee on Defense Against Censorship conducted a comparable study in New York State English classrooms. Its findings identified the novel on its list of "problem books"; the reason cited was that "Orwell was a communist." Suppressed from being displayed at the 1977 Moscow, Russia International Book Fair. A survey of censorship challenges in the schools, conducted in DeKalb County for the period of 1979 to 1982, revealed that the novel had been objected to for its political theories. Banned from Bay County's four middle schools and three high schools in Panama City, FL by the Bay County school superintendent in 1987. After 44 parents filed a suit against the district claiming that its instructional aids policy denies constitutional rights, the Bay County School Board reinstated the book, along with sixty-four others banned. Banned from schools in the United Arab Emirates, along with 125 others in 2002. The Ministry of Education banned it on the grounds that it contains written or illustrated material that contradicts Islamic and Arab values—in this text, pictures of alcoholic drinks, pigs, and other "indecent images."

The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway

Banned in Boston, MA (1930), Ireland (1953), Riverside, CA (1960), San Jose, CA (1960). Burned in Nazi bonfires in Germany (1933).

As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner

Banned in the Graves County School District in Mayfield, KY (1986) because it contains "offensive and obscene passages referring to abortion and used God's name in vain." The decision was reversed a week later after intense pressure from the ACLU and considerable negative publicity. Challenged as a required reading assignment in an advanced English class of Pulaski County High School in Somerset, KY (1987) because the book contains "profanity and a segment about masturbation." Challenged, but retained, in the Carroll County, MD schools (1991). Two school board members were concerned about the book's coarse language and dialect. Banned at Central High School in Louisville, KY (1994) temporarily because the book uses profanity and questions the existence of God.

A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

The June 1929 issue of Scribner's Magazine, which ran Hemingway's novel, was banned in Boston, MA (1929). Banned in Italy (1929) because of its painfully accurate account of the Italian retreat from Caporetto, Italy. Burned by the Nazis in Germany (1933). Banned in Ireland (1939). Challenged at the Dallas, TX Independent School District high school libraries (1974). Challenged at the Vernon-Verona-Sherill, NY School District (1980) as a "sex novel."

Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston

Challenged for sexual explicitness, but retained on the Stonewall Jackson High School's academically advanced reading list in Brentsville, VA (1997). A parent objected to the novel's language and sexual explicitness.

Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison

Excerpts banned in Butler, PA (1975). Removed from the high school English reading list in St. Francis, WI (1975). Retained in the Yakima, WA schools (1994) after a five-month dispute over what advanced high school students should read in the classroom. Two parents raised concerns about profanity and images of violence and sexuality in the book and requested that it be removed from the reading list.

Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison

Challenged, but retained, in the Columbus, OH schools (1993). The complainant believed that the book contains language degrading to blacks, and is sexually explicit. Removed from required reading lists and library shelves in the Richmond County, GA. School District (1994) after a parent complained that passages from the book are "filthy and inappropriate." Challenged at the St. Johns County Schools in St. Augustine, FL (1995). Removed from the St. Mary's County, MD schools' approved text list (1998) by the superintendent, overruling a faculty committee recommendation. Complainants referred to the novel as "filth," "trash," and "repulsive." Reinstated in the Shelby, MI school Advanced Placement English curriculum (2009), but parents are to be informed in writing and at a meeting about the book’s content. Students not wanting to read the book can choose an alternative without academic penalty. The superintendent had suspended the book from the curriculum.

Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell

Banned from Anaheim, CA Union High School District English classrooms (1978). Challenged in Waukegan, IL School District (1984) because the novel uses the word "nigger."

Native Son, by Richard Wright

Challenged in Goffstown, NH (1978); Elmwood Park, NJ (1978) due to "objectionable" language; and North Adams, MA (1981) due to the book's "violence, sex, and profanity." Challenged at the Berrian Springs, MI High School in classrooms and libraries (1988) because the novel is "vulgar, profane, and sexually explicit." Retained in the Yakima, WA schools (1994) after a five-month dispute over what advanced high school students should read in the classroom. Two parents raised concerns about profanity and images of violence and sexuality in the book and requested that it be removed from the reading list. Challenged as part of the reading list for Advanced Placement English classes at Northwest High School in High Point, NC (1996). The book was challenged because it is "sexually graphic and violent." Removed from Irvington High School in Fremont, CA (1998) after a few parents complained the book was unnecessarily violent and sexually explicit. Challenged in the Hamilton High School curriculum in Fort Wayne, IN (1998) because of the novel's graphic language and sexual content.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey

Challenged in the Greeley, CO public school district (1971) as a non-required American Culture reading. In 1974, five residents of Strongsville, OH, sued the board of education to remove the novel. Labeling it "pornographic," they charged the novel "glorifies criminal activity, has a tendency to corrupt juveniles and contains descriptions of bestiality, bizarre violence, and torture, dismemberment, death, and human elimination." Removed from public school libraries in Randolph, NY, and Alton, OK (1975). Removed from the required reading list in Westport, MA (1977). Banned from the St. Anthony, ID Freemont High School classrooms (1978) and the instructor fired. The teacher sued. A decision in the case—Fogarty v. Atchley—was never published. Challenged at the Merrimack, NH High School (1982). Challenged as part of the curriculum in an Aberdeen, WA High School honors English class (1986) because the book promotes "secular humanism." The school board voted to retain the title. Challenged at the Placentia-Yorba Linda, CA Unified School District (2000) after complaints by parents stated that teachers "can choose the best books, but they keep choosing this garbage over and over again."

For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway

Declared non-mailable by the U.S. Post Office (1940). On Feb. 21, 1973, eleven Turkish book publishers went on trial before an Istanbul martial law tribunal on charges of publishing, possessing, and selling books in violation of an order of the Istanbul martial law command. They faced possible sentences of between one month's and six months’ imprisonment "for spreading propaganda unfavorable to the state" and the confiscation of their books. Eight booksellers also were on trial with the publishers on the same charge involving For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The Call of the Wild, by Jack London

Banned in Italy (1929), Yugoslavia (1929), and burned in Nazi bonfires (1933).

Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin

Challenged as required reading in the Hudson Falls, NY schools (1994) because the book has recurring themes of rape, masturbation, violence, and degrading treatment of women. Challenged as a ninth-grade summer reading option in Prince William County, VA (1988) because the book is "rife with profanity and explicit sex."

All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren

Challenged at the Dallas, TX Independent School District high school libraries (1974).

The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

Burned in Alamagordo, NM (2001) outside Christ Community Church along with other Tolkien novels as satanic.

The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

Banned from public libraries in Yugoslavia (1929). Burned in the Nazi bonfires because of Sinclair's socialist views (1933). Banned in East Germany (1956) as inimical to communism. Banned in South Korea (1985).

Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D.H. Lawrence

Banned by U.S. Customs (1929). Banned in Ireland (1932), Poland (1932), Australia (1959), Japan (1959), India (1959). Banned in Canada (1960) until 1962. Dissemination of Lawrence’s novel has been stopped in China (1987) because the book “will corrupt the minds of young people and is also against the Chinese tradition.”

A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess

In 1973 a bookseller in Orem, UT was arrested for selling the novel. Charges were later dropped, but the book seller was forced to close the store and relocate to another city. Removed from Aurora, CO high school (1976) due to "objectionable" language and from high school classrooms in Westport, MA (1977) because of "objectionable" language. Removed from two Anniston, AL High school libraries (1982), but later reinstated on a restricted basis.

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin

Retained on the Northwestern Suburban High School District 214 reading list in Arlington Heights, IL along with eight other challenged titles in 2006. A board member, elected amid promises to bring her Christian beliefs into all board decision-making, raised the controversy based on excerpts from the books she'd found on the Internet. First published in 1899, this novel so disturbed critics and the public that it was banished for decades afterward.

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

Banned, but later reinstated after community protests at the Windsor Forest High School in Savannah, GA (2000). The controversy began in early 1999 when a parent complained about sex, violence, and profanity in the book that was part of an Advanced Placement English Class.

Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie

Banned in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, Sudan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Quatar, Indonesia, South Africa, and India because of its criticism of Islam. Burned in West Yorkshire, England (1989) and temporarily withdrawn from two bookstores on the advice of police who took threats to staff and property seriously. In Pakistan five people died in riots against the book. Another man died a day later in Kashmir. Ayatollah Khomeni issued a fatwa or religious edict, stating, "I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the Satanic Verses, which is against Islam, the prophet, and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, have been sentenced to death." Challenged at the Wichita, KS Public Library (1989) because the book is "blasphemous to the prophet Mohammed." In Venezuela, owning or reading it was declared a crime under penalty of 15 months' imprisonment. In Japan, the sale of the English-language edition was banned under the threat of fines. The governments of Bulgaria and Poland also restricted its distribution. In 1991, in separate incidents, Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator, was stabbed to death and its Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was seriously wounded. In 1993 William Nygaard, its Norwegian publisher, was shot and seriously injured.

Sophie's Choice, by William Styron

Banned in South Africa in 1979. Returned to La Mirada High School library (CA) in 2002 after a complaint about its sexual content prompted the school to pull the award-winning novel about a tormented Holocaust survivor.

Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence

In 1961 an Oklahoma City group called Mothers United for Decency hired a trailer, dubbed it "smutmobile," and displayed books deemed objectionable, including Lawrence's novel.

Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut

The Strongsville, Ohio School Board (1972) voted to withdraw this title from the school library; this action was overturned in 1976 by a U.S. District Court in Minarcini v. Strongsville City School District, 541 F. 2d 577 (6th Cir. 1976). Challenged at Merrimack, NH High School (1982).

A Separate Peace, by John Knowles

Challenged in Vernon-Verona-Sherill, NY School District (1980) as a "filthy, trashy sex novel." Challenged at the Fannett-Metal High School in Shippensburg, PA (1985) because of its allegedly offensive language. Challenged as appropriate for high school reading lists in the Shelby County, TN school system (1989) because the novel contains "offensive language." Challenged, but retained in the Champaign, IL high school English classes (1991) despite claims that “unsuitable language” makes it inappropriate. Challenged by the parent of a high school student in Troy, IL (1991) citing profanity and negative attitudes. Students were offered alternative assignments while the school board took the matter under advisement, but no further action was taken on the complaint. Challenged at the McDowell County, NC schools (1996) because of "graphic language."

Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs

Found obscene in Boston, MA Superior Court (1965). The finding was reversed by the State Supreme Court the following year.

Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh

Alabama Representative Gerald Allen (R-Cottondale) proposed legislation that would prohibit the use of public funds for the "purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." The bill also proposed that novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed. The bill would impact all Alabama school, public, and university libraries. While it would ban books like Heather Has Two Mommies, it could also include classic and popular novels with gay characters such as Brideshead Revisited, The Color Purple or The Picture of Dorian Gray (2005).

Women in Love, by DH Lawrence

Seized by John Summers of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and declared obscene (1922).

The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer

Banned in Canada (1949) and Australia (1949).

Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller

Banned from U.S. Customs (1934). The U.S. Supreme Court found the novel not obscene (1964). Banned in Turkey (1986).

An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser

Banned in Boston, MA (1927) and burned by the Nazis in Germany (1933) because it "deals with low love affairs."

Rabbit, Run, by John Updike

Banned in Ireland in 1962 because the Irish Board of Censors found the work "obscene" and "indecent," objecting particularly to the author's handling of the characters' sexuality, the "explicit sex acts" and "promiscuity." The work was officially banned from sales in Ireland until the introduction of the revised Censorship Publications Bill in 1967. Restricted to high school students with parental permission in the six Aroostock County, ME community high school libraries (1976) because of passages in the book dealing with sex and an extramarital affair. Removed from the required reading list for English class at the Medicine Bow, WY Junior High School (1986) because of sexual references and profanity in the book.

notturno's upcoming album

2011-11-23T07:18:00.000-08:00

the band broke up, and suddenly it become the pianist's solo project.. with uncertainty of when the album is going to come up, as it was recorded when the whole members were still solid, here's a sneak peak of the cover album that I did for the guys

check them out, they're good

buy (cool) T-shirts, help others

2011-11-23T06:29:00.000-08:00

My brother Dimas -his dad was the second son of my grandmother in which my mom was the seventh daughter, godspeed mom- set up this website where he sells T-shirts online with words of wisdom in it..

I can't help but ponder at how cool the idea was. Who wouldn't want a shirt with their preferred quotations packed in awesome design at affordable price?!

the best thing is, he claimed to donate 100 percent - I like putting 100 percent instead of 'all', for me it feels to have a greater depth of valuation to it, I guess, or is it just me?- to charity!

and this is the next best thing, in order to convince you that he's actually donating all of the profit, he will give a periodical financial reports on the website to visibly show which places are receiving the donations, how much they receive, and what are they using the donations for.

I'm lost for words..

I have always believe that it requires one hell of courage, utmost determination and unbelievably kind heart to be able to do stuff that my brother is doing. It apparently takes ingenuity too..

I have always thought that suddenly the world is a less interesting place after my mom's departure, I guess life has its own sparks..

kudos to my bro and these are some of his cool T-Shirts,

Deuter Tension 20L Review

2011-11-18T00:10:00.001-08:00

Just got myself a new daypack -which apparently is the cool term for your everyday back pack- and decided to give my 2 cents on the product.

Anyways, this is how it looks with proper lights and professional placement (I don't know how Deuter can always seem to inflate their backpacks like balloons).

As you can see, it has a nice green color which I really dig -what can I say, I'm a sucker for everything green- and it's not too big or too small for a working daypack. Yes, I use it primarily for work. I use another cool carrier -which apparently is the cool term for your travelling, hiking, overseas tramping trips- by Deuter, the Futura Pro 38, but let's keep the focus on the Tension for now.

First, the reason why I pick Deuter and not other brands, or other laptop dedicated bags, is because, well, laptop bags aren't really that comfortable in my back. I have about three and all of them feels like a huge hump that press my shoulders down even after walking around for less than 20 minutes. And as the nature of my job requires constant movements from one place to another, why not pick something with good shoulder padding and back system.

And Deuter was actually not my first option, I was browsing for, well, brands like Vaude -there's this really cool green vaude on their website, Karrimor -which also have a most wanted item whose name I forgot, and The North Face -though some are available, they normally come in boring black color, which in my case, attracts more mosquitoes.

But my eyes stuck on Deuter because their products are easier to find at highly bargained prices in Indonesia, in which the aforementioned brands are not. recommended sellers at Kaskus have always been my last resort.

enough talk and get on with the review.
Despite the cool looking backpack you see on top, this is how mine's looked with nothing in it.

And this is the back system I mentioned before (click on image for bigger view).

I have to say that it's not working as I expected it would. Though I feel both back
pads pressing on my back, my reflect constantly forced me to fix the adjustments of
both the right and left shoulder cords so that both pads fall perfectly on the sides.
I would have preferred a single pad on the back bone, as I constantly have a backbone
problem, but that's probably just me.

I still sweat, but not as much I guess.

And there's also the chest cord which I don't particularly use, and the bag also come
with detachable hip cords, which I detached to slip the dangling shoulder cords in

Now moving on to the compartments

The bag has a small upper pocket that can hold your keys -with dangling key cord, itsy bitsy things like identification cards, possibly earphones, cigarettes and lighters, whatever small things you want easy access to.

these are the two side pockets

this one has tons of pen holders, which is kindda cool -you'll know why later, and quite a space for anything else, like small size notebook and stuff.

The one on the left is made of an elastic material,
which you'll probably missed on the images at the
company's website. This means the right and left
pockets are dissimilar in terms of design, with the
left meant to stretch to hold something bigger,
such as water bottles, or in my case, my box of
name cards.

Peeking at the main compartment,

there's a small zipped bag that can hold small and not too thick notes. Stuff like passports, your bankbooks and other of similar sizes should fit in this pocket. Though connecting cables for electronic devices can also fit here, I found it annoying to do so as it will block my access to the main compartment.

the inside compartment has an attached line of cloth that, I guess, were meant to hold your
wet clothes. The design also meant for things to stay at the edge of the wall of the bag
so that the things you put inside won't dangle you down on the opposite direction. Plenty
of bags have this feature, so I guess you know what I'm talking about. This is where I put my
laptop in. The absence of a dedicated laptop compartment, in my opinion, is forgivable,
as it was never meant to be a laptop bag in the first place. I would advice for a laptop
soft case if you want to mount your laptop in at the expense of less space, but I'm doing
just fine without one :p.

I don't know whether 20 liter is the over all size or after the bag is shrunk. I'm saying this because the bag has an outside zipper that can give additional space for the inside compartment. With the load I'm carrying right now, I found it unnecessary to expand the main compartment, but it's good to know that I can if I need to.

This is the outside of the bag, which according to the Deuter website could (or should?) hold your skateboard in case you want to walk or run instead of glide. I haven't tried mounting a helmet in, which is partially one of the reasons why I bought this series instead the spider, which also look cool by the way, but the long connecting cords should do it, I guess, I don't really know, will update you if I finally mount something in it, if by chance I remembered to take pictures of it. You should see as I don't really like dangling cords on my bag, I kindda tighten them using plastic tighteners -whatever the cool term for it. They's the same cable tighteners available in different colors at your local utility shops.

The bag also has a glow-in-the-dark stripe that will prevent you from getting hit from behind if you're riding a bike or walking on the wrong side of a sidewalk-less street, which is a lot in Jakarta.

Now that I have covered, I guess, all parts of the bag that need to be covered.

Here are the things I carry everyday to work,

-14 inch laptop from Toshiba
-my 500GB shock proof, supposedly, portable hardisk from Transcends
-itsy bitsy stuff like bunch of pens, toothbrush -shut up, lighter, portable ashtray, back up Senheisser earphones, press id
-slightly bigger stuff like notebook, passport and a couple of bankbooks
-box of namecard
-bunch of cable connection for charging electrical equipment, such as the shitty laptop charger -due to its weight and size, iPod cable, blackberry cable and hardisk connector.
-and finally a spare shirt in case I need to look neat pronto

just to show you the capacity of this bag, I have decided to include the ultra-thick
Steve Jobs biography -may he rest in iPeace- by Walter Issacson inside the bag.

and now it's time to put everything inside, okay this one over here, that one over there, some of this stuff here, and, wait, yup.. okay and VOILA!!

This is how the bag looks after everything is clobbered in, also see the side pics to compare the thickness (click for larger view).

Just to give you an idea about the dimension of the bag, this is my son Kaezee next to the Tension -or simply because the purpose of this review is to make my son famous :p

here's pros and cons

pros
-green colored (the black stripe is also available btw)
-nice padded and wide shoulder strap
-big enough but not overly humongous for my back, appealing design
-I heard the bag is water proof :p

cons
-the back system I mentioned above
-lack of dedicated laptop container but okay laa
-placing of inside pocket that can block the way (I later see this as a good thing, as the bag doesn't necessarily weigh everything to the bottom part. Bag contents are evenly distributed on the upper and bottom parts to maintain its cool proportional shape, so it goes).

Overall I'm pretty happy with the bag as it answers my need for a hip-looking work daypack. And though the amount of things inside is similar to the amount of things mounted on my normal laptop bag, my shoulders receive less strain due to the width of the pad, and my back don't sweat as much.

Here's me looking happy

(mm probably later)

Steve Jobs at the commencement address, Stanford University, June 12, 2005

2011-10-06T03:15:00.000-07:00

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much

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

Steve Jobs
1955 - 2011

starting anew

2011-09-19T15:05:00.000-07:00

this piece has sunflowers and naked women in it, since I don't recommend obscenity, a woman with huge tits should suffice

I’ve got mixed feelings

About starting anew, everything’s change but nothing is truly forgotten, so they say.

One will need to heavily edit this.

As far as life goes, people leaves as other come. As far as life goes, we leave as other fill our position and us into theirs. To put things into perspective, I’m so in need of a breath of fresh air, and that sense of accomplishment, instead of that dull fulfilling-a-task depression.

And so, here’s the big finale that leads to a possible rambling, I decided to quit my job, one that had given me the buff, and go to find another, to fill the seat that another had left, so to speak.

That position, as I pessimistically believe, will drag the boredom out of me big time, but all is for the good-old green-thing.

It’s always about the good-old green-thing.

Or at least a huge percentage of it… the rest was, as I have come to notice, was the breaking free from that overwhelming sense of no appreciation, revenge, to the state of staleness and being stuck within a worm hole, in between worlds where we’re being tossed back and forth in such hideous manner that gives us massive headache and stomach ulcer, among others.

As I write this, the days that count are slow and yet too fast to dissipate, painstakingly, and I’m running out of hours.

I had left too many responsibilities that are need to be dealt with pronto, thanks to my procrastinating habit. Quite a mouthful, but the definition of the word, or my habit, in that sense, is that I tend to put things on hold until it’s too late, or just a bit too late, preferring to do useless things instead of actually doing the things that I need to do, not a very smart things to do actually.

Anyways, in less than a week, I will not be in this desk, doing those things I do, traveling distant places to write stupid travel articles anymore. I deliberately chose to sit in a completely contrasting environment, one that is filled with smoke with literally smarter people talking about smart stuff that I sometimes have no idea about.

Not a very smart thing to do actually.

But this had to be done. If my mom was still there, she will keep me on my track, telling me to do things accordingly and go home to spend the rest of the time in between with her.

Sounds like the smartest thing now…

Anyways, we matured, and at this very moment, I don’t feel like there’s anything in this godforsaken place that will hold me. Professional-wise, I have done all I could and the door in front of me just won’t open. The key was made but wasn’t handed to me because of the good-old green-thing. I have also learnt not to take friendship personal, which is the wisest thing I’ve done, pragmatically.

It’s not that everything started to fall into a major fuck up in this place I held dear, it’s just too sad that in turn, it has nothing else to offer me.

Except, of course, delusions, false expectancy of hopes and a locked door with the key toyed in front of me. Come to think of it, if the door is actually opened, I don’t think I’ll find naked women running around like stupid in a beautiful garden of sunflowers and grapefruits.

The nature of dream is to be pursued, and not to wait for to come true.

I guess, bottom line is, I’m just too tired of waiting, and decided to go ahead with whatever I front of me instead… I hope that’s smarter than being chained to this stupid place in a stalemate.

well, once again, walk away and move on. like past experiences, you will see a lot clearer after you've kept your distance, and you're usually stand corrected.

playboy interview Frank Zappa a year before his passing

2011-09-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

Playboy: You once said that your job is "extrapolating everything to its most absurd extreme." Does that still hold true

Frank Zappa: It's one of my jobs. I guess it must have been my main job that day. But yes, I like carrying things to their most ridiculous extreme because out there on the fringe is where my type of entertainment lies.

Playboy: Is it frustrating that more people don't get it?

Frank Zappa: The crux of the biscuit is: If it entertains you, fine. Enjoy it. If it doesn't, then blow it out your ass. I do it to amuse myself. If I like it, I release it. If somebody else likes it, that's a bonus.

Playboy: How important is it to offend people?

Frank Zappa: You mean, do I wake up and say, "I think I'll go out and offend somebody today"? I don't do that. I don't write lyrics much anymore, but I offend people just as much with the music itself. I put chords together that I like, but many people want rhythms that they can march to or dance to; they get tangled up trying to tap their foot to my songs. Some people don't like that, which is OK with me.

Playboy: You certainly offended people with the Phi Zappa Krappa poster.

Frank Zappa: Probably. But so what?

Playboy: And some of your antics from the Mothers of Invention days, like the famed gross-out contest.

Frank Zappa: There never was a gross-out contest. That was a rumor. Somebody's imagination ran wild. Chemically bonded imagination. The rumor was that I went so far as to eat shit onstage. There were people who were terribly disappointed that I never ate shit onstage. But no, there never was anything resembling a gross-out contest.

Playboy: Another rumor was that you peed on an audience.

