Slip vs. Skip

While most people may lose some sleep over contemplation on grave matters, Sleeping Sixty lost hers because she’s busy pondering the difference between the word slip and skip.

Sleeping Sixty is a 28 year old woman with the enthusiasm of an 18 year old and gullibility of an 8 year old. She is an expert snoozer and is always on the six of all things tasty, hence the name Sleeping Sixty (so sixty is not how much she weighs). Her mind is sadly clouded with paraphasia, a type of language output error. That means she can say cupang (hickey) while what she means is cuping (lobe), two very different things. She can also say towel or milk while in fact she’s trying to say antibiotics, proving the severity of her condition. I once read her message in horror when we were talking about a spirit haunting the laboratory. She told me to whisper her regards into the apparition’s dens caninus (fang) when she really meant auricula (ear). I, for one, certainly don’t want to be anywhere near the ghost, let alone her fangs.

It is not strange then to have Sleeping Sixty awake in the middle of the night thinking about slip vs. skip. She knew that both words were very different, yet she couldn’t figure out why they felt eerily similar. She tried to come up with different examples on how both words could be used interchangeably, but ended up empty handed. Sentences like “We just skip this night” vs. “We just slip this night” or “The meat slipped between her teeth” and “The meat skipped between her teeth” crossed her mind but they just didn’t work.

I, who happened to be an innocent bystander messaging her at the time, was also unenthusiastically dragged into the problem. Slip usually means “to fall” (she slips over the puddle of water, the profit slips in November) or “to move quietly” (he slips through the night). Skip, on the other hand, usually means “to hop” (he skips on the road when he is happy) or “to omit” (she skips breakfast). In a glance, there’s really nothing in common about the two, yet I too secretly felt what Sleeping Sixty felt. There’s a sense of similarity between the words.

It wasn’t until the next day that I found out an example where the two words could actually be used interchangeably. It is for describing the word attention. For instance, "The matter slipped my attention" vs. "The matter skipped my attention." In it, the word slip and skip may have different meanings (“to move [out] quietly” vs. “to omit”) but the end result is the same. Both sentences mean that one matter is devoid of my attention.

Sleeping Sixty turned out to be right. There are times when the words bring out the same meaning. Another example, although basically the same, is for describing the word mind. For instance, "Sleeping Sixty rarely slips my mind" vs. "Sleeping Sixty rarely skips my mind." It’s a terrible example, I know, but you’ve got the point.

Pertapaan Santa Maria Rawaseneng 15

Mad Max: Fury Road, 'the' Eye Candy

Mad Max; Fury Road is an eye candy so sweet, it's deemed to give you diabetes. It has one of the simplest plots in a movie: let's take our heroes in a ride, race them with baddies, and see what happens. But the same seemingly senseless plot acts as a plate to serve what it really aims, a full-time visual spectacle.

It has diverse gimmicky characters, from the horrendous ventilator-assisted grandpa, to the wacky fiery guitarist, and finally to the war-cyclist grandmas. It's as if all the characters in Mortal Kombat, or Kill Bill, or The Raid decided to do a destructive car chase.

And the car chase, oh my... There were trucks, armored cars, motorcycles, god-knows-what scrapped vehicles, hooks, chains, poles, and obviously spilled gasoline. Try imagine them in one picture, and that's what you get.

Sometimes there is meat hidden in the dressing, but in Mad Max: Fury Road, the main course 'is' the dressing. And it is a beautiful one. In the midst of movies with hidden meanings and heavy plot, this is a welcome break. Sometimes all we need is a movie where you can scream, "Holy sh*t!"

"To be loved is great, but to love is great too...!"

- Ifir

And why not?
It involves the action and actualization of me, arguably the most important person we have to deal with in our lives.

Natuna: A Brief Account on Accidents

Three things happened to me while I was in Natuna. I didn’t lose my life, I met an old man, and I lost something dear. All of them involved accidents. Only one is still giving me aches. Two I will write.

The first case is when my life failed to escape me. It had something to do with a car, stumbling backwards, out of control, and down a hill. The engine was dead and the brake was loose. On the car’s right and behind was a cliff. After that, it was a descend of several hundred feet.

There were five of us. We were going out. I remember my glasses were thrown out of the car through the open window. I remember thinking that that was it.
And I remember the car finally stopped before plunging into the ravine.

Minutes before the crash

The accident left us with a broken nose, a torn up upper lip, four disoriented people, and one badass. The badass wasn’t me. It was the first time my legs couldn’t stop trembling, something that I thought had something to do with the steep ground but turned out to be purely hormonal. I was filled with adrenaline.
So no, the badass wasn’t me. The badass was a woman-friend, someone who could see and examine a new patient while we were still admitted to the emergency room, despite the presence of other active-duty doctors, someone who turned out having a habit of snoring on the floor like an exhausted Viking after a raid, and someone who after that said sleep, rose full alert like a Viking on raid day. And she didn’t get hurt in the accident either, which hinted her Vikingly constitution (I’m sorry for the references, I’m hooked with the History Channel show).

Anyway, the experience should count as a near death experience. And as