Frank Zappa: I never had my dick out onstage and neither did anybody else in the band. We did have a stuffed giraffe rigged with a hose and an industrial-strength whipped cream dispenser. Under it we had a cherry bomb. That's how we celebrated the Fourth of July in 1967. Somebody waved the flag, lit the cherry bomb. It blew the ass out of the giraffe. Another guy reached behind the giraffe and pushed the button and had this thing shitting whipped cream all over the stage. That amused people for some reason.

Playboy: So it was simply contained outrageousness?

Frank Zappa: Stagecraft.

Playboy: To entertain or just to alleviate boredom?

Frank Zappa: There was a third factor, too. There's an art statement in whipped cream shooting out the ass of a giraffe, isn't there? We were carrying on the forgotten tradition of dada stagecraft. The more absurd, the better I liked it.

Playboy: The titles of your records and songs are art statements, too.

Frank Zappa: Well, you have to call them something, so why not call them something amusing?

Playboy: For example, Burnt Weeny Sandwich?

Frank Zappa: I still eat burnt weeny sandwiches. It's one of the great things in life. At least it's a great lunch. You take a Hebrew National, put it on a fork, burn it on the stove, wrap two pieces of bread around it, squirt some mustard on it, eat it and you're back to work.

Playboy: You've also used your songs to level political attacks. You wrote Rhymin' Man about Jesse Jackson. What made you so angry?

Frank Zappa: An article raised some questions about whether or not Martin Luther King actuallyy died in Jesse's arms. There were reports that Jackson dipped his hands into King's blood or even used chicken blood and rubbed it on his shirt, which we wore for a few days afterward as he met the media. So I did this song about the idea of communicating through nursery rhymes, as Jackson is prone to do. It rubs me the wrong way. I'm not saying that all of Jesse's ideas are bad; I agree with some of them. But I'm not confident that Jesse Jackson would be the person I would look to to implement any of them. I don't want to see any religious people in public office because they're working for another boss.

Playboy: You also assailed former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop in a song.

Frank Zappa: HBO ran something like "Dr. Koop Answers Your Questions About AIDS." On it, I saw him explain how AIDS got from the green monkey to the human population. He speculated about a native who wanted to eat a green monkey, who skinned it, cut his finger and some of the green monkey's blood got into his blood. The next thing you know, you have this blood-to-blood transmission of the disease. I mean, this is awful fucking thin. It's right up there with Grimm's Fairy Tales. And Koop was such a cartoon character with that uniform and everything. Before Ronald Reagan, when did you ever see a surgeon general dressed up like the guy in the Katzenjammer Kids?

Playboy: Because of songs such as Dinah Moe Humm ("I got a forty-dollar bill say you can't make me come"), He's So Gay and many others, you have been accused of being sexist, misogynistic and homophobic.

Frank Zappa: Some people miss the joke. In general, I was a convenient enemy and they could get exposure for their causes by coming after me. But I'm not antigay. When Ross Perot announced he was running for president, I wanted him to choose Barney Frank as a vice-presidential candidate. He is one of the most impressive guys in Congress. He is a great model for young gay men.

Playboy: But you were criticized for Bobby Brown Goes Down and He's So Gay.

Frank Zappa: But see, I'm a journalist of a sort. I have a right to say what I want to say about any topic. If you don't have a sense of humor, then tough titties.

Playboy: is that what you said when you were attacked by the Anti-Defamation League for Jewish Princess?

Frank Zappa: They wanted to convince the world that there's no such thing as a Jewish princess, but, I'm sorry, the facts speak for themeselves. They asked me to apologize and I refused. I still have their letter nailed to the wall. They got a lot of mileage out of it, but it was a tempest in a teapot. They just wanted to give the impression that here, in the world of rock, was this rabid anti-Semite who was besmirching the fine reputation of everybody of the Jewish faith. Well, I didn't make up the idea of a Jewish princess. They exist, so I wrote a song about them. If they don't like it, so what? Italians have princesses, too.

Playboy: Is there rhyme or reason behind the subjects you choose to attack?

Frank Zappa: Whatever I'm mad at at the time. I like things that work. If something doesn't, the first question you have to ask is, Why? if it's not working and you know why, then you have to ask, "Why isn't somebody doing something about it?" The government, for starters. Most institutions. The nation's education system is completely fucked up.

Playboy: Fucked up how?

Frank Zappa: The schools are worthless because the books are worthless. They still are on the level of George Washington and the cherry tree and "I cannot tell a lie." The books have all been bowdlerized by committees responding to pressure from right-wing groups to make every aspect of the history books consistent with the cryptofascist view-point. When you send your kids to school, that's what they're dealing with. Your children are being presented with these documents, part of a multibillion-dollar industry, which are absolutely fraudulent. Kids' heads are crammed with so many nonfacts that when they get out of school they're totally unprepared to do anything. They can't read, they can't write, they can't think. Talk about child abuse. The U.S. school system as a whole qualifies.

Playboy: Did you find alternative schools for your kids?

Frank Zappa: In California you can take your kids out of school at 15 if they can pass the equivalency test, so the first three have escaped. Diva still has a couple of years to go.

Playboy: Before they escaped, how did you deal with it?

Frank Zappa: We had them in public school and private school, back and forth, trying to find the best possible education that we could get for them.

Playboy: Regardless of what they learned at school, they certainly must get an education around here.

Frank Zappa: There definitely is a little stimulation around here. They meet a lot of people from all over the world and of all different nationalities and races and business backgrounds. The kids aren't shoveled into a room.

Playboy: Did the perspective you gave them prepare them for those bad schools?

Frank Zappa: It caused them trouble, because when they compared what qualifies as the real world here in this house with what they experienced as the real world in school, it was very different. Sometimes their friends think they're weird. On the other hand, their friends like to spend the night over here.

Playboy: Were the teachers horrified?

Frank Zappa: Some of them. They had a few teachers who were great. One could have taught a couch to read. She was fired because she wasn't Mexican. The school had an ethnic quota, and she was out.

Playboy: If Tipper Gore was right and exposure to an uncensored world is bad for kids, your kids must be monsters.

Frank Zappa: My kids do OK. I like them a lot and they seem to like me and their mother. They don't use drugs. They don't drink. They don't even eat meat.

Playboy: What have you said to your kids about drugs?

Frank Zappa: All I told them was, "You see examples of drug-crazed people on television and all you have to do is look at those assholes." They get the point. The biggest thing you can do for kids is give them the ability to figure things out. I use a risk-reward program. One of my kids comes to me and tells me he or she wants to do something. I say no if I don't think it's a good idea. If they can convince me, logically, that I'm wrong, they get to do it.

Playboy: You're creating your worst nightmare: a house full of lawyers.

Frank Zappa: I don't think we have to worry about any of them becoming lawyers. But it does help to develop reasoning and communication skills - you might even call it sales skills - to manage to get your way in a fast and efficient manner. I don't think it hurts. Look at the alternative: They could go "Wah-wah-wah" or break things, or sneak. We don't have very much in the way of tantrums or sneakage problems. I look at kids as little people. The little people have certain assets and liabilities. They're born with an unbound imagination. They're born without fear and prejudice. On the other hand, they don't have the mechanical skills to do big-person stuff. But if you treat them like people, they'll learn. If you think of them as your precious little commodities and you want to mold them and shape them into something that you imagine for them, it breeds problems.

Playboy: You obviously don't buy the argument that you have to give your kids something to rebel against.

Frank Zappa: Well, my children certainly have decided not to grow up like me. They don't smoke. They don't eat hamburgers or bacon. They find their own way. I just want to keep them out of trouble and make sure that they can get to adulthood with some sort of marketable skill and a chance for a happy life on their own terms. I don't want them to be like me or like Gail. They should be like them. And they should be as well equipped to be themselves as possible. As parents we have to do everything to give them the equipment to be themselves, so that when they go out into the world they can maintain their identity and still survive.

Playboy: Would they have been different had you named them Sally or John?

Frank Zappa: It's the last name that gets them into trouble.

Playboy: How?

Frank Zappa: I'm viewed as being weird. When somebody calls you weird, then anything you touch becomes weird. On the other hand, they like being weird.

Playboy: And their first names distinguish them for anyone unconvinced by their last name?

Frank Zappa: I want them to be different. I know that the people in these schools will never be different because they're afraid to be different. But my kids are genetically different, so they might as well be different all the way.

Playboy: Chastity Bono once told a reporter how terrible her name is. She said when she complained, Sonny reminded her, "Be thankful we didn't name you Dweezil." Have any of your kids threatened to change their names?

Frank Zappa: No. I think they like them, though you'd have to ask them. We all get along well. That seems to be a rare thing in a family today. The family itself is a vanishing artifact. In the Nineties, if you have a family and the people inside the family have affection for one another, it's kind of a miracle. It's mutant behavior. I mean, they yell and scream at one another like any other kids. But most of the time they play together.

Playboy: How did you meet Gail?

Frank Zappa: She was working at the Whiskey a-Go-Go in L.A. I fell in love with her instantly.

Playboy: Is it true you didn't give her a wedding ring;

Frank Zappa: I didn't have one, so when we got married, I pinned a ballpoint pen on her dress. It was a maternity dress because she was nine months pregnant.

Playboy: These days, particularly in your profession, twenty-five-year marriages are uncommon. Why has yours lasted?

Frank Zappa: We both are busy with what we care about. She's good at what she does, and I leave her alone when it comes to that. I spent so much time on the road that we were always glad to see each other when the tours were over. The other thing is I guess we like each other.

Playboy: Is there a lot of music in your house? What music do your kids listen to?

Frank Zappa: When Ahmet was in sixth grade, he liked Fiddler on the Roof and Oliver! Recently he discovered Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer. Diva likes rap music of all languages. Moon likes dance-oriented stuff. Dweezil likes anything with a guitar in it.

Playboy: How do you like his music?

Frank Zappa: The best of it, I think, is his instrumental music, which is very involved technically; the rhythms and intervals are complicated and his execution is spotless.

Playboy: How about you? Have you lost your interest in rock and roll?

Frank Zappa: My main interest is composition - getting an idea and manifesting it in a way that people can listen to.

Playboy: How much has technology changed your music?

Frank Zappa: Without the computer I would still be at the mercy of musicians to play my music. I would also be at the mercy of governmental and civic entities that fund performances.

Playboy: After your last tour, you said you wouldn't be touring again.

Frank Zappa: Well, I couldn't afford it. I lost \$ 400,000 on it and I don't wish to experience that again.

Playboy: Do you ever miss the -

Frank Zappa: Rock-and-roll life? No.

Playboy: How about the experience of the performance?

Frank Zappa: A little bit. Every once in a while I, feel like playing the guitar, but I stop and think what I'd have to go through in order to do it. The urge goes away.

Playboy: Is it particularly gratifying to get commissions such as the one from the Frankfurt Festival last year?

Frank Zappa: That one was really something. It was a whole evening of my music, which was part of a whole week of my music, new pieces and old. It was performed in Frankfurt, Berlin and Vienna.

Playboy: Do you have any theories about why your music has been more popular in Europe than in America?

Frank Zappa: Germans, in particular, have a history of supporting new composition. They also have a viable contemporary tradition of new music that gets funded and performed regularly.

Playboy: Was it always your goal to do classical music?

Frank Zappa: That's where I started. I didn't write rock and roll until I was in my twenties, but I started writing other kinds of music. I couldn't play it, I could only write it.

Playboy: Where did the interest come from?

Frank Zappa: I liked the way music looked on paper. It was fascinating to me that you could see the notes and somebody. who knew what they were doing would look at them and music would come out. I thought it was a miracle. I was always interested in graphics, and I spent most of my creative time in my early days in school drawing pictures. I got a Speedball pen and a jar of Higgins India ink and some music paper and, shit, I could draw those.

Playboy: It was originally about a picture, not a sound?

Frank Zappa: Yes. And then I got someone to play it. I went to my grandmother's funeral when I was little and I sat there looking at the candles. The choir was singing, and when they would sing a note, the candles would respond to it. I didn't know why. I was a little kid; what the fuck did I know about physics? But it was a physical manifestation of a sound. I remembered it; I put it in the memory bank to see what I could do with it later. It shows how bored I was at the funeral.

Playboy: Did your parents play music,

Frank Zappa: No. We had a very unmusical household.

Playboy: Your father worked with poison gas for a living. Did you understand the implications of that?

Frank Zappa: Yeah. I just took it as a fact of life. We lived in a place where we were obliged to have gas masks hanging on the wall in case the tanks broke, because you could die. Thinking back on it, if those tanks had broken, those gas masks wouldn't have saved us.

Playboy: How close were the tanks?

Frank Zappa: There were tanks of mustard gas next to the Army housing we lived in. We were right down the street from this shit. We had a rack in the hall, with Daddy's mask, Momma's mask and Frank's mask hanging on it. I used to wear mine all the time. It was my space helmet. There was a can at the end of the hose that had the filtration unit in it, and I always wondered what was in it. I took a can opener and unscrewed it to find out how it worked. My father got very upset when I opened it up because I broke it and he would have to get me another one, which he never did. I was defenseless.

Playboy: Were your parents religious,

Frank Zappa: Pretty religious.

Playboy: Church and confession?

Frank Zappa: Oh, yeah. They used to make me go. They tried to make me go to Catholic school, too. I lasted a very short time. When the penguin came after me with a ruler, I was out of there.

Playboy: So you were headstrong.

Frank Zappa: Yeah. I still went to church regularly, though, until I was eighteen years old. Then suddenly, the light bulb went on over my head. All the mindless mobidity and discipline was pretty sick - bleeding this, painful that and no meat on Friday. What is this shit?

Playboy: Is the irreverence and outrageousness in your music a reaction to being a good Catholic boy?

Frank Zappa: Well, I think it was possible to do what I've done only because I escaped the bondage of being a devout believer. To be a good member of the congregation, ultimately you have to stop thinking. The essence of Christianity is told to us in the Garden of Eden story. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could still be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.

Playboy: Did the end of your refigiousness coincide with your step into rock and roll?

Frank Zappa: It was right about the same time. I was pretty isolated. There weren't any cultural opportunities in Lancaster. You couldn't just go to a concert. There was nothing.

Playboy: Were you tempted by drugs?

Frank Zappa: All you'd have to do was look at the people who used them and that was enough. People would do frightening things and think it was fantastic. Then they would discuss it endlessly with the next guy, who had taken the same drug. I tried marijuana and waited for something to happen. I got a sore throat and it made me sleepy. I'd look at them and go, "Why?" I'm not going to be Bill Clinton and say I never inhaled. I did inhale. I couldn't understand what the big attraction was. I liked tobacco a lot better.

Playboy: Were you involved in other aspects of the counterculture?

Frank Zappa: In order to be a part of it, you had to buy into the whole drug package. You had to have been experienced, in the Jimi Hendrix sense of the word. And all the people I knew who had been experienced were on the cusp of being zombies.

Playboy: Was it disconcerting that your audiences were high much of the time?

Frank Zappa: The worst part of it for me was that I really didn't like the smell of marijuana. I had to go into a place that had the purple haze and work for a couple of hours in that. They were entitled to do whatever they wanted, so long as they didn't drive into me under the influence of it.

Playboy: But you told people drugs were stupid, before Nancy Reagan did.

Frank Zappa: One of the reasons we weren't rabidly popular at that time was that I said what was on my mind about drugs.

Playboy: Did you feel like an outsider? It's safe to say that every other major rock star in those days was

Frank Zappa: Looped. It wasn't just the other musicians but the people in the band. The guys in the band who wished they could do drugs couldn't because it meant unemployment. I was unpopular for it. As for the rock stars, if you've met them, you know that they generally have very little on their minds. I never had any great desire to hang out with them.

Playboy: Did any of the big acts of the time interest you? How about Dylan, Hendrix, the Stones?

Frank Zappa: Some of the really good things that Hendrix did was the earliest stuff, when he was just ripping and brutal. Manic Depression was my favorite Jimi Hendrix song. The more experimental it got, the less interesting and the thinner it got. As for Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited was really good. Then we got Blonde on Blonde and it started to sound like cowboy music, and you know what I think of cowboy music. I liked the Rolling Stones.

Playboy: Did Mick Jagger once pull a splinter out of your toe?

Frank Zappa: Yeah. He came by my house and I was hopping around because of this splinter, so he pulled it out. Good story, huh? I did like his attitude and the Stones' attitude. Ultimately, though, the music was being done because it was product. It was pop music made because there was a record company waiting for records.

Playboy: Is that why you founded Straight Records?

Frank Zappa: I naively thought that if there was some venue for nonstandard material, the material would find a market. But it failed because it was independent and had in dependent distribution. We lost our butt on that one. So the only way you can really do an independent label is to distribute through a major that has some clout to collect from the retailers.

Playboy: How are your current labels, Barking Pumpkin and Zappa Records, doing?

Frank Zappa: We have a very loyal fan base in several countries. Although the sales figures worldwide aren't anywhere near what the big rock stars would do if they released an album, the people who like what we do are very enthusiastic about it. That gives you a certain amount of leverage with record companies. You hook up with a major distributor but still control what you do. Since I have a record company of my own that controls the masters, the amount I make per unit - as the record company as opposed to the artist - is substantially more. I can sell three units and stay in business.

Playboy: What inspired you to form your first band, the Black-Outs?

Frank Zappa: In Lancaster there wasn't any rock and roll, unless you listened to it on a record. Most of the people who liked R\&B were not the white sons and daughters of the alfalfa farmers or defense workers who lived there. There were a number of Mexicans and a lot of black kids, and they liked that kind of stuff. So I put together this racially mixed ensemble that liked to play that kind of music. We banged our heads against the wall just like every other garage band, trying to figure out how to play, it. There's no guidebook.

Playboy: Were you playing high school dances?

Frank Zappa: No, they wouldn't let us. I had to mount my own events. One time we rented the Lancaster Women's Club to put on a dance. When the authorities heard that there was going to be this rock-and-roll dance in their little cowboy community, they arrested me at six that evening for vagrancy. I spent the night in jail. it was right out of a teenage movie. But the dance went off anyway.

Playboy: Did that group metamorphose into the Mothers of Invention?

Frank Zappa: That was just a high school band. After I got out of high school and moved away, I played other kinds of gigs, like a short stint with Joe Perrino and the Mellotones. We are allowed to play one twist number per night. The rest was Happy Birthday, Anniversary Waltz and all the standards. I wore a little tux and strummed chords, bored. I got sick of that and stuck my guitar in the case and put it behind the sofa and left it there for eight months. I got a job doing greeting card designs, and for fun I wrote chamber music. I ran into some people who knew a guy named Paul Buff who had a studio. I started doing some worker over there. I met Ray Collins, who was working weekend gigs with the Soul Giants. He got into a fistfight with the guitar player. They needed a substitute guitar player in a hurry, so he called me. I got really involved and learned how hard it is to run a band, especially if you are trying to put together some nonstandard musical offering with no money. You try to convince a musician that it is a worth-while thing to do, when deep in his heart every rock musician thinks that he, too, should be the fourth member of Cream or the eighteenth Beatle. That group of people became the Mothers, anyway.

Playboy: So named because?

Frank Zappa: I don't know. We chose the name on Mother's Day.

Playboy: Do you look at those as the good old days?

Frank Zappa: I look at those as the old days. But we did have fun.

Playboy: What was the music scene like?

Frank Zappa: Pretty bizarre. it was the days of all these Sixties bands, including Jefferson Airplane and Paul Butterfield and Johnny Rivers. We opened for Lenny Bruce at the Fillmore West in 1966. I asked him to sign my draft card, but he said no.

Playboy: Is that when you had your runnin with John Wayne?

Frank Zappa: Yeah. He came to one show very drunk. He saw me and picked me up and said, "I saw you in Egypt and you were great . . . and then you blew me!" Onstage I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, it's Halloween and we were going to have some important guests here tonight - like George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party - but unfortunately all we could get was John Wayne." He got up and made some drunken speech, and his bodyguards told me I'd better cool it.

Playboy: There were other characters - such as Cynthia Plaster-Caster. Tell us about her.

Frank Zappa: Eric Clapton introduced me to the Plaster-Casters. They had all these statues of the dicks of people like Jimi Hendrix. One of them mixed the plaster stuff to make a mold, and the other gave the guy a blow job. She took her mouth off the guy's dick, and then the other one slammed the mold onto it. We declined to be enshrined, so to speak.

Playboy: During those years, the Mothers were famous for being a hardworking band. You were on the road all the time.

Frank Zappa: We played everywhere. Like the time we spent in Montreal, when we played a club called the New Penelope and it was twenty degrees below zero. We walked from our hotel to the club, and the snot had literally frozen in our noses by the time we got to work. The wind instruments got so cold that if you tried to play them, your lips and fingers would freeze to them. The instruments couldn't even be played until they were warmed up. It was pretty primitive. If we hadn't experienced that, we probably wouldn't have come up with some of the more deranged types of audience participation and audience punishment things that we were doing at the time.

Playboy: Audience punishment things?

Frank Zappa: The question became, How far would they go? What could we get an audience to do? The answer seemed to be anything. We'd bring someone up and go, "Take your shoes and socks off, put your socks on your hands and lick them while we play." Anything we could think of. So long as the person telling them to do it was onstage, they would do it. The rest of the people in the audience were laughing at the person who was doing the most ridiculous things but saying at the same time, I could do that! That could be me!" At a theater in New York, which had once been a porno theater or something, there was a projection booth at the far end of the stage. We ran a wire from there to the opposite side of the stage. We had pulleys on it. Our drummer, Motorhead, was instructed to attach objects to the line at random times during the show and fly them down. When they would land onstage, whatever arrived, we would improvise on it. Once, he sent down a baby d4" a doggie-style position with its head removed. It flew over the audience, whizzing by like in apparition over their heads, and crashed into the post over us. It was followed shortly by a three-foot-long Genoa salami that sodomized the doll. It seemed to me that there was no reason to waste this perfectly good salami, so I invited this lovely girl with very long hair, wearing a kind of Little Miss Muffet costume, to come up onstage and eat the whole salami. We played and she ate the salami. She started to cry because she couldn't finish it. I told her it was OK, that we would save it for her and she could come back and eat the rest of it. She did.

Playboy: Do you keep up with popular music now?

Frank Zappa: What's to keep up with? If anything's sensational, it won't be on MTV, it'll be Sister Souljah on Larry King.

Playboy: You had your own talk show on FNN for a short time. What started that brief career?

Frank Zappa: I was invited to be a guest on Bob Berkowitz' show to talk about business opportunities in the Soviet Union, which I knew something about from my travels there. It was a fairly amusing half hour. After that, Bob asked me to guest-host his show while he was on vacation.

Playboy: You tried to book Czechoslovakia's president Vaclav Havel as a guest, right?

Frank Zappa: I knew a guy who had been a rock-and-roll musician who, after the revolution, was a ranking member of the Czech parliament. I asked him whether or not he could arrange for me to meet Havel so that I could interview him about the country's economy for FNN. I met with Havel and found that the minute I started talking with him about economics, he turned me over to his advisors; he didn't know anything about it. We didn't do the interview, but it was great meeting with him.

Playboy: Why Havel; ZAPP: I happen to think that the Velvet Revolution was a little bit of a miracle. Since he was kind of the focal point of the whole thing, I thought he'd be a nice guy to talk with. He was. In the middle of everything, he mentioned that Dan Quayle was coming to visit. I expressed my condolences. I told him I was sorry that he was going to be forced to have a conversation with anyone that stupid. It eventually must have gotten back to the U.S. embassy. Instead of sending Quayle, Jim Baker - who was on his way to Moscow - rerouted his trip and went to Prague.

Playboy: What do you think of the breakup of Czechoslovakia?

Frank Zappa: It's a big mistake. The crash program for economic reform is part of what led to the breakup of the country. Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, who was the advocate of the fast economic reform a la Poland, is a person who is well respected by Western financial people because he talks their language. This has a tendency to assure potential Western backers, who are not comfortable with a guy who wants to go slowly. But there. are factors that make it necessary to go slowly. Now there is no intellectual core in charge of the revolution, and the country has divided up, which is a mistake. Smaller entities tend to be less efficient; every small country has to reinvent the wheel. They have to set up a new constitution, a legislature, currency. It's happening in every one of the small breakaway republics. It gives the people personal gratification as a nationality, but the price is chaos.

Playboy: But you're all for smaller governments and more local control, aren't you?

Frank Zappa: No, because that means more governments.

Playboy: But smaller governments might better reflect their constituents.

Frank Zappa: That's a reasonable assumption, if it were all going to work fairly. But I think that behind each breakaway movement is a breakaway demagogue who will set up his breakaway demagogue government. In many breakaway countries the governments now say, on paper, that you are free to be an entrepreneur. Well, that's great if you have cash to invest. But who has the cash? The party bosses who were there before are the new entrepreneurs. Guys who got thrown out of office wound up buying restaurants, hotels or factories. The drones who were wandering around the streets are still wandering, even though they have the right to be entrepreneurs. That's certainly true in Russia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. I haven't been to Poland yet.

Playboy: Was it surprising that you had fans behind the iron curtain?

Frank Zappa: Yeah, and lots of people who didn't like me - like the secret police.

Playboy: What did the secret police have against you?

Frank Zappa: In Prague, I was told that the biggest enemies of the Communist Czech state were Jimmy Carter and me. A student I met said that he was arrested by the secret police and beaten. They said they were going to beat the Zappa music out of him.

Playboy: How did Czechs know about your music?

Frank Zappa: It had been slipping in there since 1966 or 1967. The first album that was really popular there was Absolutely Free, the one with Plastic People on it. In Moscow, I was in the Ministry of Culture and met a young guy with a big Communist pin on his chest who said that he had earned his way through school bootlegging my tapes in from Yugoslavia.

Playboy: Were you glued to your TV set when the Berlin Wall came down and the rest of the U.S.S.R. unraveled?

Frank Zappa: Yeah, and I was thrilled, even though I'm pretty disappointed by what's happened since then. See, in that part of the world, the average guy in the street is like the average guy in the street anyplace else. He has the same desires. He wants something to eat, a roof over his head. He doesn't want to freeze, he wants to get laid, he wants to have a long and happy life reasonably free of pain. If he has a trade or a craft, he wants to be able to do his job. Unfortunately, these normal people are represented by bad people, just like here. But they want what we want. The average guy there is just like us, Joe Six-pack, except his beer tastes better.

Playboy: How do you feel about America's reaction to the changes in the former Soviet Union?

Frank Zappa: It's underwhelming. I would call it reactionary.

Playboy: What would you have the United States do?

Frank Zappa: If you really believed that the major threat to the universe was communism, the minute you saw it crumbling, wouldn't you do everything you could to make sure it never came back? To make sure that the people in that part of the world have a chance to participate in something better, so they aren't tempted to vote communism back in? That's a real danger in these countries. Now that they have free elections, so long as there is any remnant of a Communist Party, even if they call it something else, it could easily be voted back in because their economy is in such bad shape. They don't need a tank or a gun to regain control, they just need a ballot box.

Playboy: You planned to become involved in Russian businesses. What happened to the company you founded to do it?

Frank Zappa: Since I got sick, nothing happened. The idea was that there are a lot of small-to medium-sized U.S. companies that would like to have access to raw materials, patents, processes or other things they don't know about that exist in Russia or other countries. A nation that plays chess that well, and where you can still get 15,000 people to show up to hear somebody read poetry, has something going for, it. There's a brain at work there. I suspect that because of their economic condition they've found was to use string, chewing gum, reprocessed turnips - whatever they use - to do things in a way that we haven't thought of. Somebody needs to go snooping around to find out what's there and try to put those people together with American investors. It would help both countries. That's what I was going to do. It was a better solution than having the Russian scientists flock out of there to get jobs making weapons for the Arabs or the Indians.

Playboy: Sometimes you sound like a political candidate. How serious was your plan to run for president?

Frank Zappa: I wanted to do it. It's a bit hard to mount a campaign if you have cancer and don't feel well.

Playboy: If you hadn't been ill, would you have run?

Frank Zappa: Yeah. And it's a shame. We got calls and mail throughout the election. Squadrons of volunteers called.

Playboy: If you had run and won, what would President Zappa have done?

Frank Zappa: I would have started by dismantling the government. At least I would have presented the idea to the voters.

Playboy: Nothing too revolutionary?

Frank Zappa: In the Beltway and places that have large federal payrolls, the idea wouldn't be too popular, but in other places people would think it's great. One strong selling point is that you could do away with federal income taxes, or at least reduce them to a point that people would have something left at the end of the week. In the end, I think people, in their enlightened self-interest, would consider voting for that.

Playboy: If you dismantled the government, you'd put yourself out of a job.

Frank Zappa: No, because most reasonable people would agree that we need roads, for instance, and water you can drink and breathable air. Most people realize that there has to be some coordinated infrastructure and a national offense that is commensurate with whatever threat you feel from other countries.

Playboy: National offense?

Frank Zappa: I mean - well, what we have now is national offense. We should have national defense.

Playboy: You've said that you're not a peacenik.

Frank Zappa: Human nature and human stupidity often breed violence. When violence escalates to an international confrontation, you should be able to protect yourself. On the other hand, to plan for it - like we did throughout the Cold War - based on badly handled intelligence estimates of the threat to our national security is just stupid. Most intelligence estimates indicated that the Soviet couldn't do shit to us, but they were ignored order to maintain the level of employment and financial activity in the defense industry.

Playboy: Do you think that our recent election was irrelevant?

Frank Zappa: Yes, because America has to be completely restructured. We have to question every institution in terms of efficiency. I'm serious about abandoning the federal system.

Playboy: Is there any way that it's likely to happen?

Frank Zappa: Not this week, but I wish people would at least consider it. They think, There it is, we're stuck with it, it will go on forever. It doesn't have to. The Soviet Union didn't go on forever. If you want reform, the people who've been doing a bad job have to get fired. They have to go back to the used-car lot from where they came.

Playboy: Yet you've always pushed people to vote. Why bother?

Frank Zappa: Even if you don't like the candidates, there are issues that affect your life. Bond issues affect your pocketbook. That's the only real reason for voting. As far as the rest of government is concerned, forget it. The amount of overstaffing, overlapping, wasted energy and pompous pseudograndeur is science fiction. All of it is supported by this universe of political talk shows. CNN is one of the worst offenders on the planet. It maintains the fiction of the theoretical value of the thoughts and words of these inferior human specimens who manage to become Beltway insiders.

Playboy: Do you want to name names?

Frank Zappa: Do we need to see John Sununu as a talk-show guy? Or, on CNBC, Gordon Liddy or Oliver North? Let's face it: Some of these people are criminals. Why do we need to be presented with them as voices of authority whose opinions are something we should even waste our time with? Why?

Playboy: What do you think is behind it?

Frank Zappa: It's a whole program designed to modify behavior and modify thinking on a national level. They're happy to take the slings and arrows of the outraged minority in order to keep these voices of stupidity in your face all the time. It's all propaganda.

Playboy: How planned is it?

Frank Zappa: Completely. It is the residue of the domestic-diplomacy department that Reagan established during the Irancontra days. The idea was to control the news. From that office, a guy would make phone calls and certain journalists would get fired and news stories would get changed. Then it was the obvious control of the media we saw during the Gulf war.

Playboy: So you maintain that the media are no more than pawns?

Frank Zappa: The media are part of the package. You think really liberal people own those outlets? I don't. Even if they were Democrats, it wouldn't mean anything, because who can tell the difference between those two criminal classes?

Playboy: it sounds as if you are as cynical as ever.

Frank Zappa: It's hard not to be.

Playboy: Yet you feel it's worthwhile to raise some hell?

Frank Zappa: Pessimism and the natural instinct to raise hell are not mutually exclusive. Raising hell comes naturally to me. Still, I am not optimistic about what will happen to this country unless some radical change is made. It's going to take more than just firing a few bad guys.

Playboy: You were involved in politics firsthand when you tried to stop record companies from being forced to label records, much like movies are rated. Your opponents got their way. Has it had any impact?

Frank Zappa: A chilling impact.

Playboy: How? Don't you think that the warning stickers help sales? Kids want stuff with bad words.

Frank Zappa: But groups that are getting signed to recording contracts are being told what they can and cannot sing.

Playboy: That doesn't ring true, It seems that there is less censorship than ever. "Motherfucker" is almost requisite to rap songs. in heavy metal, Axl Rose screams, "Suck my fucking dick!" What's being censored?

Frank Zappa: If it's some guy selling thirty million records, the record company isn't going in with scissors. But the new bands just signing up have no leverage. They do what they are told.

Playboy: Many of the rap artists aren't selling millions.

Frank Zappa: But they're on shaky ground. Time Warner was ready to succumb to the protests over Cop Killer before Ice-T backed off. It's all hanging on a cliff, ready to go over. More frightening is the Child Protection Act. It holds people responsible if they in any way influence someone to commit a crime. The record companies are worried.

Playboy: You obviously don't believe songs can make people kill or rape or commit suicide.

Frank Zappa: There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something, we'd all love one another. Violence in songs functions the same way violence in movies does. In Lethal Weapon, people get blown up, mashed and mutilated. The people in the audience would never do anything like that.

Playboy: Have you been censored?

Frank Zappa: No. I do what I want to do, though there are certain socially retarded areas where my records are not to be seen. That's one of the reasons we have a mail-order business. There's this ludicrous fear of the power of music manifesting itself in the corruption of the youth of America. It's idiotic. But censorship, in effect, is turning the United States into a police state, as far as ideas go. It's not about children learning dirty words. It's about putting a lid on ideas. Whatever they don't want to confront, whether it's about sex or racism or anything else, is what they want to censor. One way to shut off the avenues of dissent is to put a lid on rock and roll. Then come books and everything else. But censorship is communism. Why are we buying into communist suppression at a time when everybody else in the world has realized that it doesn't work? The people who want to censor do not care about saving your children. They care about one thing - getting reelected. Let's face it, folks: Politicians in the United States are the scum of the earth. We have to go after them individually because they're varmints. The legislation they are passing, piece by piece, converts America into a police state. The mentality that has existed since Reagan and Bush is that the population of the United States has to be subjugated by law.

Playboy: Did the record industry fight the labeling hard enough?

Frank Zappa: The record companies are interested in one thing, which is making a profit. If Cop Killer sells millions of records, they are happy about it. They are not happy when police officers' pension funds sell their Time Warner stock and people boycott Time magazine.

Playboy: It must have been strange for you when Al Gore was nominated as vice president.

Frank Zappa: They felt it was a good way to counteract the Dan Quayle-family values nonsense. But why would anybody need to counteract Dan Quayle?

Playboy: They obviously didn't care about your vote - or the vote of the people concerned about Tipper's ratings campaign.

Frank Zappa: Not necessarily. Deep in their hearts, those politicos think they're really cagey strategists. They figured they'd get a certain amount of column inches because of Tipper. It was advertising they didn't have to buy.

Playboy: Your song Trouble Coming Every Day, about the Watts riots, could have been written about the more recent L.A. upheaval.

Frank Zappa: The only part that wasn't apropos was the woman driver getting machine-gunned in half because she drove through a stop sign.

Playboy: What were you doing during the riots?

Frank Zappa: I taped them from top to bottom while flipping through the channels. I got it from every angle that I could, some amazing stuff, things that weren't reported nationally.

Playboy: For instance?

Frank Zappa: Shots of a group of soldiers in a barracks in Orange County wearing Desert Storm nerve-gas clothing. Now either the Crips and Bloods had nerve gas or there were some plans of dealing sternly with the rioters.

Playboy: What did you do with the recordings?

Frank Zappa: When I performed in Germany, we had television sets in the bar during intermission showing the finest of American cultural entertainment. On one set, nonstop riot. On another, nonstop televangelists. On another, C-SPAN. On another, Desert Storm. You got to have your light beer and watch the American media at its finest.

Playboy: You said that you couldn't do some things you wanted to - including running for president - because of your illness. How else has cancer affected your life?

Frank Zappa: The minute somebody tells you you have cancer, your life changes dramatically, whether you beat it or you don't. It's like you have a fucking brand put on you. As far as the American medical profession goes, you're just meat. It complicates your life because you have to fight for your life every single day, besides doing your shit. To do the music is complicated enough, but to think of doing things that involve travel and other kinds of physical stress is too much. Whatever medication you take fucks you up, too.

Playboy: Are you currently taking any medication?

Frank Zappa: I'm forty pounds overweight because the stuff that I'm taking fills me up with water. I'm a walking balloon. You can't just take an Advil or a Nuprin and forget about it. It's a fucking battle.

Playboy: Can you travel, or do you have to stay close to your doctors?

Frank Zappa: Well, you do have to be tested periodically, every couple of months. You want to be close to a doctor you trust. You wouldn't want to go to a Russian hospital. That could put you out of business in a big hurry. A friend of mine was in an auto accident there and wound up in a Russian hospital. They had no anesthesia and no disposable syringes. As the doctor was setting her leg without anesthesia, he said, "Nobody ever died from pain."

Playboy: How long have you known about your cancer?

Frank Zappa: I found out about it in the spring of 1990.

Playboy: It hit out of the blue?

Frank Zappa: I'd been feeling sick for a number of years, but nobody diagnosed it. Then I got really ill and had to go to the hospital in an emergency. While I was in there, they did some tests and found out it had been there for anywhere from eight to ten years, growing undetected by any of my previous doctors. By the time they found it, it was inoperable.

Playboy: How about other treatments?

Frank Zappa: I went through radiation and that fucked me up pretty good. They were supposed to give me twelve shots of that, but I got to number eleven and I was so sick that I said I couldn't go back.

Playboy: Was it helping,

Frank Zappa: I don't want to dwell on all the morbid details of what happened to me, but I'll summarize it. When I went into the hospital, the cancer had grown to where I could no longer take a piss. In order for me just to survive, they had no poke a hole in my bladder. I spent more than a year with a hose coming out of my bladder and a bag tied to my leg. That'll keep you from traveling. The result of the radiation was that the tumor was shrunken to the point where I could get rid of the bag and could piss again, but there were bad side effects. I don't want to talk about it. It's not a picnic.

Playboy: It seems that you can still do a lot of the things you care about-composing, at least.

Frank Zappa: Some days you can do more of it than others. Part of the problem is that it hurts to sit some days, and this work is done sitting at a computer terminal. I used to be able to work sixteen, eighteen hours a day and just get up from my chair and go to sleep and go back to work, and it was fine. But some days I can't work at all. Some days I can work two hours. Some days I can work ten.

Playboy: How does it affect your life with your family?

Frank Zappa: Well, it's not a secret around here. They're very nice to me. They take care of me.

Playboy: Is it an emotional roller coaster for you?

Frank Zappa: The emotional aspect is more influenced by the drugs than it is by the idea that you're sick. What can you do? People get sick. Sometimes they can fix it and sometimes they can't. But the chemicals that they give you to treat it take a toll. The week before last I found myself in the hospital for three days riddled with morphine. That was definitely an experience I don't want to repeat. When I got out, it took almost ten days to get the residue of all the drugs they'd given me out of my body.

Playboy: At a certain point it must be confusing about what's making you sick, the drugs or the disease.

Frank Zappa: It'll really turn you around. It's difficult if you are the boss of a company, even a little company like mine, and you have to make decisions about what's going on and you can't trust your own decisions because you don't know, chemically, what's happening. It's also difficult not to know how you're going to be one day to the next. The only reason I agreed to do this interview at this time was I thought I was reasonably clear enough to have a conversation. That's debilitating. If you can't trust your own judgment, that's really hard. When you're writing music, every note you put down is a judgment call.

Playboy: Weve been talking forr hours and yet you seem tireless.

Frank Zappa: You got me on a good day. I mean, tomorrow I could be flat on my back in bed. So you get to be very time-budget conscious. Certain things are time-consuming and the time spent doing them is productive. Other things are time-consuming and it's like being hijacked. I have a low tolerance for wasting time. I try not to be irritable about it, but it's my main concern. I'm trying to live my life the same way that I lived it before, without indulging in any of the things that would waste time.

Playboy: Some people would retire - go to live their life out on some beach.

Frank Zappa: Not me. I'm less inclined to travel, less inclined to leave the house for any reason, just because I happen to like my life in this place, and I like my family.

Playboy: How does it influence the music you're writing now?

Frank Zappa: I don't think it does now, though it did for a while. It's so uncomfortable to work, you may be tempted to say that something's done when it's not done. You physically can't stand to work on it anymore. During one period, I was working on some pieces that I let go before their time. Since they hadn't been released yet, as I gradually felt better, I went back and worked on them to make sure that the level of competence was maintained.

Playboy: But hasn't it affected the mood of the music;

Frank Zappa: No, I haven't started writing sad music. Time is the thing. Time is everything. How to spend time. We all want something to do with our minds. The choices are a major human preoccupation. The people who find the easiest solutions, like beer and football, might be happier if they had just a little dimension to their lives. But most people, once they achieve a certain level of gratification for time disposal, don't go beyond it. They already know how good they're going to feel when a football game comes on, and they have their beer. They don't want to know beyond that. They build a life around it. It's been the same for me since I got cancer as it was before. I have to look way beyond the football game and the can of beer. Once I've gone out there and dabbled on that fringe, I feel as if I may as well bring some artifacts back, in case anybody else is interested. That's what I do. I come back and go, "Here it is. This is what happened after the football game."

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

interview taken from this site

pict taken from this site

Composer Frank Zappa left for his final tour just before 6:00 pm on Saturday, December 4, 1993.

the waking

2011-07-05T00:30:00.000-07:00

i wake to sleep, and take my waking slow
i feel my fate in what i cannot fear
i learn by going where i have to go

we think by feeling, what is there to know?
i hear my being dance from ear to ear
i wake to sleep, and take my waking slow

of those so close beside me, which are you
god bless the ground! i shall walk softly there
and learn by going where i have to go

light takes the tree, but who can tell us how?
the lowly worm climbs up a winding stair
i wake to sleep, and take my waking slow

great nature has another thing to do
to you and me, so take the lively air
and, lovely, learn by going where to go

this shaking keeps me steady, i should know
what falls away is always. and is near
i wake to sleep, and take my waking slow
i learn by going where i have to go

for the people of Japan, Ganbareeee!!!

2011-03-17T03:22:00.000-07:00

It's devastating, but people of Japan, please be strong!!!
translation: "Ganbare!!To everyone affected in the disaster, it is really very difficult, but please don’t give up and do your best! – Toriyama Akira“.
- Urasawa Naoki

farewell, mother, til we meet again

2011-02-25T08:24:00.000-08:00

I guess there's no escape on this one, only delays, no matter how I tried to look at it, I guess I am indebted to write, about my mother, for her, for the sakes of being her son.

And something in my mind tells me that this piece won't probably end in one sitting, so many years, so many beautiful memories, so many things to say.

on the night of December 28, 2010, approximately seven hours after I received my mother's text saying she's leaving Jakarta for two days, about a day and a half from our last encounter, my mother, 26 days after her 48th birthday, left this world, left us who love her greatly, forever.

it was shocking, as though we know that she's got a heart condition, it was her high blood pressure that took her life. the vein from her right to the brain popped, leaving signs of blood sipping out of the skin on her neck, ear and right temple.

she was smiling.

I guess parts of us wanted to think that she was smiling, that she didn't feel too much pain at the end, because we weren't there. it was as if the mighty God had cunningly deviced a scheme for her to be with us at the end, without us realizing it, and took her at the time when we're the most ignorant, when she was alone, miles away from us, and guess what, the scheme worked.

from fragments I tried to assemble my last memories of her, the two days we spent together, and all of them cornered me, leaving regrets and deep remorse. I wish I treated her better.

I was too emerged in my works, that my eyes were constantly on to the small blackberry screen. I wish I had looked at her face intensely, even for a brief moment, held her as long as I could like what I always do, which I didn't.

"let's go out and watch the rain together,"

and now, when it rains, it was as though God punished me for not doing that simple thing, a code for "let's talk, just you and me".

"show me that images you took at Bonnie's wedding"

and now every time I scavenge images of her, her beautiful pictures from the wedding, tears forced out. I should have shown her, how beautiful she was wearing that blue kebaya, how beautiful she is for us her children. but instead, the lazy me used it to start a useless lazy-bum-excuse quarrel.

if only we could grasp the deeper meaning behind everything.

I didn't think she was immortal, but I did think that she will always be around. and at the end -though most of us like to believe that she was much prepared- my head wanted to believe that she too thought that she will always be here.

I should be blamed, for thinking that some things can wait.

some things can't, and the expressions of love, mainly the actions of showing it, shouldn't be made second.

there's no logical explanation of why tears are formed when we're sad. some scientific explanations, digesting the chemical content of the liquid substance, did its best by reexplaining the question, because of emotion.

when I think of mom, my heart feels like exploding, my chest hurts, it feels as though I'm experiencing the after impact of a severe beating, and that it swells, and the body just can't contain it.

I don't know how anybody could deal with such situation, how are they coping, how could they manage to go on.

I miss my mom so much..

For the most time, my brain can't digest it, still waiting for daily calls that never comes. But when it can,

I can't remember how many times I found myself crying, uncontrollably, profusely in dark places, in one corner, on my desk, in front of my computer, on my bike, now..

which is ridiculous really, because an ocean of tears won't sail her back. I should have known that it didn't, it won't get any easier, the passing of time only confirms her absence.

I remember one afternoon several years back, moments before breaking the fast, my step dad was bringing a healthy food home, and mom looked at it and cried.

"I've been holding my appetite for a whole day and this is what I got for it?!"

she really cried, really up set, I was bewildered, I thought it was funny, sometimes after that I would joke about it, and we would laugh, but I still remember step dad's expressions, he looked at her in awe, feeling like he had done something terrible, like he had left a starving kid to a family of cannibals, mistakenly thinking they were nice.

mom loves great food, unhealthy one, and she always deters those who stack on land, saying they don't take land with them when they die. like most people, her stress release is getting a new bag, or a new pair of shoes. though when I offer to get one for her, she would chose something cheap, afraid of taking too much from her son, though at the end, she wouldn't wear them, probably just once, when I was around.

mom was funny, she was wonderful, more than everything she was home.

and her knowledge of things are astounding. I'm proud to say that whenever a quick knowledge of what's going on, updates are necessary, why people are protesting the president, what is the current situation after the eruption, whatever happen to the wife of the current Japanese emperor, is Garuda actually a bird, I can't remember one thing, one question that she couldn't answer.

she even did an interview for me once, with a neighbor who went to arab as maid. she should be doing my job.

on her last days with us though, she looked so tired, too tired. bags under her eyes, choosing to sleep at the sofa instead of the bed, and excessive walking, at the mall, at stupid places to have quality times with us.

it was as if her body couldn't contain it any longer, couldn't compete with her willpower of spending the most time with us her kids, her grand children, she was always wanted to do something.

it's almost as if her body tricked her, pushing itself to do things that are usually fall beyond its capacity.

the living parts of a dear community, forming a massive engine that is my mother's force to live, knew their time was near, so in a giant gathering, they looked at each other, with eyes filled with meaningful expressions, holding each other, with their wise leader saying at the end.

"let's make this final race a race worthy of remembrance. if this should end, we will make such an end.."

this reminds me so much of my grandmother, whom my mother loved dearly, whose death brought two swollen eyes on my mother's face for weeks.

thoughts about mom is not just about possibilities. we couldn't help it. questions are left unasked, unanswered, planned trips are left unattended, and a big chunk of love is left unexpressed.

she was proud of us, she was happy with the life we chose, she was glad that things turn out okay, but there were things we wished to accomplish on her behalf, because we know it will make her proud.

in fact most of the things in my life, things I've done and plan to do, are based on that very reason.

mother was everything, she was the sun, with us constantly revolving around her, fixed on our trajectory, in a perpetual motion, which is the nature of things for us. even now when she's gone, we're still revolving, with the memories of her as our anchor, the center of our life's gravity.

but death is a part of what life's got to offer, it's something the dalai lama should say, though he did say that life should be easier once we realize that death is a natural part of life.

if we knew, of such secrets written in God's book called fate. if she happen to read this, as she would normally try to, walking half a mile to the nearest place with an internet connection just to see her son on youtube. if in anyway possible she could see us, here with us, she would know that the love we feel, the grateful feelings of her everyday existence in our life, the pride of being her son, the joy of her company, that unique feeling of fulfillment seeing her familiar laughter drenched in bright June sky, our admiration in the way she carried herself, how she glide, her simplicity that brighten the dreary skies in rainy days, she would understand

that there's never a condition for our love, forever we are her children, and forever she claims the throne in our heart.

"we will meet again, but until then, we will celebrate your life, every day, knitting our own scape of you into full."

"each path we took in that race is worthy of remembrance, and the long hard race that we got through makes us victors."

here, with what's left,
your mother loving child

Farewell, Satou-sama

2010-12-10T03:59:00.000-08:00

Copy pasted from a translation by Makiko Itoh, thanks for translating and sharing this with the world, I am forever indebted.. -I tried leaving comment on your website but seem unable to find the comment button-

for everyone else, this document is Satoshi Kon's last words before his passing..

Sayonara (Goodbye)

How could I forget, May 18th of this year.

I received the following pronouncement from a cardiovascular doctor at Musashino Red Cross Hospital.

"It's the latter stages of pancreatic cancer. It's metastasized to several bones. You have at the most half a year left to live."

My wife and I listened together. It was a fate so unexpected and untenable, that the two of us together could barely take it.

I used to honestly think that "I can't help it if I die any day." Still, it was so sudden.

To be sure, there were some signs. 2 to 3 months before that I'd had strong pains in several places on my back and in the joints of my legs; I'd lost strength in my right leg and found it hard to walk, and I'd been going to an acupuncturist and a chiropractor, but I wasn't getting any better. So after having been examined in an MRI and a PET-CT and such advanced machinery, came the sudden pronouncement of the time I had left.

It was as if death had positioned itself right behind me before I knew it, and there was nothing I could do.

After the pronouncement, my wife and I researched ways to prolong my life. It was literally a life or death situation. We received the support of staunch frends and strong allies. I rejected anti-cancer medication, and tried to live with a view of the world slightly different from the norm. The fact that I rejected what was "expected (normal)" seemed to me to be very much like me.

I've never really felt that I belonged with the majority. It was the same for medical care, as with anything else. "Why not try to keep living according to my own principles!" However, as is the case when I'm trying to create a work [a film], ones willpower alone didn't do the job. The illness kept progressing day by day.

On the other hand, as a member of society, I do accept at least half of what society in general holds to be right. I do pay taxes. I'm far from being an upstanding citizen, but I am a full member of Japanese society. So, aside from the things I needed to do to prolong my life from my own point of view, I also attempted to do all the things necessary to "be ready to die properly". I don't think I managed to do it properly though. (But) one of the things I did was, with the cooperation of 2 friends that I could trust, set up a company to take care of things like the measly number of copyrights that I hold. Another thing that I did was, to insure that my wife would take over any modest assets that I had smoothly by writing a will. Of course, I didn't think there would be any fighting over my legacy or anything, but I wanted to make sure that my wife, who would remain behind in this world, would have nothing to worry about - and besides, I wanted to remove any anxiety from myself, the one who was going to take a little hop over there, before I had to leave.

The paperwork and research necessary for these tasks, which neither my wife nor I were good at doing, were taken care of speedily by wonderful friends. Later on, when I developed pneumonia and was at death's door, and put my final signature on the will, I thought that if I died right then and there, it couldn't be helped.

"Ah...I can die at last."

After all, I'd been brought by ambulance to the Musashino Red Cross Hospital 2 days before that; then brought back again to the same hospital by ambulance the day after. Even I had to be hospitalized and undergo many examinations. The result of those examinations: pneumonia, water in my chest, and when I asked the doctor [straight out], the answer I received was very businesslike, and I was in a way grateful for that.

"You may last 1 or 2 days...even if you survive this, you probably have until the end of the month."

As I listened, I thought "It's like he's telling me the weather forecast", but still the situation was dire.

That was July the 7th. It was a rather brutal Tanabata for sure.

So, I decided right there and then.

I wanted to die at home.

I might inconvenience the people around me, but I asked them to see how I could escape and go back home. [I was able to do so] thanks to my wife's efforts, the hospital's cooperation despite their position of having given up on me, the tremendous help of other medical facilities, and the coincidences that were so numerous that they only seemed to be gifts from heaven. I've never seen so many coincidences and events falling into place so neatly in real life, I could barely believe it. This wasn't Tokyo Godfathers after all.

While my wife was running around getting things in place for my escape, I was pleading with doctors "If I can go home for even half a day, there are things I can still do!", then waiting alone in the depressing hospital room for death. I was lonely, but this was what I was thinking.

"Maybe dying won't be so bad."

I didn't have any reasons for it, and perhaps I needed to think like that, but I was surprisingly calm and relaxed.

However, there was just one thought that was gnawing away at me.

"I don't want to die here..."

As I thought that, something moved out from the calendar on the wall and started to spread around the room.

"Oh dear, a line marching out from the calendar. My　hallucinations aren't at all original."

I had to smile at the fact at my professional instincts were working even at times like this, but in any case I was probably the nearest to the land of the dead that I'd ever been at that point. I really felt death very close to me. [But] with the help of many people, I miraculously escaped Musashino Red Cross and came back home, wrapped up in the land of the dead and bedsheets.

I should emphasize that I have no criticism of or hatred for Musashino Red Cross Hospital, so don't misconstrue me.

I just wanted to go home to my own house. The house where I live.

I was a little surprised that, when I was being carried into my living room, as a bonus, I experienced that deathbed experience everyone is familiar with of "looking down on your body being carried into the room from a place high above". I was looking down on myself and the scene around me from a position several meters above ground, through a wide-angle-ish lens and flash lighting. The square of the bed in the middle of the room seemed very large and prominent, and my sheet-wrapped body was being lowered into the middle of the square. None too gently it seemed, but I'm not complaining.

So, all I had to do was to wait for death in my own home.

However.

It seems that I was able to overcome the pneumonia.

Eh?

I did think like this, in a way.

"I didn't manage to die! (laugh)"

Afterwards, when I could think of nothing else but death, I thought that I did indeed die once then. In the back of my mind, the world "reborn" wavered several times.

Amazingly, after then my life-force was rejuvenated. From the bottom of my heart, I believe this is due to the people who helped me; first and foremost my wife, and my supportive friends, the doctors and nurses, and the care managers.

Now that my life-force had been restarted, I couldn't waste my time. I told myself that I'd been given an extra life, and that I had to spend it carefully. So I thought that I wanted to erase at least one of the irresponsibilities that I'd left behind in this world.

To be truthful, I'd only told the people closest to me about the cancer. I hadn't even told my parents. In particular, because of various work-related complications, I couldn't say anything (to people) even if I wanted to. I wanted to announce my cancer on the internet and report on my remaining life, but if Satoshi's death was scheduled, there might be some waves made, however small. For these reasons, I acted very irresponsibly to people clear to me. I am so sorry.

There were so many people that I wanted to see before I died, to say even one word of greeting to. Family and relatives, old friends and classmates from elementary and middle and high school, the mates I met in college, the people I met in the manga world, with whom I exchanged so much inspiration, the people in the anime world whose desks I sat next to, went drinking with, with whom I competed on on the same works, the mates with whom I shared good and bad times. The countless people I was able to know because of my position as a film director, the people who call themselves my fans not only in Japan but around the world, the friends I'd made via the web.

There are so many people that I want to see at least once (well there are some I don't want to see too), but if I see them I'm afraid that that the thought that "I can never see this person again" will take me over, and that I wouldn't be able to greet death gracefully. Even if I had recovered, I had very little life force left, and it took a lot of effort to see people. The more people wanted to see me, the harder it was for me to see them. What irony. In addition, my lower body was paralyzed due to the cancer spreading to my bones, and I was prone on my bed, and I didn't want people to see my emaciated body. I wanted most of the people I knew to remember me as the Satoshi that was full of life.

I'd like to use this space to apologize to my relatives, friends and acquaintances, for not telling you about my cancer, for my irresponsibility. Please understand that this was Satoshi's selfish desire. I mean, Satoshi Kon was "that kind of guy". When I envision your faces, I only have good memories and remember (your) great smiles. Everyone, thank you for all the truly great memories. I loved the world I lived in. Just the fact that I can think that makes me happy.

The many people that I met throughout my lifetime, whether they were positive or negative, have helped to shape the human being that is Satoshi Kon, and I am grateful for all of those encounters. Even if the end result is an early death in my mid 40s, I've accepted this as my own unique destiny. I've had so many positive things happen to me after all.

The thing I think about death now. "I can only say, it's too bad." Really.

However, even though I can let go of many of my irresponsible actions [by not telling people], I cannot help regretting two things. About my parents, and about Madhouse [founder] Maruyama-san.

Even though it was rather late, there was no choice but to come clean with the whole truth. I wanted to beg them for forgiveness.

As soon as I saw Maruyama-san's face when he came to see me at home, I couldn't stop the flow of tears or my feeling of shame. "I'm so sorry, for ending up like this..." Maruyama-san said nothing, and just shook his head and gripped both my hands. I was filled with thankfulness. Feelings of gratitude and joy, that I'd been lucky enough to work with this person, came over me like a landslide. It may be selfish, but I felt as though I had been forgiven in that instant.

My biggest regret is the film "Dreaming Machine". I'm worried not only about the film itself, but about the staff with whom I was able to work with on the film. After all, there's a strong possibility that the storyboards that were created with (our) blood, sweat and tears will never be seen. This is because Satoshi Kon put his arms around the original story, the script, the characters and the settings, the sketches, the music...every single image. Of course there are things that I shared with the animation director, the art director and other staff [members], but basically most of the work can only be understood by Satoshi Kon. It's easy to say that it was my fault for arranging things this way, but from my point of view I made every effort to share my vision with others. However, in my current state I can only feel deep remorse for my inadequacies in these areas. I am really sorry to all of the staff. However, I want them to understand, if only a little bit. Satoshi Kon was "that kind of guy", and, that's why he was able to make rather weird anime that was a bit different. I know this is a selfish excuse, but think of my cancer and please forgive me.

I haven't been idly waiting for death, even now I'm thinking with my weak brain of ways to let the work live even after I am gone. But they are all shallow ideas. When I told Maruyama-san about my concerns about "Dreaming Machine", he just said "Don't worry. We'll figure out something, so don't worry."

I wept.

I wept uncontrollably.

Even with my previous movies, I've been so irresponsible with the productions and the budgets, but I always had Maruyama-san figure it out for me in the end.

This time is no different. I really haven't changed.

I was able to talk to my heart's content with Maruyama-san. Thanks to this, I was able to feel, at least a little, that Satoshi Kon's talents and skills were of some value in our industry.

"I regret losing your talent. I wish that you were able to leave it for us."

If Madhouse's Maruyama-san says that, I can go to the netherworld with a little bit of self-pride after all. And of course, even without anyone else telling me this, I do feel regret that my weird visions and ability to draw things in minute detail will be lost, but that can't be helped. I am grateful from the bottom of my heart that Maruyama-san gave me the opportunity to show the world these things. Thank you, so very much. Satoshi Kon was happy as an animation director.

It was so heartbreaking to tell my parents.

I'd really intended to go up to Sapporo, where my parents live, while I was still able to, but my illness progressed so unexpectedly and annoyingly fast that I ended up calling them on the telephone from the hospital room as I was closest to death.

"I'm in the late stages of cancer and will die soon. I was so happy being born as a child to Father and Mother. Thank you."

They must have been devastated to hear this out of the blue, but I was certain I was going to die right then.

But then I came back home and survived the pneumonia. I made the big decision to see my parents. They wanted to see me too. But it was going to be so hard to see them, and I didn't have the will to. But I wanted to see my parents' faces one last time. I wanted to tell them how grateful I was that they brought me into this world.

I've been a happy person. Even though I must apologize to my wife, my parents and all the people that I love, that lived out my life a bit too faster than most.

My parents followed my selfish wishes, and came the next day from Sapporo to my house. I can never forget the first words out of my mother's mouth when she saw me lying there.

"I'm so sorry, for not bringing you into this world with a stronger body!"

I was completely speechless.

I could only spend a short time with my parents, but that was enough. I had felt that if I saw their faces, that it would be enough, and it really turned out that way.

Thank you, Father, Mother. I am so happy that I was born into this world as the child of the both of you. My heart is full of memories and gratitude. Happiness itself is important, but I am so grateful that you taught me to appreciate happiness. Thank you, so very much .

It's so disrespectful to to die before ones parents, but in the last 10 plus years, I've been able to do what I want as an anime director, achieve my goals, and get some good reviews. I do feel regret that my films didn't make a lot of money, but I think they got what they deserved. In these last 10 plus years in particular I've felt as though I've lived more intensively than other people, and I think that my parents understood what was in my heart.

Because of the visits by Maruyama-san and my parents, I feel as though I've taken a big burden off my shoulders.

Lastly, to my wife, about whom I worry the most, but who has been my support until the end.

Since that time-left pronouncement, we drowned ourselves in tears together so many times. Every day was brutal for both of us, physically and mentally. There are almost no words for it. But the reason why I was able to survive those difficult days was because of the words that you said to me right after we received the news.

"I'll be at your side [run with you] until the end."

True to those words, as though you were leaving my worries in the dust, you skillfully directed the demands and requests that came rushing towards us like a landslide, and quickly learned how to take care of your husband. I was so moved, watching you deal with things so efficiently.

"My wife is awesome."

No need to keep saying that now, you say? No no. You are even more awesome now than you ever were - I truly feel this. Even after I have died, I believe that you will send Satoshi Kon to the next world with grace. Ever since we got married, I was so wrapped up in "Work, work" that I was only able to spend some time at home after the cancer - such a shame.

But you stood close to me, you always understood that I needed to immerse myself in my work, that my talent was there. I was happy. Truly happy. During my life, and as I wait for death, I just can't express my gratitude to you enough. Thank you.

There are so many things, countless things, that I worry about, but everything needs an end. Lastly, to Doctor H who agreed to see me to the end in my home, even though it's something not done these days, and his wife and nurse, K-san, I would like to express my deep gratitude. Medical care in a private home is very inconvenient, but you patiently dealt with the numerous aches and pains that cancer brings on, and endeavores to make my time until the final goal called death be as comfortable as possible. I can't say how much you helped me. And you didn't just deal with this difficult and arrogant patient as if it were just your jobs, but communicated with me as human beings. I cannot say how much of a support you were to me, and how much you saved me. I was encouraged by your qualities as human beings several times. I am deeply deeply grateful.

And, this is really the last, but from shortly after I received that pronouncement in mid-May until now, I've been lucky to have the cooperation, help and mental support, both personally and in business, from 2 friends. My friend T, who has been a friend since high school and is a member of KON'Stone Inc, and producer H, I thank you both from the bottom of my heart. Thank you so much. It's hard for me with my measly vocabulary to express my gratitude adequately to you both. My wife and I have both received so much from you.

If you two hadn't been there for us, I am sure that I'd be anticipating death while looking at my wife here as she sits by my side with considerably more trepidation and worry. I am really in your debt.

And, if I may ask you for one more thing - could you help my wife send me over to the other side after my death? I'd be able to get on that flight with my mind at rest if you could do that for me. I ask this from my heart.

So, to everyone who stuck with me through this long document, thank you. With my heart full of gratitude for everything good in the world, I'll put down my pen.

Now excuse me, I have to go.

Satoshi Kon

happy belated birthday, Kurt Vonnegut

2010-11-12T09:32:00.001-08:00

from thisisnthappiness

of husband and wife and the generation that follows

2010-09-21T09:51:00.000-07:00

at such level of spirituality.. let me revise that.. at such level of spiritual enlightenment, followed by rapid heartbeats and the constantly ever changing background soundtrack playing continuously during the process, I stumbled..

and here at mediocre level of spirituality.. let me revise that.. at average level of mental enlightenment and carefree nature I write.

perplexing on the complex and perpetual flow of Naruto comic book, of the possible repetitive events preceded by a series of past events on human relation I reconnects.

on the seemingly inescapable fate, co started by something that the next generation should pay attention to, evaluate, and comprehend to innately do in conscience, I come up with points of husband and wife and the generation that follows

1. you can't force it
2. what should not be together should not be together
3. human like human should will gather all the best notion in their life to come up with the most logical explanation why things works and vice versa, that is of course in the absence of self righteousness
4. inescapable fate can be avoided with enough understanding that such thing can be avoided
5. these of course, should be followed by real actions preceded by thoughtful manners
6. and if things go wrong, it's never too late
7. try to understand as you equally wanted to be understood
8. you are never a victim

and finally
9. you might have done something terribly wrong with your decision, wishing to press control z, but let's face it, you might have only done something stupid.. and some stupid things are usually funny, in a way

:)

with this I decided to end my bachelorhood, and ask someone's daughter to be together with me till death do us part..

let's hope I'm only doing something stupid..

where it remains

2010-07-12T07:25:00.000-07:00

It was raining, and there she was standing. The wind was soft, and the lights falling on the sidewalks loomed over her umbrella. She was wearing a skirt with a bright yellow sunflower pattern. Her white shirt was wet. I noticed that she had cut her hair short, but the eyes behind the glasses were clear as always, as bright as the sun in the morning.

Bayu said he didn't want to sit with any girl and complained how annoying they'd get with their stupid colorful pens, bags, books and stuff. But I'd sit with her. I'd sit with her through all the subjects in the fourth grade if I had too, including math. I wished we went to the same school.

I get to see her once a week, every Sunday at the free traditional dance class provided by the local government in the city area, thirty minutes by bus from our school. Sunday, for me back then, was the best day of the week. Bayu would bring some home-made foods cooked by her mom, and I would get some bites, sometimes more. Dancing doesn't need shoes and my sandals were just two month old.

And I still remember the way she danced, moving quietly like the night. At 12 o'clock every Sunday her parents would come and pick her up and for two seconds, just two seconds, you got to see her smile. You got to see her run to the open car door. You got to see her go, disappear around the corner; an end to start another beginning, a week long of waiting for another dance class.

It was two o'clock and it was raining. She stood there with her umbrella. Bayu's mum had picked him up. I sat there as if waiting, pretending that someone would pick me up. But all I could see was her, standing there with her umbrella. The rain carried by the wind fell soft on the sidewalk.

I was a dull boy; sport was never my cup of tea. I though I was a good sketcher, coloring with crayons was a lot of fuss. My marks had fallen like dead soldiers in the Belgian war since the beginning of this term, but I didn't care.

Our dad had left us several months before, after a big fight with mom, he never returned. And for me, that's a good enough reason to stop studying all together, pretending to be some fucked up little kid instead of just a lazy little donkey.

My only source of entertainment was the rain, sometimes heavy and sometimes soft, that fell all afternoon. It was, after all, the rainy season and the smell of the wet soil, the fog in the mountain feet, the waving green trees at a distance from the window, they're begging for my attention.

To tell the truth, the fourth grade was not much of a fun than the fifth. It's funny that the class is actually a bit smaller, funny, because in a way we were getting bigger.

Bayu said that his friend Rudy knew her friend and that her name was Tanya. A weird name if you speak Bahasa. You asked her name and you get Tanya. I guessed that her parents loved to play tricks.

To describe her in color, she was a yellowish-white. A lot of yellowish-whites roam the city. The toy store on the fifth street has older yellowish-white and even yellowish parents, pale wrinkled creatures. But this yellowish-white was special, she shone. And Bayu was the blackest living skinny kid alive. I for sure was a caf* latte brown with some peanut specs covered in dust, but who cares? I certainly don't.

I once saw her without glasses on. She said she wanted to wash her face, and I, out of whatever it was, stole a way out of the class and followed her from a distance. And she removed her glasses, took the running water and washed her face. At exactly 4 meters away she looked at me, with her beautiful two eyes, directly at me. After what I thought was a hint of smile, she looked away, in the most elegant of ways. My heart melted in my knees, and that was the end of me.

But apparently not, because after three months of joining this God condemned dance class, I finally got the chance to talk to her. It was two o'clock and she was there, her friends already leaving. The rain was shimmering and there was no sign of a car arriving from any corner. "I'm going to say hi", I thought.

There's a big tree shading the main street 10 minutes before the dance hall. It was the biggest tree I've ever seen in my life. Bayu said that it was probably because we're so small and that everything else seemed bigger or taller or farther. That in five years it would just be a tree, nothing special.

Everything looked so big and amazing when we're kids, and when we grow up, things will start to get the way they are, making us bored, and people start killing themselves.

Tanya, with her tiny little fingers washing her face, was like that tree to me, and I'm going to leave it at that.

Bayu's friend Rudi said that his friend told him that Tanya lives in one of the houses behind the Empat Lima football field, that her parents were rich and that she's got a brother who's got the latest Nintendo. He said that his friend said that Tanya is good at Tetris. I was a genius at hide and seek, and with her apparently a master at Tetris, whatever Tetris was, we must be suited to each other.

And she's great at Gambyong, we could one day dance together. People would see us and say how great we are - Tanya and me.

So baring these things in mind I stood up. It was raining but what the hell, I'm wearing sandals anyway. Water dripped from branches above the gate opposing the hall and there she was, with her short hair waving and her ever-lively eyes.

I stood a meter away from her after crossing the wet street. There was no contact until, suddenly, I slipped.

"Heeh!!" she screamed, almost worried.

I wasn't a skater or a funambulist, but I did get myself a hole in my right thigh with a twelve centimeter twig two months before Christmas simply because I failed in my impersonation of Tarzan, falling from a ledge of a gutter and regretting the futile effort of clinging to a half rotten banana tree.

"I'm okay, thanks!" I thanked God for not letting me fall on my butt.

She laughed, it was contagious. I laughed too. That's it, I'm going to marry this girl and we're going to have lots of kids.

"You're Dhika right?"

She knew my name! How in the hell would she know me? Should I ask? I once asked my mother to change the name to Agus, because I had two friends who were Agus and they're both stinking rich, but apparently 27 people in our school were Agus and I had to stick to the quota. Anyways, yes, I'm Dhika.

"Yeah, you're Tanya right?"

"Tanya? No! I'm Mei Ling"

Darn that kid named Rudi. My friend Cahyo had an uncle named Rudi and we once caught him ripping a page from a Dragon Ball manga to wipe his nose. Never trust anyone named Rudi, that's a consensus we made, I can't believe I forgot about it.

"Mei Ling? I was born in May too!"

"That's a Chinese name you stupid," she laughed.

Never before did someone call me stupid and make me happy at the same time. What she did to me was way crazier than Santet, I felt pins and needles in my stomach, sand in my knees, and I laughed like a stupid cow.

I was soaking wet, and as the rain got heavier, I stepped closer under her umbrella. The skin of our hand touched and I felt my heart beat faster by the second - and then her parent's car appeared.

She said goodbye and disappeared behind the closed door. Time stood still but the rain kept falling. The sky was grey but my heart was blooming, it was going to be a long week.

It was the last time I ever saw her. A teacher told Rudi - whom Bayu and I vowed never to trust again - and he told his friend and that friend told us that she had moved to Jakarta with the rest of her family. Though I can see her smiling face every time I closed my eyes, time passed, and she slowly faded away.

...

Adam is calling, started with easy talk about last night's stupid incident and ended with another blind date to set up. What is so wrong with a 29 year old single guy? Absolutely nothing!

"You're going to like her. She's a friend of my wife and she's fun. Her name is Mei Ling," he said on the speaker-phone.

"Okaaaay, seven o'clock tomorrow at the usual cinema," I said uninterested, walking back to the living room.

"Mei Ling huh? She couldn't be born in May, could she?" asked John.

"That's a Chinese name you stupid," I replied.

----------------------------------
the short story was published on The Jakarta Post, Sunday 05/17/2009, I hope you guys like it :)

27

2010-07-02T01:09:00.000-07:00

27 years of being a sloppy guy, but a mother loving child, a food mongering bastard, but an easy to please bloke, though I have achieved so much, I have achieved so little. whatever happen I'm happy, and if that isn't nice I dunno what is, and birthday is really what it's all about..

well done me :)

fast forward to yesterday

2010-06-24T10:26:00.000-07:00

leave out one decision
and return to tomorrow

but things inevitably get worse
century old science is accounted for
in a way, your decision valid today
and not forever during the span of time

watch the sun goes down..

the waiting

2010-06-24T10:02:00.000-07:00

on a singular mind breathe envy
and gap of ocean pride screams singularity
massive destruction to individuals
at the same time repetitively

and these drag onto eternity
with escape gate points to nothing but the sky

in your voiceless dignity
no mistake could stain
in your safely kept self righteous
logic is profanity

and these drag onto eternity
with escape route buried
six feet under

this is your life

2010-06-24T00:00:00.000-07:00

after about half a dozen chemo, DIO, the DIO, passed away..

this is my tribute post, may god, if there is any, take him by his side, he should know better how DIO has touched people's life, save them from a damaging possible end, and this is not an overrated statement..

who cares what came before
we were only starlight
one day, then nevermore
because we're whispers in the wind

once upon a time
the world was never blind
like we are

right now it seems
you're only dreams and shadows
if wishes could be eagles how you'd fly

this is your life
this is your time
what if the flame won't last forever
this is your here
this is your now
let it be magical

who cares what came before
we're only starlight

once upon the time
all the world was blind
like we are

this is your life
this is your time
look at your world
this is your life

rest in peace Ronnie James Dio, the world will feel a bit odd without you..

A stupid death

2010-06-21T08:29:00.000-07:00

Pain was real, and so was sadness. And happiness was a role play in his mind, begins with a smile and ended with a smile. But I don’t think he feel any of those.

“I befriended him for ages. And still, I have absolutely no idea what goes through his mind,” said Jono about Adry.

Adry, the guy who killed himself last week in his boarding house, was said to be the average usual guy, who loves playing trumpet in the park and drinking beer late at nights with his circle of friends.

Toby recalled they were once found themselves in a hangover state in front of a Circle K in one area in Bandung at eleven A.M., because they were too drunk to find their way home the morning before. All they did were buying beers, bottles of beers, until they’re running out of money. He too was spotted at Adry’s funeral.

His mom cried like a wailing wolf. His dad stood silent beside her.

Thomas, another friend, told me that Adry hated his job, a translator in a small firm in Jakarta. At least it pays enough, he recalled, enough to buy comic books and action figures stacked in the walls of his room.

There were no flies, nor insects. When the cop finally found him two days after his time of death in his room, forcing the door open with a big steel block, his body had already bumpy. He slit his left hand artery opened with a cutter. There were no notes, no recorded message found.

His clothes were piling up like they’ve always been there for months, drawn in a pool of blood that was flowing from his open wound. The room was dusty and the closet doors were open. Cigarette butts were stomped in a bowl turned ashtray beside him, and plastic bags were scattering everywhere.

His MP3 player was charged and hooked up to a computer speaker. It continuously played Counting Crow’s Color Blind.

It was apparent that he drugged himself before the effort. A bottle of sleeping pills were found on the side of his bed, empty, with all the pills gone.

He doesn’t seem to have a motive, a simple 26 year old guy with no record of violence, crime or breakdowns who happened to be found dead in his boarding house.

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

But after a month of his death a journal was found, with the last pages of it being the saddest thing I’ve ever read.

“I have come to a decision to end my life,” he started.

“There’s nothing wrong with it yet. I know I can find some reasons latter, but the only thing I could think of now is death.”

On the next page was a picture of a T-shirt, written “I chose death” and an edgy illustration of a chopped off head.

“I came across good people like fairytales, helpful people, but in their minds I know they’re insincere. I know they hate their life,” he wrote on a page dated March 25, a week before his death.

“The Ritz is 250 meters tall. Kempinski is quite tall, but the security is tough, though jumping from it would certainly be a gag, or the TVRI tower? What about the boarding house?” he wrote on a page dated March 27, presumably figuring out that the best way to end his life is by jumping from a high building somewhere.

After a space he wrote, “I could try mixing detergent with Wipol, but I guess it would be painful. Drowning sucks, suffocating is definitely not the best way to do it.”

“I feel nothing. I feel like there’s nothing left for me in this world. I don’t feel like flying or escaping. I don’t think that any of those will get me somewhere. I don’t see anything anymore in the mirror. I think this is the end.” He wrote on a page dated March 31.

He got three calls that day, one from his mom who’s apparently a frequent caller, and two from his girlfriend which according to her were smooth calls, with no hints of a depression.

The girlfriend, as Adry once put it, was a mix between a party queen and a bitch. “There’s the possibility that she’s the town’s bike everybody rides, with the only one who didn’t know was me,” he once said, laughing after seven cans of beer.

“For us his friends, it would be a lie to say that she wasn’t a lot of fun. It does seem that she was always there with him every time and they have always had a good laugh, but I guess we didn’t know it that much,” said Toby.

She was present at the funeral.

When Adry finished high school in 2011, he decided to go to Padjajaran University, Bandung, taking Japanese literature. That’s where we met. He’s a smart kid with peculiarly no ambition whatsoever.

His goal was “to get out of this place.”

But he was a lot of fun, and I was in search of something out of the ordinary. I proclaimed myself as the guy who liked to do crazy stuff and he’s got absolutely nothing against it, we were inseparable throughout those four years of torments and hard works.

I left for Japan in 2015 and we lost contact. And now, four years later, I found him dead.

“Would it make any different if the sun was grey, or if everybody else in this world starts to make some sense?” he wrote on the last page of the book, dated April 10.

“I wish I have a point to this end. I’m just a selfish bastard my whole life after all. I wish I’m killing myself for a better good, for a better reason. But I feel them as abstract as the action itself. I refused to be here or there, being forced into a condition without certainty of what to feel, how to react, what to expect. The world is stale and it keeps turning like an idiot.”

“I don’t expect to go to heaven, nor do I fear of going to hell. I don’t expect to see angels taking me with their wings. I do not wish to remember, or to born a new man. I do not wish to know, I really don’t care. Like a bad movie, I want this to end and fall into a deep slumber, the sweet release of death. The sun might shine. The ocean might continue making that sound and the rest of the universe might expand.”

His final words were “live and let die...” They were on the corner page, and there’s nothing afterwards.

I didn’t know why he killed himself even now. Or where did he go every Tuesday night from eight to ten P.M. for two years throughout college. The more I realize it; the more I think that I really don’t know him after all. All I knew was that he was a good friend.

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

Several weeks later I received a call telling me that Adry had joined an insurance program four months before his death, a program that says an amount of money will be given to a pre-decided beneficiaries if he died, dead because of whatever cause, including some clausal that indirectly pointed suicide as the cause of death.

Written in his contract, 70 percent of the money will go to his mother, and the rest of it will go to Greenpeace.

To tell the truth, I think that was the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. I wasn’t laughing hearing the news, I thought of laughing my ass off, but I couldn’t. And I wasn’t crying either. It was stupid, but it wasn’t funny either.

It was bitter, it was a waste of life and I feel pity for that guy. A stupid death.

bagaimana menulis essay untuk beasiswa yang tepat

2010-06-21T07:53:00.000-07:00

jika judul diatas adalah pertanyaan, maka saya sebagai orang yang sudah lebih dari tujuh kali lamaran beasiswa nya ditolak sangatlah buta tentang penulisan essay, meski iya memang saya bekerja sebagai penulis dan diwajibkan menulis setidaknya dua artikel setiap hari, pendek maupun panjang.

akan tetapi saya berterimakasih pada MIT dan murid muridnya yang pintar, kemudian pihak militer amrik yang menyempurnakan arpanet dan pak Al Gore yang alhamdulilah punya visi dan duit untuk membiayai pengembangan internet.

saya juga berterimakasih pada dua orang yang secara tidak langsung merupakan bagian penting hidup kita tiap harinya saat ini, Larry Page dan Sergey Brin, yang dengan keisengan mereka membuat saya dapat menemukan beberapa sumber yang memberi gambaran bagaimana sebaiknya menulis essay itu.

berikut sumber dari essayinfo.com

Scholarship Essay

Scholarship essays vary dramatically in subject. However, most of them require a recounting of personal experience. These tips will be more helpful for writing personal essays, like for the National Merit Scholarship, than for writing academic essays.

The most important aspect of your scholarship essay is the subject matter. You should expect to devote about 1-2 weeks simply to brainstorming ideas. To begin brainstorming subject ideas consider the following points. From brainstorming, you may find a subject you had not considered at first.

* What are your major accomplishments, and why do you consider them accomplishments? Do not limit yourself to accomplishments you have been formally recognized for since the most interesting essays often are based on accomplishments that may have been trite at the time but become crucial when placed in the context of your life. This is especially true if the scholarship committee receives a list of your credentials anyway.

* Does any attribute, quality, or skill distinguish you from everyone else? How did you develop this attribute?

* Consider your favorite books, movies, works of art, etc. Have these influenced your life in a meaningful way? Why are they your favorites?

* What was the most difficult time in your life, and why? How did your perspective on life change as a result of the difficulty?

* Have you ever struggled mightily for something and succeeded? What made you successful?

* Have you ever struggled mightily for something and failed? How did you respond?

* Of everything in the world, what would you most like to be doing right now? Where would you most like to be? Who, of everyone living and dead, would you most like to be with? These questions should help you realize what you love most.

* Have you experienced a moment of epiphany, as if your eyes were opened to something you were previously blind to?

* What is your strongest, most unwavering personality trait? Do you maintain strong beliefs or adhere to a philosophy? How would your friends characterize you? What would they write about if they were writing your scholarship essay for you?

* What have you done outside of the classroom that demonstrates qualities sought after by universities? Of these, which means the most to you?

* What are your most important extracurricular or community activities? What made you join these activities? What made you continue to contribute to them?

* What are your dreams of the future? When you look back on your life in thirty years, what would it take for you to consider your life successful? What people, things, and accomplishments do you need? How does this particular scholarship fit into your plans for the future.

memang bahasa inggris, tapi sebagai negara asia yang tingkat fluency bahasa inggrisnya lumayan tinggi, sekiranya bisa lah di kira kira artinya.

berikut taktik lain yang ditulis oleh Kelly Tanabe, meski rada abstrak menurut saya, tapi lumayan laaah.

How To Write A Winning Scholarship Essay

If you think that writing essays for college applications was an exhausting experience, we’re sorry to break the bad news to you–there are more to come. Many scholarship applications require at least one essay–although they are usually (but not always) shorter than those for college admissions.

Before you begin wondering if it’s worth the trouble to apply, the good news is that because you have already written quality essays for your college applications, you have some very good recycling possibilities. Plus this time you have the motivation of writing to be paid money instead of writing to spend money as you did for the college application essays.

Similar to admissions officers, scholarship committees see the essay as a window into the hearts and minds of the applicants. Because of this, essays for scholarships should be written similarly to college essays. They should be original, well-written, honest, and describe something meaningful about you. Scholarship essays should captivate the readers and make them care about the writer. All the strategies that you learned in the college essay writing chapters also apply to scholarship essays.

While a scholarship application may give you the luxury of writing on any subject–in which case you can easily submit one of your college essays–most give you a much more focused topic. For example, if you are applying to an organization dedicated to promoting world peace they may ask you to write about–what a coincidence–world peace. If you are applying to a civic group, they may ask you to write about your volunteer experience. In these cases you need to demonstrate in your essay that you are strong in that particular field or area or that you are the most suitable candidate because you fulfill the specific criteria of the award better than anyone else.

This may mean that you will have to write a new essay. However, since these essays are shorter and it is not expected (like the college application essays) that you spend weeks on them, they should be much easier to turn out. Once you get going you can usually whip out an essay pretty quickly, especially if you can cut and paste one together from several previous essays.

The final thing you should keep in mind when writing is to consider the kinds of people who will be reading your essay. An essay about how you wished you were born in a communist country because of your love for Marx may not go over well for an American Legion scholarship–many of whose members risked their lives fighting communists. An essay about the evils perpetrated by big business may not find much sympathy in a scholarship committee composed of Rotarians. Keep in mind, at all times, who your readers will be and make sure what you write will not offend them.

ada juga dari sumber yang sama yang lebih spesifik, setidaknya ada dos and donts nya, hehe

The graduate school statement of purpose is your chance to demonstrate your unique qualifications for and commitment to your chosen field by discussing those experiences, people, and events that compelled you to pursue it.

That's a lot to accomplish–especially in the typical two-to-three pages allowed for your statement. You can find the key to success by focusing on a few illustrative incidents as opposed to giving a superficial overview. Remember: Detail, specificity, and concrete examples will make your essay distinctive and interesting. Generalities and platitudes that could apply to every other grad school applicant will bore. If you use them, you'll just blur into one of the crowd.

Following "Ten Do's and Don'ts for Your Statement of Purpose" will help you write a compelling, focused essay — one that will transform you from a collection of numbers and classes into an interesting human being.
Ten Do's and Don'ts for Your Statement of Purpose
The Do's

1. Unite your essay and give it direction with a theme or thesis. The thesis is the main point you want to communicate.
2. Before you begin writing, choose what you want to discuss and the order in which you want to discuss it.
3. Use concrete examples from your life experience to support your thesis and distinguish yourself from other applicants.
4. Write about what interests you, excites you. That's what the admissions staff wants to read.
5. Start your essay with an attention-grabbing lead — an anecdote, quote, question, or engaging description of a scene.
6. End your essay with a conclusion that refers back to the lead and restates your thesis.
7. Revise your essay at least three times.
8. In addition to your editing, ask someone else to critique your statement of purpose for you.
9. Proofread your personal statement by reading it out loud or reading it into a tape recorder and playing back the tape.
10. Write clearly, succinctly.

The Don'ts

1. Don't include information that doesn't support your thesis.
2. Don't start your essay with "I was born in…," or "My parents came from…"
3. Don't write an autobiography, itinerary, or rÃƒÂ©sumÃƒÂ© in prose.
4. Don't try to be a clown (but gentle humor is OK).
5. Don't be afraid to start over if the essay just isn't working or doesn't answer the essay question.
6. Don't try to impress your reader with your vocabulary.
7. Don't rely exclusively on your computer to check your spelling.
8. Don't provide a collection of generic statements and platitudes.
9. Don't give mealy-mouthed, weak excuses for your GPA or test scores.
10. Don't make things up.

yaaa begitulah. semoga nih page ngasi saya, mungkin anda juga, sedikit petunjuk tentang penulisan essay beasiswa, tapi, curhat aja, masalah essay ini benar benar menyebalkan.. :(

new found realizations

2010-05-19T11:35:00.000-07:00

there are so many things I want -well more in the thought that it would be good to pour in than want- to write lately. different topics that now seem a bit useless -though funny- and obviously pointless. and i guess to just go ahead with them in smaller structures does seem to be less tedious in a way than my original conception.

I have, and frankly quite surprised by the fact that some humility can result in the finding of brand new realizations that -in my own reasoning- have been shunned away in my brain for quite sometimes now.

this is stupid, but for the first time in my life, I realized the importance of high speed internet connection in brightening up my day.

quite frankly I have had that assumption for quite sometimes now that I will not find peace in my working without hitting the download button before hand. that the idea of already downloading something put me in a state of tranquility, hence the freedom of focusing on microsoft words without the feeling of wasting one of the most inventive inventions in the history of humankind: the ability to down load new knowledge and take them for granted.

I always considered myself a mouse, not only from the way I scatter all the little things around my bed where I sleep, but also the natural behavior of collecting everything that at first glance looked interesting. and internet is that magic wand that allows me to become the real me, a mouse.

For the first time also I realized that the accumulation of fear is the sole reason why I can't seem to put everything in order to virtually snatch a scholarship.

I mean, I realized that it actually make sense. I can't explain it, but it does make sense.

I also realized that I have never ever actually believe in anything. I mean, more than seeing, believing requires such degree of bravery, and I feel like that is what I most lack of in most of the time: the courage to actually believe in some things.

I can easily say I believe in God or proclaiming myself as a religious twit. but the questions of his, or her, role in the life of gazillion people, or why he, or she, always seems to be pro to status quo, does blur away the possibility: the possibility that he, or she, might actually exist.

this lead to the doubting of hell, heaven, angels, demons, historically unrecorded prophets, new testaments, religious conflicts, viaticum, the importance of religious leaders like the pope, purity and pure teaching of good versus evil, eventually lead to the doubting of good deeds, bad deeds, actions and reactions, the cordiality of self reflection, religious consequences, the afterlife, simple treats or even bigger ones that are actually valued in His presence, the importance of actually paying attention to religious teachings and so on and so forth.

But still, I can easily say I believe in God just for the heck of it.

I guess more importantly than everything else is that the believe in God does help people to be morally acceptable in their social life. I mean, pagans shouldn't in their right mind say stuff like "I'll pray for you" whenever a friend is trapped in dire situations, caught in conflict areas like Darfur or more recently the capital city of Thailand.

This lead to the next realization, that we don't need to actually believe in God to actually believe in God, we are sensible, thus positioned to believe in him, or her, for the sakes of being.

the next realization is as stupid as shit, but still fit to the category. I kindda realize, barely, that my state of being fat is actually caused by my love of eating, or gulping, whatever fit the description of food or drinks and apparently too lazy to break some sweat, wishfully thinking that one day I'd wake up thin and lean and looking good as ever.

and that also lead to the next realization, that it's genuinely a wishful thinking to find myself lean blablabla waking up.

Other than the fact that I hate coffee -but still drink them-, less hating Duren -but still deliberately chose not to have anything to do with the decision of putting anything with them in my mouth-, and despise stupid people, I found it the worse pain in my life ever, physically, to have a clot of air stuck between the bulk of my ass and the pole of my spine, go figure.

people are living with more things than the things they actually need, and I'm looking forward to find the same things around me somewhere in the future.

I also realized that though I'm familiar with the phrase "you only live once", I don't have the capacity of living up to it, and I guess so as other people. I realized that people do understand that they only live once, but they seem to dwell on the idea that they might live long enough to starve or to be a hobo, or more precisely for good, and that explains their way of life, or mine for that matter.

mm...

I can't exactly root a point in life where I begun to develop the habit, because more often than I realize it, I get to put "this is stupid" in front of some stupid, and probably not so stupid, things I want to say, or write for that matter.

but in a way, I'm grateful, and by grateful I mean I thank God, I actually do, that never throughout my time of living I get to see my entire life flashing through before my eyes and get to feel like there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. I somewhat come to the point of realization that some things who seem good at the first encounter don't necessarily be good for the rest of its existence and vice versa, and that it applies to almost everything.

I realize that it's just the way it is. and I somewhat glad that I get to realize it now, because in a way, life does seem a bit bearable afterward..

hm..

in your eyes

2010-04-23T05:16:00.000-07:00

love,
I get so lost, sometimes
days pass
and this emptiness fills my heart
when I want to run away
I drive off in my car
but whichever way I go
I come back to the place you are

all my instincts,
they return
and the grand facade,
so soon will burn
without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside

in your eyes
the light the heat
in your eyes
I am complete
in your eyes
I see the doorway
to a thousand churches
in your eyes
the resolution
of all the fruitless searches
in your eyes
I see the light and the heat
in your eyes
oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light
the heat I see in your eyes

love,
I don't like to see so much pain
so much wasted and this moment keeps slipping away
I get so tired
of working so hard for our survival
I look to the time with you
to keep me awake and alive

and all my instincts,
they return
and the grand facade,
so soon will burn
without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside

in your eyes
the light the heat
in your eyes
I am complete
in your eyes
I see the doorway
to a thousand churches
in your eyes
the resolution
of all the fruitless searches
in your eyes
I see the light and the heat
in your eyes
oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light,
the heat I see in your eyes

volare via

2010-04-13T05:03:00.000-07:00

e da un po' che io ci penso su
che cosa farei lantano da qui
da tutte queste inutili bugie
che ogni giorno devo vivere
comprendere

vorrei volare via
per un momento
dire solo a te
quello che sento
senza aver paura d'amare
senza aver paura...

e da un po' che io ci penso su
che strada farei lontano da qui
lontano dai rumori e dalle immagini
che ogni giorno vedo intorno a me
e dentro me...

vorrei volare via
per un momento
dire solo a te
quello che sento
non aver paura d'amare
si', non aver paura...

io ti nascondero'
dietro ai miei occhi
e ti difendero'
da mille attacchi
senza aver paura d'amare
senza aver paura... di te

what is "a friend indeed"

2010-03-31T02:05:00.000-07:00

a descent picture of us with not so descent aperture point

a not so descent picture, which is a bit gay-ish hahaha, but whatta heck, of us

i just had a brief encounter with, well, pretty much my bestest friend this afternoon. he is slightly bulkier, looking cleaner like most husbands, but still the old guy I remember being there for me for an extended period of time.

though he might not ever consider this, i gladly consider him the best friend, even if the meaning of the term itself is overrated.

the history between us is long and tedious. to tell the truth i can't even remember some of them in the days i decided cranking his boarding house for, probably more than half a year, or could be a year or year and a half, in Bintaro back in the hey days, when we were all broke, jobless, a bit stupid, but happy. i don't know about him, but yeah, it was a key moment in my life and i'm glad i had it. i guess i'm glad he was in it along the way.

fyi, he paid all the bills

he was shocked looking at my hair, and though awkward for him, i managed to hug him. and brief encounter followed to the basement for lunch where we tried our best to keep up with each other's life, he with his married life, me with my work life (haha).

and like hitler chocking up on helium after drinking too much coffee, i screeched about whatever i can think of, while he gracefully hinted about babies, the nature of life within the tender imprisonment of marriage and well, tax, not to mention how the latest case on gayus demotivates most tax workers.

actually talking again after more than half a year, or could be a year or year and a half, reminded me of why.

because married life, like most people knows it, is demanding, where he didn't have that much time anymore to just wander around doing stupid shits with his friend, or to make things less complicated, me, and working has been occupying especially me, and all that other crap reasons whose counter argument is that if we really miss each other we could always arrange a meet up, though the last time we did i got lost.

but the why is more on why i once considered the guy the bestest friend, though most of our friends at the old Bintaro boarding house considered us 'soulmate', hopefully in a non, or less-gay sense of things.

and based on that also, i figure i ought to have the authority -and audacity- to actually spell out what i think is a friend, or in his case, a best friend, as i have lived a long life to begin with, and all other crap reasons.

to do this in an appropriate manner, i will try to come up with points on the qualities of why one can be considered as a best friend. a bit stupid, as this has been done millions of times and every time one does it, i always feel that such decision to do so is lame and cheesy, but hell, i'm in a good mood.

- with a best friend you can actually talk. be it filled with broad sense, or nonsense at all.

he might understand or he might not, but he always come up with remarks that make me feel like i'm worth listening. you don't find that situation too often unless of course i'm asking questions :).

and the part where i feel like i'm worth listening is way much more complicated than simply being boring -which is a stupid defensive remark if i may say, as some people do find me boring. jumping off from one subject to another in quentin tarantino style, while discussing multiple topics at once, leaving one when it has lost its exciting qualities onto another that is fresh to only go back to the abandoned topic without trying to link them at the end as conclusion is not an easy way or normal method to converse stuff. but it has been apparent to me that he's digesting it well, hence making it feel totally normal, though this is a mere assumption i made based on his lack of complaints.

i know i'm a good listener, but my mind is often wandering off to some things that makes my brain temporary closed down its electricity portal from the ears, hence the huh, what, and multiple eh that randomly pop out in every beginning of conversations. but like i said, he's taking it well.

-with your best friend you can stop talking without being afraid that you're wasting his/her time.

and this has happened too many times back in the past, though some of these moments have apparently been erased from my fragile memories. and such situation where other people can feel okay about it don't happen that much either. like when you make calls, which is the only moment when "time is money" takes form in its truest sense.

being silent has apparently become a redeeming quality that he had, and most of us had actually, and there are times when you just don't feel like talking, or simply prefer listening to music over headphones, without the fear of thinking that you might ignoring the other person. i did that a lot, and he ditto apparently.

-your best friend never ask too much of you, expecting too much of you or demanding too much of you

with that being said, the only time he ever asked anything from me was back when he said he wanted to get married.

he asked me to be his best man.

which i immediately said yes, but flank on the d-day because i did things that i shouldn't have done or at least delayed to about three or five hours after that in which due to propriety's sake shouldn't be mentioned or hinted even a bit in this post. i came late, the wedding is already over, and no one is giving him the ring.

in later days he told me that because there's no other best man available for back up, he kept the ring in his pocket.

he was probably mad, or at least disappointed. but he didn't show them.

"it was great, i was nervous, you should see the number of people coming dude, damn i thought i'd passed out. and where were you?"

"i got lost," which we all know was a lie

and i guess that's the moment where he truly felt happy and content, or at least relieve, that the biggest challenge in a man's life is passed without meaningful obstacle, or at least that's what i'd like to think so :p.

come to think of it, we all think it's okay with each other's bad habits over time, like being late. i can still remember vividly where in his bed, at about eight o'clock in the morning, in our, or his, old boarding house, he received a call from his boss inquiring him about his whereabouts as he was late for an important meeting.

"I'm on the way, I'm on the way," he said and continued sleeping for another ten minutes before finally getting up.

I swear to god till this day that he wouldn't have gone to that stupid so called important meeting if i didn't hassle him about going as fast as he could.

in this case, i wasn't being a best friend as i mentioned earlier i guess.

but even back in high school, where i'll be late for most of the days, he would come some minutes after me.

- your best friend appreciate your work, where as a best friend, you appreciate what he does too

the simplest example, as both of us were the lead cartoonists, illustrators, wallpaper designers and whatever involving the use of different types of pens, cardboards, paints, scissors, and other painting tools to lead a group of merryful bunch in almost every major event requiring big, small, colorful, less colorful, meaningful, less meaningful, boring and less boring decorations in highschool, and highschool being the only span of time reasonable enough to mention as we end up going to different universities and take up different jobs after highschool, i can fairly say that nobody appreciate, admire, take careful observations with the intend of learning and understanding, continue to remember most of his works with the aim of comprehending his style, more than me.

and back in the first grade of highschool, i can still remember him being the only guy who thought that my sketching of a girl's hair viewed from the back was, well, basically worth looking at for the next half an hour.

i fell asleep in the next two hours or so and he kept the page.

-your best friend doesn't tell you what to do, he supports you with whatever thing you chose to do.

in a way, he refused to be responsible for your wrong decisions, but he don't mind to also feel the impact, or take partial responsibility of your well being after all the things harvested their impacts. that's what he always do, and learning from him, that's what i always try to do in my life with my worthy friends.

I think the boarding house case, where i stayed at his boarding house, thinking it as mine also, for an extended period of time in his own expenses, being an impact of a wrong decision i made, was a clear example.

well, luckily i don't do drugs, don't steal stuff and not causing any trouble, that if i did, i wouldn't even want to befriend myself.

(*)

there are a lot of other qualities, obviously, but i will add them later. i've got deadlines and i'm not looking to be dead just yet.

and if we don't get to see each other again in a long time after this, i'm sure i can catch him again next year while paying my tax. he wouldn't mind.

and oh, the last thing is

-you feel grateful having your best friend, and from their odd little ways, you know they're grateful too

from my experience, i can only assume :)

cheers

lost in uncertainty

2010-03-30T00:03:00.000-07:00

I have found the immeasurable tunnel, rooted deep with China as its possible end
I have found deep dark oceans looming in sight, luring fishermen to get near and drown
I have found a tall tower of knowledge, which floors aren’t numbered
I have found them in you
And you have found pretty much the same in someone else

China isn't probably destined for me :)

lost in certainty

2010-03-12T05:35:00.000-08:00

He looked at her mother's page, and then her sister's. And then he stumbled upon Paulo Coelho's facebook page, whose recent status was displayed on her sister's page.

the status says "Love is joy. Don't convince yourself that suffering is part of it"

it shook him

he is suffering, in where it's supposed to be love. and worse yet, he seems to find joy, in all the little sufferings someone else is inflicted on him. something that will not ever be.

suffering is not part of love, he is convinced, and he is committed to go down the familiar path, where nothing awaits but suffering, till death do them part.

stuff lost

2010-03-10T04:44:00.000-08:00

btw the biggest thing in my life throughout the year is probably happening.

D90 got stolen, plus tele lens, some money and two hardisks, forcing me to move out from the old boarding house pronto, the place that I like so much and have inhibited for three years now.

The new place is air conditioned, not very well vent, has got histories of things stolen and cost almost twice the previous one..

I hate it

but hey, you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need!

or so they say.. you can force it, but it will drive you craazyyy...

anyways, I've got some loan from koperasi to get a D90 as replacement. This is secret, but as personal revenge, I really want to get me a D700 or 5d Mark II sometimes in the future, Insya Allah,

And because I don't really like talking about bad stuff happening to me, that woul be all and bug off

godspeed

yogya erased

2010-03-10T04:43:00.001-08:00

At just about midnight nine hours before, some friends tried their luck crossing the two giant trees blindfolded at the Alun-Alun south of Yogyakarta Keraton (traditional palace). “Yogyakarta is running out of places to hangout in weekends, hence the constructions of hangout spots even in the outskirts of the city,” said Danang, a PR officer from the hotel that after sometimes has become more of a friend than a nuisance.

This explained the crowding youth at the Alun-Alun. The myths behind the trees, where successful crossing without the luxury of sight will grant their innermost desire in life, have prompted some people to lease black cloths for eye cover. And people are selling everything traditional, from the widely known Ronde (hot ginger drink) to boiled ground peanuts. We rent tandem bikes and make two rounds circling the Alun-Alun. Frankly, I haven’t had that much fun –or laughs- in a long time.

it's liberating to be somewhat stupid

2010-03-03T06:28:00.000-08:00

lagu latian buat besok pas latian dan yang bakal kita mainin pas acara kantor di waterbom

okeh

karena kita mau bawain dua lagu, dan sekalian pas kita main di waterbom, maka menurut hemat gue, bener kata agus kalo bom bali hiji (karena judulnya sama ama water"bom", get it?) adalah lagu pertama yang tepat untuk dimainkan..

selanjutnya, setelah menimbang dan mengevaluasi bahwasanya image kita sebagai band akan langsung turun drastis kalo kita tiba tiba came up dengan lagu ga penting dan dilanjutkan dengan lagu ga penting lainnya, maka kita butuh sebuah lagu yang secara teknik profound, tapi ga nyusahin dengan durasi minimum yang meski bentar tetap bikin orang terperangah - tapi perlu di pikirkan juga kalo terlalu beresiko bahwasanya kalo kita nyanyi juga bakal kacau - maka dengan ini saya memilih lagu ini untuk kita latih bersama, sebuah lagu instrument yang tidak bisa dibilang tidak penting, yang maaf sekali bukan barang tentu dari coheed and cambria atawa blink 182, tetapi dari band favorite saya yang seperti sodara sodara sekalian tau adalah sebuah band norway beranggotakan sepuluh orang multiinstrumentalists bernama jaga jazzist (ben to)

mungkin akan ada protes tentang susahnya melodi dari om mustapha, maka dari itu, melodi akan dipangkas untuk dimainkan berdua bersama pemain bas yang notabene dan sangat disayangkan adalah sang penulis dan empunya alamat email ini. sebagai konsekwensi dari pemangkasan melodi, om mustapha akan sangat disesalkan akan tetapi sangat diharapkan untuk mengisi syncops syncops ala gamelan bali dalam lagu ini.

akan tetapi yang darimana sesuai dengan yang daripadanya, om lolla pemain drum dengan terpaksa harus berlatih extra keras untuk mampu setidaknya menyesuaikan meski tidak dipaksa oleh kami atau lebih tepatnya saya sebagai penggagas dan pemaksa pembentuk band ini dan di ujo ujo supaya kiranya dapat mampu menghapal tema tema pukulan dan hitungan dari hanya dan hanya dari reff lagu yang saya attach sebagai benang emas dari lagu tersebut.

setelah menimbang dan memeriksa dimana akan sangat diharapkan terjadi kesalahan dan kesulitan kesulitan tertentu pada saat pementasan dimana perilaku tersebut dapat menimbulkan cemoohan dari audienz termasuk pengunjung waterbom lain yang sebentulnya tidak begitu memiliki kepentingan sedikit apapun, maka sangat dianjurkan bagi anggota band ini untuk melatih poker face mereka dan meski kemungkinan besar akan main dengan acakadul tetap berlagak tidak ada yang terjadi atau lebih tepatnya seolah olah kesalahan kesalahan tersebut sebagaimana besar atau kecilnya merupakan bagian dari permainan progresive kita yang telah dengan sangat matang dipikirkan.
berikut lagunya dan harap diunduh, di dengar dan di telaah setelahnya dilatih dan dicemooh..

terimakasih,
over and out
cumi

ps. kok ternyata filenya gede yak.. besok ajah gue kasi yak
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For less paperwork and better environment, think twice before printing this email

heheh.. above is the email I sent for members of my band, recently named DeTrakt, but will probably changed to MayaElectric :p. don't be fooled that despite the tone, the band consists some of the most profound musicians I know :p

parenthood and yup, there's absolutely something wrong with me

2010-03-03T00:41:00.000-08:00

I hate to say it, but besides real sad stories with details of other people being left alone and then cried, well, heartlessly, screaming possibly, sobs continuously, put it simply, moving pictures of people feeling extremely sad, that and the death of Michael Jackson, or other great musicians I adore, now that I mentioned it, I always have these profound mmm.. well empathy, or simply grieve on parenthood..

well.. not exactly..

in a way I'm easily moved by it, yup that's the term..

I mean how crazy is suddenly bursting into tears and laughter at the same time after a sight at a big board commercial with the face of an ordinary man, nothing special, with words like

"today, trying to get daughter to preschool"
"tomorrow, entering daughter to Yale"

that is just sick

until now I realized that the simplest sentence to bring me into tears, and not just down, but literally water in my eyes is

"and father, do you understand, what it is you mean to me.."

(shit)

(breathe..)

I just stumbled upon this blog, and I couldn't read it any further, for proper's sake..
well.. just want to share that, not going to make or find conclusion whatsoever..

supersonic ears

2010-02-24T00:48:00.000-08:00

walls surrounding me
hands chained shackled
yet I can hear you
drenched in your laughter

I think it was your eyes that drown me
and your animation of life took me on a stroll
into the familiar unknown

walls surrounding me
I built those walls surrounding me

falling in love at a coffee shop

2010-02-23T22:44:00.000-08:00

a short story by Restiawardani

Dia menunggu lagi. Aku tahu, karena setiap kali aku ke sini, dia selalu ada lebih dulu. Tempat duduknya pun selalu sama, dekat konter kasir tempat Mima akan berdiri...seandainya dia masih ada.

Aku tidak pernah mencoba memberi tahu laki-laki itu, bahwa gadis yang dia tunggu tak akan pernah lagi ke tempat ini, atau ke tempat manapun. Aku tak pernah mencoba memberitahunya.

Laki-laki itu selalu berharap, matanya selalu tertuju pada pintu pegawai, seakan-akan Mima akan muncul di sana. Caranya menjawab telepon yang masuk lewat handphone-nya juga tak pantas, seakan seseorang mengganggu ritual sucinya, setiap hari, di coffee shop ini.

Suatu hari, seseorang lewat di samping lelaki itu dan memanggilnya, Sandy. Tapi selain namanya, Aku tidak tahu hal lain tentang dirinya. Yang aku tahu dia mahasiswa. Aku melihat judul-judul buku yang dia bawa, yang tidak pernah dibaca, seakan benda-benda itu hanya aksesori. Sandy tidak pernah tersenyum pada bukunya. Dia hanya memamerkan lekukan itu di wajahnya ketika menatap aplikasi facebook di laptopnya.

Aku menyukai Sandy. Aku berharap dia melupakan Mima.

Tapi Sandy selalu kembali ke coffee shop ini. Dia selalu menatap konter kasir dengan murung. Ketika kukira dia terbenam dalam facebooknya, suara seperti denting sendok jatuh, atau suara tertawa tiba-tiba dari meja sebelah, atau suara denting mesin kasir, akan dengan mudah mengalihkan perhatiannya. Kepala Sandy pun akan berputar ke arah pintu pegawai, dan template kesedihan itu akan kembali dia aplikasikan saat dia tidak juga menemukan Mima di sana.

Aku tidak tahu mengapa Sandy tidak pernah menanyakan satu orang pun yang bekerja di coffee shop ini tentang keberadaan Mima, karena dia pasti akan langsung mendapatkan jawabannya. Mereka, yang juga sepenuhnya tahu bahwa laki-laki ini datang untuk menemui Mima, juga tak pernah mencoba menyapa atau bertanya. Seperti aku, mungkin mereka suka dengan keberadaannya. Mungkin mereka menikmati kesetiaannya, dan kami terdiam dalam kekaguman.

Suatu waktu, aku pernah mencoba meniupkan kesadaran ke balik matanya, tempat hatinya berada. Tapi kuurungkan. Sandy sepertinya sudah memilikinya. Dia hanya menutupnya, seperti kebanyakan kaumnya, yang lebih memilih hidup berharap dibanding hidup dicekik kenyataan.

Sandy tidak tahu, andai dia tahu. Mima tidak ada karena aku menjemputnya...lebih dari tiga bulan lalu.
Seharusnya Sandy tidak perlu berorasi bisu menyuarakan protesnya karena ketiadaan Mima, dengan setiap hari memasang wajah murung di tempat yang seharusnya hangat dengan kopi dan kebaikan. Dia seharusnya tahu, Aku menjemput Mima, karena aku menginginkannya lebih dari dia mampu membayangkannya. Adakah yang lain di kaumnya yang memiliki hati sejernih Mima? Maka sebelum seseorang mendapatkannya, sebelum mereka menyakitinya, sebelum sesuatu membuat luka di hatinya, sebelum Mima mengotori hatinya, aku mengambilnya.

Kelak, saat Sandy mampu mendengarku, akan kubisikkan permohonan maafku.

Mima kini berdiri di sampingku. Kadang gadis kecil ini mengikutiku, hanya untuk melihat laki-laki yang setiap hari duduk berjam-jam di coffee shop menunggunya.

Aku menyukai Sandy dan kesedihannya yang melelahkan.
Hari ini, kuhembuskan kesadaran itu.

Sandy tersentak terkejut. Terburu-buru dia berdiri. Setelah hampir satu tahun menunggu di coffee shop ini, baru kali ini Sandy pergi ke menemui wanita manajer itu di konter, dan bertanya di mana Mima. Dia tentu saja, sudah menduga apa jawabannya. Tapi tetap saja, begitu mendengarnya, dia hanya terdiam di sana. Tidak ada kemarahan, tidak ada teriakan. Hanya ada air mata yang mengalir pelan di wajah, dalam kebisuan.

Tapi kami tahu Sandy akan baik-baik saja.
Maka aku dan Mima pergi. Kali ini untuk selamanya.

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I feel bad, as she has erased the short story from her blog and here I took the liberty of repost it in my blog..
I think she will be like a bit mad at me for doing this, but whatta heck hahaha

Putting Valentine’s Day on perspective (heleh)

2010-02-11T05:04:00.000-08:00

Shakespeare once described love as “a smoke made with the fume of sighs”. And as abstract as it may sound, we all know it when it’s love, we feel it.

Some people, nevertheless, could not fairly express their love. The fear that the feeling is unrequited, inappropriate or simply foolish, has in a way prevented them from receiving God’s ultimate give, to love and to be loved back. And that’s why Valentine’s Day is not just special, but also necessary.

Dating back, the history of the day started during the reigning time of Emperor Claudius II in the third century of the Roman Empire. It was told that Claudius II, feeling that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, decided to outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine, a priest served during such time, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret.

He was sentenced to death when found out, but this lead to another story. Legend has it that while in jail, Valentine performed a miracle by healing the jailer’s blind daughter and fell in love with her. He sent the first ‘Valentine’ greeting the night before his execution, a letter signed “From your Valentine” to the healed daughter.

Finally executed in mid February, around 269 AD, the time of his death was later celebrated as Valentine’s Day.

The above legend does sound like a make believe, but it was recorded in history that a Christian priest named Valentinus was martyred on Feb. 14 about 269 AD and buried in Via Flaminia, the most important Roman road to the north leading from Rome to Rimini.

There are a number of martyrs named Valentine in the early days, most notably Valentine of Terni, who died in Feb. 14 about 197 AD -with relics found at the Church of Saint Praxed in Rome and at Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, Ireland, and a third saint mentioned in the Catholic Encyclopedia from www.catholic.com, who died at the same date in Africa.

In 496 AD, the last of three popes with disputable African origin in the Roman Catholic Church named Pope Gelasius I, decided to shift the Roman feast of Lupercalia, a pagan love festival that fall on Feb. 15, to the 14th and officially named it St. Valentine’s Day. Gelasius died that year, but it was his decision that finally gave correlation between Valentine’s Day and love, in which the pagan aspect of Lupercalia was omitted.

There are many stories leading to the celebration of Valentine’s Day, but the sending of Valentine’s greeting card did not become a huge fashion until about late 1840s, especially in Great Britain and the U.S.

As a matter of fact, the Valentine’s Day we know today is considered as one of the Hallmark’s holiday in U.S., which in commercial purposes marked the second biggest selling of greeting cards for a specific day after Christmas Day, leaving the three other holydays, namely the Sweetest Day, Mother's Day and Fathers' Day behind. The U.S. Greeting Card Association also estimates that approximately one billion Valentine’s cards are sent each year worldwide with men spending twice as much as women.

But how did chocolate candies and bars become an important part of the celebration, if the solid form of chocolate wasn’t even invented until 1830 by Joseph Fry & Sons?

There was no solid evidence on how chocolate suddenly meddled in the celebration except for the fact that Richard Cadbury created the first known heart-shaped candy box for Valentine’s Day in 1861, having his son John to mass marketed the first boxes of chocolate candies in 1868 after introducing chocolate bars in 1849 with Joseph Fry & Sons at an exhibition in Bingley Hall, Birmingham, England.

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yup, ini sebenernya cuman referensi dari berbagai informasi tentang Valentine's Day di internet. Yaa setidaknya tau lah apaan si Valentine bagi yang emang ngasi kembang ke pacarnya, cekidot

2010!

2010-02-02T05:35:00.000-08:00

baru nyadar ternyata selama bulan januari ga nulis apa apa dan tiba tiba udah februari. yaa ternyata bullshitan gue di koran lebih menjual dari blog ini, but whatta heck, pertama memutuskan punya blog kan emang biar punya record tentang diri sendiri, biar bisa di baca baca pas bosen dan ketawa ketawa sendiri hehe, lagian secara tidak sadar ternyata tulisan gue di blog ini lumayan lucu hoho.. jadi ayo dibaca dunk! (hayah)

anyways, seperti layaknya koran, hehehe ga tau deh, pokoknya gitu, gue ingin membuat sebuah review tentang kehidupan gue di awal tahun ini, dan apa yang udah berubah hehe.. yaaa meski kalian mikir ini ga penting, ini tetap penting buat gue, kan ini idup gue, I'm alive and breathing and sometimes I just can't figure out why or how..

di februari tahun 2010 ini gue menyadari beberapa hal sudah berubah, dan gue ingin bikin list tentang hal hal itu, so here are they..

1. gue mulai merokok, dan rokok gue Dunhill Menthol (gambarnya luar karena rokok lokal ga ada hehe). rada lama juga memutuskan Dunhill sebagai rokok tetap gue, karena pas mulai ngerokok, tepatnya sekitar mmmm ga tepatnya si sekitar sembilan bulan yang lalu, gue cobain berbagai merek dari kretek ga jelas, dji sam soe, ampe kansas, dan Dunhill lah yang memberi gue perasaan fly yang terkenal itu.. tapi kini merokok jadi kaya kebutuhan, disamping pengharapan bakal bisa ngurusin badan (jiaah). pas nyokap tau juga beliau bilang "yaudah kurangin makannya banyakin ngrokoknnya" hehe nyokap gue emang bijaksana.. anyways ngerokok itu paling enak pagi pagi, ato sore sore setelah seharian ga ngerokok.. secara official, gue ngerokok sepak sehari. dan kalo ga ada Dunhill, apapun jadi, termasuk yang ngelinting dewe hehe.. blasphemy..

2. berat badan gue naik... (apaaaaaa?!) ya yaaa.. long gone is the schlanke linie form yang di gilai banyak wanita jaman smu, diganti bentuk om om ga jelas. secara official, berat badan gue naik dari 62 (berat badan ideal yang udah termasuk gendut) ke 70-71 (yang lebih parahnya ngebikin muka gue tampak tembem) I'm not that attractive anymore, dan ditambah perilaku dan gaya hidup gue yang emang berantakan, I'm a mess hihi.. but whatta heck, ga tau kenapa di dalam diri gue berpikir kalo in a not so distant future, dimana berat badan gue udah turun lagi jadi sekitar enempuluhan, gue akan mengingat masa masa gendut gue sekarang dengan penuh canda tawa (hayah).

3. gue abis beli komputer! yup. komputer super keren yang di perkuat dengan komponen super keren dan di dukung oleh monitor super lebar dan di instalin berbagai jenis game super berat hihi.. total duit yang di habiskan buat komputer ini adalah 9 jeti buat PC dan 3.5 jeti buat monitor. berikut spec nya
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor
MOBO: GIGABYTE GA-MA770T-UD3P AMD Motherboard
RAM: G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
GPU: XFX HD-487A-ZHFC Radeon HD 4870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5
HDD: Western Digital Caviar green 640GB SATA
PSU: CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W
HSF: Scythe SCKTN-3000 92mm Sleeve "KATANA3" CPU Cooler
CASE: COOLER MASTER HAF 922 Mid Tower Computer Case
monitornya Samsung 23 inchi karena yang 24 inchi ga ada yang jual di mangga dua. dan gue bener bener cinta komputer ini hehe, rasanya ingin bercinta dengannya (hayah).

4. gue udah mulai settle di tempat ini, and things are going to the right direction kayanya, dengan nih koran di sebut sebagai koran peringkat 76 di 200 koran ternama dunia dan koran nomor satu di Indonesia ngalahin kompas menurut website ini.. nggak berdasar jumlah sirkulasi si, tapi berdasar jumlah pengunjung websitenya. gaji juga naik 5 persen, jadi yaa life's been good.

5. hihi ini bodoh, tapi sekarang gue pernah ke luar negri, setidaknya malaysia, thailand dan singapore hehe... dan karena gue memutuskan untuk ga ngelamar beasiswa tahun ini yaa mungkin ga bakal ke eropa ampe tahun depan, we'll see laaa..

6. gue balik ama oppie, let's hope things will go according to plan.. (cross my fingers)

7. adik gue hamil! hehe dan bentar lagi gue bakal jadi pakdhe, so get the baby out already sistah!

8. gue beli BB! hihi yaa seperti biasa hape gue ilang lagi, dan karena ini udah yang ke sekian kali (ke empat ato lima gitu) berasa biasa aja, dan tuh hape seperti biasa juga udah mulai rusak sebelum ilang, so there..

9. dan gue juga udah punya kamera sendiri, D60 dengan lensa tambahan 55-200 kayanya, dimana gue ma oppie berencana ngebikin kartu nama dan satu blog lagi buat nampung semua portfolio, hasil photo yang di jadiin undangan blabla dan menjual jasa, termasuk design kaus, kartu nama, tukang photo dan design ga penting penting lainnya, jika hal berjalan lancar, kita bakal punya usaha design dan jualan macam outlet tapi berbasis internet, hehe ngimpi boleh dunk :p

10. gue ga give up music, tapi kayanya ga begitu menekuninya dengan penuh pengharapan ga penting lagi sekarang. masi main si tapi ga jelas dan ga ada prospek buat beneran jadi musisi ato anggota band hihi.. sempet juga si bikin page di reverbnation dengan sebuah band fiktip bernama DeTrakt, tapi ga tau neh kelanjutannya hehehe.. mungkin emang musti serius di merchendize, let's see laaa..

11. oh iye gue gondrong!!!!!! hehehe gendut gondrong dan malah keliatan lebih cantik, but whatta heck

12. dan gue juga udah punya tattoo di punggung, yang gue bikin terakhir kali pas ngajakin nyokap ke bali. damn tattoos are painful, selama tiga jam tuh mas mas ngerajah punggung gue bersama alunan lagu Bryan Adams, se CD penuh MP3 bok, jadi pas lo kira tuh lagu yang emang udah beberapa album berakhir, keluarlah versi livenya hihi Bryan Adams emang moy.. he helps with the pain :p

13. nyokap punya facebook hehehe.. dan udah masukin poto poto dia yang cantik ke facebook :p. She's also gaining weight, but she said she's healthier than ever so.. I'm coming to see her this weekend :)

well.. that's so far the huge details in my life, in addition to pipim's gone, ridwan's sunk in his marriage, Iskandar broken up, the guys at the office mainly agus, andreas and reja planning to smoke some weed sometimes this month, everything is doing just fine :)

life part 1

2009-12-08T04:50:00.000-08:00

gue tulis part one, karena pasti ada suatu saat dimasa depan dimana gue curhat lagi tentang life, dan dikemudian hari, posting itu akan berjudul life part 2.

samar2 teringat John Paul, temen jaman kuliah, pernah bilang sembari naik pespa butut yang perlu di genjot 40kalian sebelum idup bahwa "sometimes life just sucks".

Andrea, temen kantor gue, barusan menangis dengan tersedu2 sambil ngendeprok dilantai padahal pake baju rapi dan rok item karena cover dua komiknya yang bakal di release sebentar lagi diubah total dan jadwal releasenya di undur.

Andreas, temen kantor gue juga, ngabisin sekitar lima biji roko gue buat curhat tentang tiga temen milis-nya yang berseteru karena salah pengertian intonasi kalimat yang seharusnya dianggap biasa. Dia merasa bertanggung jawab karena dialah founder milis itu, moderator dan orang yang berasa memiliki, bertanggung jawab dan seharusnya mengayomi dengan bijaksana. in his own word 'sensitive'

Agus, temen kantor gue juga.. well basically.. everyone have their own problem.

bokap tiri gue sering bilang sebuah kalimat, yang menurut gue dia ambil dan terus diucapkan biar ga lupa, dan seperti Chuck Norris buat sebagian orang yang gue kenal, adalah jawaban bagi semua permasalahan.. that "life is about solving the problem"

but life sometimes just sucks

at one point, I envy Andrea for being able to cry over her problems.. and not keeping it with logic so not come to an end where logic fails..

at one point, I envy Andreas for still finding smoking five cigarettes helps.. and not stuck in a condition where everything else fails as an escape..

and I certainly envy Agus for being who he is.. the no problem guy, the keep it to myself guy.. for being able to keep everything under control even when he's the only one to do it..

..

I'm running out of words

secret garden

2009-12-02T12:35:00.000-08:00

she'll let you in her house
if you come knockin' late at night
she'll let you in her mouth
if the words you say are right
if you pay the price
she'll let you deep inside
but there's a secret garden she hides

she'll let you in her car
to go drivin' round
she'll let you into the parts of herself
that'll bring you down
she'll let you in her heart
if you got a hammer and a vise
but into her secret garden, don't think twice

you've gone a million miles
how far'd you get
to that place where you can't remember
and you can't forget

she'll lead you down a path
there'll be tenderness in the air
she'll let you come just far enough
so you know she's really there
she'll look at you and smile
and her eyes will say
she's got a secret garden
where everything you want
where everything you need
will always stay

a million miles away

you are so beautiful

2009-12-02T12:26:00.000-08:00

you are so beautiful
to me
you are so beautiful
to me

can't you see
you're everything I hope for
you're everything I need

you are so beautiful
to me

so what does it take

2009-12-02T09:44:00.000-08:00

the deprivation of love leaves a hole in the land where used to be a tree
rooted deep in through the soil..

and as love is deprived, the land becomes dry, grasses stop growing and the sun is nothing but a scorching ball of fire..

and land becomes a mass of graves, burying whatever remains, memories of the past, dying in each minute passed..

rain would come, but it brings nothing but flood, taking layers and layers of what could be the departing future of a generation..

for to set back into whence it started, a seed is needed, and nurturing it to life takes time, both rain and the sun..

and as fear is embedded within the living land's ability to adapt, it becomes un-nurturing, twice as careful and less braver than any land..

so what does it take?

as 'crave' becomes an enemy of the land, crave for an instant tree, growing with its root delving deep within the soil, with leaves hoovering the green grasses of hope and expectation..

making the sun a redeeming wave of hand in the morning..

what does it take?

when pessimism and scepticism taking over

2009-11-05T07:12:00.000-08:00

when it happens, you start to wonder, what's wrong with you.

when it happens, like at least these past few days with me as its subject, you start to question whether the decision you've made is the right one. the money was good, yet you start wondering whether this very thing is the thing you want to do all your life.

you start to question your own opinion, your parameter of good and bad, while all the things out there do seem too hasty in flipping whatever you do. with lesser prospects for you to move forward, you began to question your own quality.

or was it the stuck that makes you rot? or worse yet, were you never really that good? was it the point where at least they don't have to pay?

I've been here long enough, supposedly, to know which is which and which is not. I've been here long enough to supposedly make a choice on what I'm going to do next within the line, or where I'm going to lead to afterward.

or am I just too dumb to put myself in the right chair after moving around endlessly.

what is lost, what is leaking, what is less colored, what is most important and what not.
or am I lost, leaking, in shades and not of importance.
who to tell, who to speak of these things and strengthen?

damn, I hate it when it happens.

past illustrations II

2009-11-02T00:17:00.000-08:00

bellow are random illustrations with different theme, not all of them good, mind you, but enjoy it anyways.

past illustrations

2009-11-01T23:30:00.000-08:00

in random orders, here are illustrations and comics I did in college, some for the faculty magazine and some for fun. I had a ton of illustrations back then, but only less of them are scanned and secured. anyways here they are, comics first.

this one has no words in the brackets, but basically told about a guy who wanted to rent some DVDs, of different genres, in a comic shop.

this one is kindda cool, I like it, as you can read, it's about wish-granting old lamp of some sorts.. batman's left hand is incorrectly drawn.. heck

Indonesia As the New India

2009-10-20T01:47:00.000-07:00

This stable democracy with a hot market economy resembles another Asian giant in the 1990s.
By George Wehrfritz | NEWSWEEK

Jakarta today could be any of Asia's 21st-century boomtowns. The malls buzz, traffic snarls and modern office towers dominate the skyline. It all feels profoundly normal—but that's big progress in a place that, barely ten years ago, seemed destined for ruin. Following the fall of longtime strongman Suharto, and with Indonesia reeling from the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, many analysts feared that Asia's third-biggest country (population: 235 million) would go the way of Yugoslavia. Instead, it has become a cohesive, robust and exuberantly democratic moderate Muslim nation. Things are so buoyant that Indonesia invites comparison to another Asian giant: India.

Both remain corrupt, chaotic and excruciatingly complex. Yet each is also an attractive emerging economy, and in India's case, a star of the developing world. Could Indonesia be next? Its economy grew by 6.3 percent last year, the main stock exchange ranks among the world's best performers since 2003 and last year foreign direct investment nearly tripled, to a respectable $4 billion. All of which resembles India in the 1990s, when reforms kick-started a potentially massive economy—though outsiders barely noticed until the IT sector took off and growth passed 8 percent. In Indonesia, the key sectors are energy, mining and soft commodities like rubber, palm oil and cocoa. And in an exclusive interview, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono says he sees no inherent reason why a big democracy like his can't grow as fast China, which has posted 10 percent growth rates in recent years.

That would put Indonesia on a lot of magazine covers. In fact, the country already looks better than India in two ways: its per capita income ($3,348) is a third higher, and thanks to Jakarta's fiscal austerity, it now boasts one of the lowest debt ratios in the world. "After ten years of restructuring, Southeast Asia's largest economy is in great shape," says Nicholas Cashmore, CLSA's country head and chief researcher in Jakarta.

Indonesia's political turnaround has been just as dramatic as its economic one. The president, known universally as SBY, is a former general who was elected in mid-2004 and has since become the country's most effective democratic leader. In four years, he has helped Indonesia roll up its terrorist problem and rebuild from the 2004 tsunami. Less appreciated (but more enduring), he has backed a profound political decentralization program, empowering hundreds of local administrations. Jakarta now rules by consensus, not decree. This has its downsides: it makes it impossible to railroad through big national development projects of the sort China is famous for. As SBY himself admits, "in many circumstances, we face local communities that don't agree with government projects, so we have to convince them. I do not think the system is wrong. In a democracy like ours, change, reform and resistance are normal."

The country's largest parties now basically agree on economic policy and the need to reduce corruption, improve the rule of law and make government more efficient. Key democratic institutions—including a free press, impartial courts and a legislature chosen by voters—are remarkably robust, and the once all-powerful military has largely removed itself from politics. Meanwhile, regional autonomy has triggered economic booms at the periphery, in contrast to the typical Southeast Asian model. "From the U.S., the U.K. or even Hong Kong," writes Cashmore, "it is difficult to comprehend the magnitude of Indonesia's potential [or] appreciate just how much more there is to the country beyond Jakarta." By his calculation, greater Jakarta now accounts for just 15 percent of Indonesia's GDP, a relatively small share compared to other Asian capitals.

Indonesia's accomplishments are all the more impressive when you remember how far and fast the country has come. The fall of Suharto's New Order (a highly centralized system that vested absolute power in the dictator and his cronies) 10 years ago was accompanied by a financial meltdown so severe that the IMF had to step in. Indonesia also faced fierce separatist insurgencies, Christian-Muslim violence and Islamic extremism underscored by the 2002 Bali bombing. The country seemed to be teetering on the brink of wholesale disintegration. Yet today, as Australian National University economist Andrew MacIntyre and the Asia Foundation's Douglas Ramage argued in a recent report, observers should start thinking of Indonesia "as a normal country grappling with challenges common to other large, middle-income, developing democracies—not unlike India, Mexico or Brazil."

In some ways Indonesia's democracy is even more sophisticated than those other states'. Take decentralization. Jakarta, like New Delhi, oversees national defense, internal security, finance, foreign policy and the justice system. But unlike the Indian government, Indonesia's—thanks to two "big bang" reform packages passed in 2001 and 2006, and supported by SBY—must now coordinate most other activities through the country's 33 provinces and nearly 500 local administrations, where popularly elected leaders make policy, manage two thirds of all civil servants and oversee everything from schools to economic development. As World Bank economists Wolfgang Fengler and Bert Hofman observe in a soon-to-be-published study, Indonesia has turned itself from "one of the most centralized countries in the world into one of the more decentralized ones."

To see what that means on the ground, follow the money. Under a new fiscal system implemented in 2001, regions are allocated a huge slice of the country's budget to spend more or less as they please. POOR AND REMOTE AREAS RECEIVE THE MOST PERCAPITA, and those with abundant natural resources get shared extraction revenues. According to the World Bank, regional governments in Indonesia now account for 36 percent of all public expenditures, compared with an average of just 14 percent in all developing countries. And locals can promote whatever agendas they choose. "This is the real revolution," says Erman Rahman, who heads the World Bank's local governance initiatives in the country. Regions with proactive leaders have become laboratories of experimentation from which innovative anti-corruption, public-health and economic-growth initiatives have emerged. For his part, SBY has enabled this process by maintaining macroeconomic discipline and political stability. And his support for local autonomy has undermined separatism, extremism and communal violence.

One regional pioneer, Gamawan Fauzi, took power in West Sumatra's Solok region in 2001 and quickly created a one-stop shop for government services, replacing an opaque and complex web of offices and brokers. Fauzi's concept was to bring all government services under a single roof, post set fees, promote autopayment and guarantee prompt service as a means of rooting out corruption. And it has worked: the model has since been emulated across Indonesia, and Transparency International reports that corruption, while still high, has been reduced substantially.

Other local leaders have earned fame by initiating innovative new programs. Gede Putrayasa, who heads the poorest of nine regencies on the tourist island Bali, won office in 2001 on a pledge to provide universal medical insurance and free education. The latter proved relatively easy (he simply waived the 5,000 rupiah monthly fees), but improving health care without breaking the local budget was tougher. Under the old system, funds went to hospitals and local administrators, who did things like stockpile pharmaceuticals procured from companies that paid kickbacks. Putrayasa's innovation: provide every local household free health insurance that compensates clinics for services actually provided. "There's not a big savings," says Putrayasa, "but everyone is covered and the efficiency is much better because there is no longer any corruption."

Such reforms have stimulated economic growth. Putrayasa's health-care and education initiatives (as well as a jobs program that sends underemployed rice farmers to Japan) have reduced the local poverty rate fourfold to just 5.5 percent today. Better local governance has also made Indonesia a major beneficiary of the global soft commodity boom. Together, the value of its four largest crops—rubber, coconut, palm oil and cocoa—rose from $2.3 billion in 2000 to an estimated $19 billion in 2008, CLSA calculates. That's thanks to local leaders like Fadel Muhammad, governor of the hardscrabble province of Gorontalo on the island Sulawesi, who turned his constituents into the country's best corn farmers by deploying teams of agricultural consultants; providing subsidized seeds, fertilizers and rental machinery to farmers; and giving cash rewards to village leaders who boost yields. Since 2002, Gorontalo's poverty rate has shrunk from 49 to 29 percent.

Of course, decentralization has its problems. Analysts and watchdog groups say that while the number of effective leaders in the 500 local administrations has spiked from a handful to 50 or more under SBY, they are sometimes particularly effective at blocking necessary national reforms and projects. The result, says Ramage, is that progress will be "evolutionary, not revolutionary." For example, the Trans Java highway, which would link Jakarta with Indonesia's second-largest city, Surabaya, was launched in 2004 with a target completion date of 2009, but is still only 10 percent done because of local opposition.

Nonetheless, Indonesia has already become a beacon of stability in Southeast Asia and the Islamic world. Its antiterrorism campaign—Indonesia has shut radical madrassas, established an effective counterterrorism force and cracked down hard on suspected cells, while also avoiding human-rights abuses—is seen as a model for the region. And as the world's most populous Muslim country, Indonesia's democratization has implications from Morocco to Mindanao in that it exemplifies an alternative to zealotry, intolerance and extremism. "Indonesia is not immune to radicalism we see worldwide, but this is exactly why we must maintain our identity as a moderate, tolerant nation," says Yudhoyono. "It enables us to prevent a clash of civilizations."

SBY is likely to win re-election next year, but even if he loses, analysts don't expect any sharp change in policy, because all the major political camps in Jakarta agree on the current reform blueprint. Even India does not enjoy that kind of stable consensus on how to catch China.

With Greg Hunt in Hong Kong

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

making you a bit proud as Indonesian, agree?

lolla's fucked up birthday party - planning

2009-10-13T03:59:00.000-07:00

audy zandri: tes
mas wawan: halo cumi
audy zandri: yeeeeeeeee... cuman sekali!
audy zandri: hoho
audy zandri: lah si agos kok offline?
mas wawan: loh si bubat mane
gooz: am here
andreas : ada
andreas : lanjut lah
audy zandri: sep sep
mas wawan: jadi gimane
gooz: cum lo tlpn s Tika Mraz mba kita perlu satu botol minuman anget neh
gooz: harganya kisaran brp??
audy zandri: trus kalo dia bilang
audy zandri: "yang mana mas?
gooz: klo ama mbanya jd berapa??
mas wawan: bandrek kaleee anget
gooz: ada Vodka Vibe lyche g??
mas wawan: guys serius guys time tiking niy
andreas : gue rasa bilangnya kudu "mbak tika, saya dapet nomernya dari rendy...katanya aku bisa nanya liquor...
audy zandri: iya hmmm iya tuh ndre coba deh lo nelpun gitu he
mas wawan: ya andre juga manis tuh kata2nya
andreas : tai
mas wawan: ada hasil?
andreas : percuma dong dari tadi kita mbujuk2 elo cum
andreas : udah buruan sono
audy zandri: mmm
andreas : biar jelas nih, kalo ga ada, gue sama agus meluncur ke gelael
audy zandri: sayangnya gue ga punya no telpunnya he
mas wawan: udah cum lu aja dah
mas wawan: motor guwe siapin dah tuh tgl ambik konci
andreas : 08170060881 namanya TIKA
audy zandri: bentar
audy zandri: jadi gue telpun nanyain barang
gooz: 08170060881 namanya TIKA
audy zandri: kita mau apaa barangnyaaaa?
andreas : vibe lychee
gooz: Vodka Vibe Lyche
mas wawan: VODKA VIBE rasa lychee
audy zandri: trus beli berapa?
gooz: satu aja men
andreas : tanya dulu berapa harganya
audy zandri: heeeh satu doang?
gooz:
audy zandri: kisarannya berapa?
gooz: klo d bdg sih 180rb an
audy zandri: yo trus kalo dia bilang
mas wawan: *menahan ketawa*
andreas : elo ada duit? kita kan miskin semua cum..mo nelpon aja kudu rame2
audy zandri: "ada mas cumi ganteng, harganya 200, mau berapa?"
gooz: satu mba plus kacang ya
audy zandri: ya dari kantor laaaa
andreas : bajet lo 300 kan gus?
audy zandri: ya wis gue telpun
audy zandri: doain gue yakl
gooz: hahahahhaaa,,,
andreas : gut lak cum
audy zandri: nih udah gue dial
mas wawan: *sedang doain cumi*
audy zandri: sayangnya tuh telpun
andreas : serius kalo bajet lo 300, gu siap nambahin
audy zandri: bilang
audy zandri: "terimakasih, ini adalah layanan kotak suara XL"
mas wawan: guwe tau telpun lu abis pulas kan cum
andreas : hiyaaaaaaaaaaaaa
audy zandri: gue ga paham XL itu ukuran BH ato CD
audy zandri: gue cobain lagi deh
mas wawan: udah deh ini kacrut smwa beli bir item aje
andreas : coba lagi sampe maghrib (biar afdol)
audy zandri: yak
andreas : kalo sampe jam segitu ga bisa juga kita cabut ke gelael gus?
audy zandri: ukurannya tetep XL
audy zandri: he
gooz: MAGNUM
audy zandri: ?
gooz:
audy zandri: wong edan
audy zandri: (mengkuot mbah gue yang potonya gue pajang di twitter kalo ngadepin orang2 sarap kaya kite kite)
mas wawan: udah deh bajet 200 dapet anker 10 tuh nyisa kacang
andreas : sabar cum masi ada sepuluh menit lagi
audy zandri: yo wis lima menit lagi gue perkosa tuh TIKA
mas wawan: sisain dikit buwat guwa
andreas : sementara si cumi mencoba terus kita coba diskusikan pilihan laen
andreas : yang jelas demi memuaskan dahaga yang mulia pangeran bubat kita kudu cari liquor
andreas : option pertama: gelael, di gatsu ada. itu gue yakin.
andreas : option dua: hero. hero mana nih? ada yang tau?
mas wawan: usul! beli anker dapet 13,3 kalo bajet 200rebu @gendul bir15rebu
audy zandri: tapi ngebawa gendul segitu banyak
mas wawan: pake tas dik cumi pake tas
audy zandri: kita musti nyewa mobil box yang ratenya 140 rebu sekali jalan plus supir
andreas : kalo bir itu jelas rencana terakhit, yang jelas si agus butuh liquor
audy zandri: yee emang beer bukan liquor yak?
audy zandri: booz aja
mas wawan: la kalo liquor cuman dapet segendul pan muliut tak berdosa laen gimane
andreas : gue si gapapa ga kebagian...demi agus...nih yang ulang taun sapa sih...!
audy zandri: yia neh
mas wawan: *berdoa buat dre si baek hati nan mulia*
audy zandri: kita tadi secara ga sengaja denger wish lo pas niup "lilin" lo minta oplosan vodka gepeng ma arak bali ye?
andreas : hahah
andreas : udah vodka aja gus kalo cuma mau liat si cumi jakpot mah
audy zandri: LOL
mas wawan: satubuh!
audy zandri: ahk
audy zandri: gue ga doyan vodka
audy zandri: gue doyannya marimas
audy zandri: he
mas wawan: vodka kasih sprite tuh kayak cointreu di panasin cum
mas wawan: kalo pake kopi dapet kahlua...
gooz: move
mas wawan: pake spiritus dapet hell vodka
audy zandri: pake pipis dapet Vodka Art
audy zandri: btw ada source lain yang bisa di tele ha?
audy zandri: ga?
andreas : si tika ga bisa?
andreas : ya udah kita hunting dulu ke gelael sama hero dulu aja gus
andreas : hero mana nih tapinya
audy zandri: tika ga bisa
gooz: aahhh informanya payah
gooz: kyknya kurang tips
gooz: nomernya diilangin satu tuh
gooz:
audy zandri: tau juga tuh
audy zandri: tapi bener kali yak
audy zandri: soalnya itu emang no XL he
gooz: men gw tunggu d posko
audy zandri: lah
andreas : oke cuy
audy zandri: kita barusan aha minggat
audy zandri: lah gue masi ada kerjaan satu lagi
audy zandri: pie ki?
andreas : ambil kunci dulu di simbah
audy zandri: hoo kalian mo lonesome two buy some beer and get boom boom?
andreas : gue sama agus yg berangkat
andreas : iye
audy zandri: yawis
audy zandri: good luck ya men
audy zandri: semoga dapetin tuh
andreas : hehe
audy zandri: vodka squirt rasa licin
gooz: hahahaha
gooz: your squirt
audy zandri:
andreas : tae
andreas : cuih
audy zandri: hekhekhekhek
gooz: ccuuuiiihhhh
audy zandri: udah sono minggat
audy zandri: nunggu apaan si
audy zandri: dasar
audy zandri: wong edan
andreas : gus lo minta konci gih ke mas wawan
andreas : gue masi ribet ni
gooz: ntar gw update status fb dulu
andreas : taeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

walk away and move on

2009-09-16T03:36:00.000-07:00

"walk away and move on" adalah sebuah wallpaper yang gue pernah lihat dari windows, gue pernah nulis tentang ini juga kapan tau.

waktu itu gue bilang kalo ni tagline intinya adalah menghimbau para pemakai windos untuk ngelupain release2 mereka yang gagal dan melanjutkan ke hal hal os yang baru, jaman itu si XP.

entah kenapa wallpaper itu, dengan gambar embak2 pake jeans yang lagi berjalan menjauh, ngeplak banget di kepala gue.

dan sekarang kata2 itu terngiang kembali.

Adalah Novita Veronica Situmorang, cewe cakep, baik, pintar nan seksi yang gue pacarin sekitar 2 tahun ini. Yang meskipun ga pernah terbesit sebuah sair lagu pun untuk nya, sangat gue sayang.

Tapi akhirnya untuk kesekian kali, hubungan ini mesti di akhiri dengan pahit, dan rada menohok.

pernah ada pelem tentang mas mas yang ninggalin cewenya yang devastated di tinggalin karena dia kedapetan menjalin hubungan gelap ma lelaki lain yang tak lama kemudian ninggalin dia, kindda ring a bell..

di pelem itu, nasehat yang di dapat mas mas itu adalah.. "at least when she fell, you will be the one who catch her, and not somebody else.."

dan mas itu pun balik ke cewe itu dan pelem itu berakhir..

hmmm.. life is so fucked up sometimes isn't it?

I really don’t know love at all

2009-09-08T05:48:00.001-07:00

When Maggie at one time decided to go to Solo with her cousin, out of reasons I can’t yet to recall, something was wrong. It was stupid this thing I thought love. I used to buy her one and sometimes a bunch of chocolate bars just to show how much I like her smile and her company.

It was raining quite heavily and I can’t reached her or find her everywhere. I remember going to her house and venturing the whole university but found no clue whatsoever of her existence. And this cousin of hers was like a personal bodyguard. That when somebody, him too I can’t recall, was telling me about her possible whereabouts, I was angry and confused.

It was completely naive, that we’ve been dating for three to four months in an unofficial term, we knew we had each other. At least that’s how I remembered it. And through out the afternoon was torments, I remember got very angry at what happen, singing to a thrash song just to be able to scream.

What nobody understood was the fact that at that very night I went to Solo, which is a three hour ride by bus.

I was already broke it up with her a week later. We took a walk for the entire evening and at the end of the night she said that she loves me. I didn’t say anything, but she was a ghost for me the day after. And now, probably six years after that, she’s been officially dating that cousin, probably planning to make babies and got married in secrecy.

No, this is not about how man can be cold sometimes, or woman can be so stupidly obvious, this is about making a decision.

I dated quite many girls back in hey days, and each one was such a lovely creature. One of them was Hapsari, some one I know nothing about yet brought the most impact in my life. Falling in love at the first sight back in my first hour of college, she was a star to a turtle and a moon for the wolves.

It wasn’t soon before we finally know each other. And in a way I feel like my feelings for her grew like grasses in dump site, like nothing is strong enough to stop them. But at one point she disappeared, broke my heart in pieces, and I can never forgive her for that.

I saw her holding a guy’s waist coming out of the guy’s boarding house. She saw me and look away, that’s when I realize that the grasses had burned, to disappointment and disgust. She would try to stop me at certain occasions, and I would say hi and let go of my hand from her. And for months I would have this massive pimple problems resulted from severe sleep deprivation. The traces of the rain would dry, but I loved her more than everything in those days.

And Oppie, my beautiful Bataknese angel, whom I dated these couple of years, had apparently fallen for this guy she met at a recent trip to Malaysia. It’s a stupid joke now how Malaysia didn’t only claim our songs, our traditional dances and parts of our land, but it also claims my woman.

I remember the first movie we watched on our first date, the biggest burger I’ve eaten my whole life. I remember what she ordered and tried hard to finish, showing that she always finishes her meal –I learn in later days that she never finishes her meal.

I remember the green dress she wore on our second date, how I can’t stop staring at her, the sweet smell of her blue blouse on our third date to Dufan, our first kiss, our second kisses in my sister’s boarding house and the whole history of it, our New Years, our way of showing affections.

I remember how we used to talk until it was so late to go home, that I’d have to walk miles before finally entering different angkots to Depok from Senen, reaching my boarding house at about three o’clock in the morning to go to work four hours later to Senen. It was crazy but I guess that was the ideals of love in our older days.

I remember the park. But I guess all of these were way in the past when we’re talking about her feelings in the present. And the present is me, trying to squeeze her in within the bulk of my workload, meeting her at weekends and some nights to fill the blank, and her, missing the embrace of what appear to be a myth for me, her ideal imagery of love I can’t seem to provide.

I didn’t see it coming. Even when it lingers on, I was so stupid to notice it, and when it’s done, I guess it’s done, and should be unwind.

What happened was a testament of how love sometimes is the enemy, the wrong star to follow, the poison in heaven’s neck. That it didn’t exist to lead you to the happy ending, but to lose you somewhere in between.

---

“Fears and dreams and ferry’s wheel,
the dizzy dancing wails that you feel,
as every fairy tail comes smooth,
I’ve looked at love that way.

But now it’s just another show,
and you leave them laughing when you go,
but if you can don’t let them know,
don’t give yourself away.

I look at love from both sides now,
from give and take,
but still somehow,
it is love’s illusion that I recall.
I really don’t know love.”

from Karen

2009-09-04T02:10:00.000-07:00

"If you were in my position what would you do? Would you stay, knowing that life would be a bit worse? or would you cut and run? You’ve made a fool of me."

kopano

2009-08-17T14:16:00.000-07:00

rona ma Africa
ratanga ka kopano
batho ba Africa
ngothando sizongoba ma Africa

eya batheo beso
oh ngothando sizophumelela

so it goes

2009-08-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

turn down the lights, turn down the bed
turn down these voices inside my head
lay down with me, tell me no lies
just hold me close, don't patronize - don't patronize me

cause I cant make you love me if you don't
you cant make your heart feel something it wont
here in the dark, in these lonely hours
I will lay down my heart and Ill feel the power
but you wont, no you wont

cause I cant make you love me, if you don't

Ill close my eyes, then I wont see
the love you don't feel when you're holding me
morning will come and Ill do whats right
just give me till then to give up this fight
and I will give up this fight

cause I cant make you love me if you don't
you cant make your heart feel something it wont
here in the dark, in these lonely hours
I will lay down my heart and Ill feel the power
but you wont, no you wont

cause I cant make you love me, if you don't

blame it on my youth

2009-08-12T05:40:00.000-07:00

I wish I was born rich, because that types of quality, of to be rich is in the upbringing. Or at least in a family where opinions are valued no matter how clumsy they are.

I guess I'm regretting the past where I wasn't having that quality to make the right choices, or the wrong choices and have enough guts to just go with them -like dating one of the most gorgeous looking bitch.. well probably the most wonderful looking babe with enough personal quality in high school and see what it will become in the future.

I couldn't even say no to the possibility of being larger than who I was at that time, though it eventually turned out to become such hell on my side, finally understand how insecure I was.

Even now, that daring attitude, of just saying what you have in mind and telling it convincingly no matter what the outcome, is a quality that I don't have. Silent is good, but sometimes what you need is enough courage, to be loud and to be disturbing.

Let's not talking about accomplishments, but lets talk about past failures that impact on traumatic behaviors.

Apple don't fall far from its tree, and I always have that fear of turning out like my dad. And because he's the type of guy that eventually left you, I always have that insecurity of being left. Like when everybody's saying that they're leaving, it always struck me with things like "shit, he/she is moving on to a higher ground!" and that sucks because here I am, sticking.

In a way I feel like walking away and move on, before sticking too long, and in a way I feel like fleeting to something new, something temporary.

wait, was that a pick up line?

2009-07-28T07:27:00.000-07:00

btw, you won't believe what I'm going to tell you.

so I was on a flight to Jakarta from Singapore the other day, Visa made a commercial. I was sitting at row 32 A, obviously besides the window. besides me was this cute 3 year old American/Indonesian girl and his American dad, and when the SQ stewardess is picking up our plates, respectively, -she's been smiling to me before when she's handing out my dish- she smiled at me and start MAKING A CONVERSATION?!.. this is the transcript

hot stewardess aboard the SQ: "I think you look cute in that T-shirt, I think you should write your name and address in case of emergency"

me, who was wearing a shirt written 'if lost/drunk, please send to this address..': (smiling and feeling a bit odd) "yeah.. in case I got drunk"

the same hot stewardess: "haha, you know my friend also have the same T-shirt. Did you get it in Singapore?"

me, whom at the time feeling even more odd as the caucasian guy on the end of the row is giving us the stare: (confused a bit) "yeah, in some store"

I remember her looking a bit bashful as the caucasian guy keep giving us the stare which probably translates "not in front of the kid?!" and after giving a hint of a smile, she left with a funny expression

what a weird situation that was. I mean, I don't remember any SQ stewardess making some small talk with its passengers, and the way she said "you look cute in that T-shirt" man, was that even a pick up line?!

anyways, I feel a lot cuter afterward haha

not one night

2009-07-27T04:23:00.000-07:00

I used to dream of only you
now I don't do that.
I used to miss talkin' to you
oh, now I don't do that.

Since you've been gone I learned to stop
tryin' to hold on because

there's not one night, one single day
that I wouldn't give to you.
So with all my might in every way,
I'll try to forget you too.

I thought you could tell me anything
yeah, you used to do that.
You let me inside of everything
yeah, you used to do that.

Never to change at least I thought
it feels so strange because

there's not one night, one single day
that I wouldn't give to you.
So with all my might in every way,
I'll try to forget you too.

Loneliness may come knockin' at my door
where I'm comin' from that don't phase me anymore.
Time has shed a little light on where I'm supposed to be
there ain't no used in thinking you'll come running back to me.

Since you've been gone I learned to stop
tryin' to hold on because

there's not one night, one single day
that I wouldn't give to you.
So with all my might in every way,
I'll try to forget you too.

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

betapa gue dulu sucker for Mr. Big, dan ini salah satu lagu fav gue dari album the best mereka yang keluar tahun 1996, Big Bigger Bigest. Semoga mereka mainin ni lagu ntar pas konser reuni, amiin

delicate

2009-07-22T05:29:00.000-07:00

We might kiss when we are alone
When nobody's watching
We might take it home
We might make out when nobody's there
It's not that we're scared
It's just that it's delicate

So why'd you fill my sorrows
With the words you've borrowed
From the only place you've known
And why'd ya sing Hallelujah
If it means nothing to you
Why'd you sing with me at all?

We might live like never before
When there's nothing to give
Well how can we ask for more
We might make love in some sacred place
The look on your face is delicate

So why'd you fill my sorrow
With the words you've borrowed
From the only place that you've known
And why'd you sing Hallelujah
If it means nothing to you
Why'd you sing with me at all?

And why'd you fill my sorrows
With the words you've borrowed
From the only place that you've known
Why'd you sing Hallelujah
If it means nothing to you
Why'd you sing with me at all?

lagunya Damien Rice.. so delicate.. bye mba Emm, I will miss you..

love lost

2009-07-21T07:22:00.000-07:00

"did you ever regret leaving?"

he knew he did, yet he wanted to hear it from his lips

a father longing for his children's love in his old days. he's done some mistakes back in the hey day, and as time's pass, he's seeking faint forgiveness, followed by acceptance.

not so complicated

so he left, at the children's early age, and never return, realizing how lousy he was at this stuff of fatherhood, or probably fatherhood wasn't that much of a thing, he probably just looking for an escape, a new life.

and years after that, after years of flowing life, in the calm ocean that flew in one direction, he regretted it.

he probably regretted it, or probably wished that in a way love remains, that these kids will always be his kids.

and when love is lost, the general notion would build you that fortress of ego. or when you finally break it down, there's that unforgiving notion from whence it came.

to accept the fact that it's gone is to accept the loneliness it brings, the stillness of being in void. but try to get it back, to force your way in is a futile effort that will bring you much pain.

so what if you do regret it, you have no guts to say it. and what if you finally say it, nothing can change the past.

you're a stranger and that's the way it is, but it's not over yet, is it?

we'd still have to inevitably hurt you to show you that what's gone is gone, and that what's lost can not be found.

but if you had the chance to redo all the things, would you take the other way?
you might, but what become of us?

fuucked, you're fucked

2009-07-21T06:50:00.000-07:00

you love her and you feel like running away
she holds your heart and you seem like melting away

how, this distance makes no sense

and skies wasn't that big of an escape
loneliness don't seem that liberating

how, this distance makes no sense

when smoke starts taste like meat, and it blows you a way
and tears keep drown your heart in each of its way

fucked,
you're fucked

what if God safe you a spot in his little hell?
you know He's got enough power to plunge you in

fucked
you're fucked

you're fucked

I don't mind (nothing will be born from hatred)

2009-07-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

with their innocence, a child killed a man, I don't mind
nothing will be born from hatred

and you keep it pressured, deep in your heart, I don't mind
nothing will be born from hatred

if you see the world it shines, the stars conjuring lights
and the sun will rise in precision, so do castles in clouds
and here we lay it down
with our intense fear of lost
I don't mind
I don't mind

would you forgive what's done, would you mind, I don't mind
nothing will be born from hatred

and let the hours pass by, with tranquil and peace, I don't mind
nothing will be born

from curses, from anger, from far stretched emotion
from scolds, from fists, they destroyed

and in such pain that erupts, she burnt her children, I don't mind
nothing will be born from hatred

and so did he, left a hole in our heart, by leaving
nothing will be born from hatred

nothing will be born from hatred

nothing will be born from hatred

so close

2009-07-06T09:43:00.000-07:00

You're in my arms
And all the world is calm
The music playing on for only two
So close together
And when I'm with you
So close to feeling alive

A life goes by
Romantic dreams must die
So I bid mine goodbye and never knew
So close was waiting, waiting here with you
And now forever I know
All that I want is to hold you
So close

So close to reaching that famous happy ending
Almost believing this one's not pretend
And now you're beside me and look how far we've come
So far, we are, so close

How could I face the faceless days
If I should lose you now?
We're so close
To reaching that famous happy ending
Almost believing this one's not pretend
Let's go on, on dreaming for we know we are
So close
So close
And still so far

------------------------------
it's a soundtrack to a dance scene done beautifully in the movie entitled Enchanted. I liked the way he started the song, but soon the acting started to breathe life into the song, making it the best part of the movie.. shit, I'm a sucker for romantic comedies.. :(

about flying

2009-06-02T08:18:00.000-07:00

hihi

neh T-Shirts tentang airways yang diganti jadi "cimeng". Bayangin logonya dibentuk seperti logo aselinya juga

Cimeng Air
We Make People Fly

Cimeng Asia
Now Everyone Can Fly

and some more about global warming

Support Global Warming
Reset the Earth
because frankly, it's better without us

and other stuff about being an environmentalist

Love pets, feed him --->

hell is coming..

2009-05-26T02:56:00.000-07:00

Jesus is coming, look busy

Hell is coming, get a fridge

Armageddon's coming, get a tattoo

Beer, making beautiful people fuckable since 1976

Beer, making assholes shit their pants since 1976

save water, drink less (eh udah yak?)

kopi berbunga

2009-05-09T12:46:00.000-07:00

buat Sunday kapan, karena terlalu memaksa diri mengeluarkan sebuah karya yang bagus, jadi nya malah jelek hihi, yo wis lah

kissing you

2009-04-21T06:08:00.000-07:00

pride can stand a thousand trials
the strong will never fall
but watching stars without you
my soul cries

heaving heart is full of pain
the aching

touch me deep, pure and true
give to me forever

Introducing, Adidas Microbounce+ FH 08!!!

2009-03-26T05:02:00.000-07:00

yohoooo hehehe

seneng gue gokiiil!!

dikarenakan umur sepatu Gastra kebanggaan gue yang ternyata tak selama yang gue pikir, sole -nya udah pada krepes dan pada lepas dari kulitnya, air juga gampang mrembes, dan kalo di pake kelamaan kaki jadi pegel.. (hayah ini mah ngada2) gue memutuskan sudah saatnya membeli sepatu baru huuuuuhuhuhuuhu

dikarenakan yaa kadang kita emang ngabisin duit banyak buat liburan, buat beayain adik beli kain buat kawinan, ngasi duit nyokap buat jajan jajan (heyeh) ada kalanya kita yang bekerja banting tulang sore malam ini memanjakan diri sendiri dengan membeli sepatu yang yaa emang rada mahalan dikit sii.. (untung di counter adidas lagi diskon jadi ya ga mahal mahal amat.. tapi yaaa semua semua itu emang kalo dipikir kemahalan..)

tapi pas di coba rasanya bener bener enak, kaki terasa melayang (ini hiperbole) dan tampang di kaca jadi rada kebantu.. meski kalo diterusin ke muka dan rambut di jamin kecewa huehehe

pilihan pertama sebenernya jatuh ke sepatu item kulit adidas yang kalo di toko lain harganya masi delapan ratusan, tapi di counter itu entah gimana jadi 400 rebuan.. naaah pas mo di beli ada bapak2 yang kayanya pengen banget beli tuh sepatu setelah tau tuh sepatu mau gue beli haha.. ngotot gitu, yo wis laah biar tuh bapak seneng, kalo kena serangan jantung kan berabe gue.. ntar ntar kalo tuh counter punya sepatu begituan lagi gue beli (hayah) (gue ga tau namanya, jadi ga bisa ngasi gambarnya. padahal udah sok nge google2 ala kadarnya looh, sayang sekali (T,T)) -sehari kemudian: eh gue berhasil dapet tuh sepatu!! yang item gambar2nya kecil2 jadi ya seadanya aja yaah, dapet yang coklat si, tapi biar ga misleading dipasang yang di ebay aja hehe ---->)

Naaah.. pilihan kedua jatuh pada sepatu adidas yang lain (namanya juga counter adidas, ya pasti sepatu adidas, masa bata..) yaitu Fulton Low!!! (apa maksudnya coba kasi tanda seru)

berikut gambarnya -->

tapiii.. berhubung gue udah punya sepatu putih.. (ato tepatnya coklat sekarang)
gue ga jadi ambil, dan memutuskan ke sepatu laen, yaitu.....

Adidas Microbounce+ FH 08!!!

(yang alhamdulilah ternyata emang sepatu buat cowo huehehe)

berikut gambarnya dari berbagai malaikat (angel) -->

keren kaaan hueheheh.. kenapa warnanya rada kuning? karena yang putih ukurannya tinggal 44.5 (yang kalo harganya cuman 30rebu, pasti gue beli huehehe ya ga piuu?)

naah dilemanyaa.. nih sepatu kan kalo ga buat fitnes buat lari, gue rencananya yaa pake ni sepatu buat dolan dolan gitu.. aneh ga yaaa.. ah cuek aja hehe.. secara.. mahaaaal (seberapa mahal siii...? rahasia ciing..)

Asthma dan hal hal yang mengikutinya

2009-03-20T10:04:00.000-07:00

gue ga pernah bener2 ke dokter untuk ngecek astma, juga ga tau apakah yang gue alami adalah asthma yang sejati, tapi kalo ngelihat definisinya di kamus, yang notabene adalah sakit pernafasan akut, maka niscaya gue emang dari jaman jebot udah kena asthma. tapi biar aman, karena gue juga ga yakin, mending kita sebut penyakit ini dengan kata 'tendang.'

naah beres.

sebenernya penyakit 'tendang' gue udah ga pernah gue rasain lagi sejak gue pindah ke jakarta, karena yaa mungkin hawanya panas. Soalnya, pas di salatiga, sering banget gue sesak nafas kalo 1. kedinginan banget
2. habis nyapu2 yang debunya banyak banget
3. habis bangun tidur dan pilek

tapi beberapa saat yang lalu, pas salatiga bener2 dingin, karena kecapaian motoin sepupu2 yang pada narcist, tiba tib entah dari mana, munculah gejala gokil yang bikin gue heran, gue sesak nafas!! kaya seluruh saluran pernafasan gue keluar lendir yang menghambat jalannya udara ke paru2. dan kalo tuh lendir berhasil di keluarin, dengan cara dibatukin ampe muka merah mata mo keluar, pernafasan gue jadi lebih lancar bentar, ampe tuh saluran ngeluarin lendir lagi tentunya.

gokil ga si?

gue pikir ga akan berlanjut, tapi ternyata gue ga pernah sembuh. ampe sekarang masi.

jadi yaaa.. seperti orang orang yang terkena HIV dan Kanker, gue merasa musti berdamai ma penyakit gue ini.. dan membiarkannya dan mencoba melihat hal hal yang tersembunyi dibaliknya.. kalo ada.. tapi ada beberapa hal yang berhasil gue temuin.

1. 'tendang' bisa mempengaruhi mimpi

pernah gue mimpi tenggelam di laut, badan gue tak bergerak di dalam cairan biru kental yang dalam, gue ga bisa gerak tapi gue idup, semua berwarna biru kegelapan, dan gue ga bisa nafas. ga ada plastik yang ngebungkus muka gue, ga ada jepet jemuran yang menutup hidung gue, dan ga ada ceceran lem super, gue ga bisa menarik nafas, ga bisa ngehembusin nafas..

dan gue pun terbangun.

pernah juga ngimpi di pantai, kosong dan langit berwarna kekuningan, gue terdiam menghadap ombak yang tak bergerak. dan apa yang terjadi? gue ga bisa nafas! tiap tarikan nafas seperti upaya untuk menyedot lautan dan matahari yang ga hidup, gue mencoba dan mencoba, tapi matahari tak mau bergerak, lautan tak mau berombak, dan udara tak mau masuk, butir butir keringat gue mulai menetes tapi tak ada udara yang masuk, seolah2 tak ada lagi atmosphere, gue terjebak di sebuah pantai tanpa lapisan udara!!

dan gue pun terbangun.

cara terbaik untuk mengatasi 'tendang' gue ternyata adalah dengan berfikir positive kalo kumatnya ga bakal lama, berdiam diri di luar menghirup udara segar malam hari dan minum air dingin yang banyak.. ato anget..

-bersambung-

for the many times, I'm not gay

2009-03-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

out of joke, a friend once considered himself lucky that he's not just appealing for the female off the species, but also the male. approximately a year later he said that he's in love with me.

our friendship collapsed, and we're no longer in touch. about four years after that we're back on our beaten track, threading a new line of being brothers, but the friendship was stale.

somewhere around 2004/5 a friend offered me to be a high class prostitute, for the guys. it was of course ridiculous, but he can't help thinking why; I'd be popular.

there's one absolute reason to all this; I'm not gay.

it's awfully awkward to ever have to explain about your sexual orientation, because gays can apparently spot other gays, and somewhere in their innate God given radar, there was me.

there's gay talk, gay walk, and all that stuff fall under gay attitudes, and it's not that hard to spot them through these, and it is apparent to me that I've got these little ickies within me that put me in between. some signs they thought they spot that they'd have to confirm whether I'm with them or not.

something like Chandler. yet, I'm more on the edge of things than safe.

it doesn't really seem important whatever defenses I have. even my profound adoration to both breasts and wonderfully crafted ass was futile. when your reasons cannot explain you further, ask yourself and find the answer; I don't find the male of the species interesting sexually.

a simple example, on how some people know how to talk, to be eloquent, but not that they're sexually appealing through that. we wish to be that eloquent, but that doesn't necessarily mean we want to date them.

an add once hit me saying "what's important is love, not whether you're a man or a woman," how beautiful it is if it was true, but deep in me I know it's way impossible, that's how far I am from being a gay.

and no matter how interesting a man is, the idea of being close to them as more than just colleague is absurd to me. disgusting in a way that our skin would have to touch, the biology never feels right.

the face of a woman, their eyes, the way they looked at you, how things are comforting with their simple little things, that's not reasons why a man should ever love a woman.

I've got no reason why a woman for me is more appealing than man, it just happened to be the way it is for me.

I can't explain it, but I know I feel it; I'm not gay

if we weren't meant to be together

2009-03-03T11:25:00.000-08:00

if we weren't meant to be together at least,
i can see your hair from here
and your smile at rare occasions

if we weren't meant to walk together at least,
the touches of your skin are rare, thus soothing at times

and i can always see you from a distance

if we weren't meant to understand each other at least,
we're smiling at each other
share laugh together

and days would pass with hints of you throughout
and nights flow with me hoping for tomorrow

for that sparkle you take my heart with,
though if we weren't meant to be together
at least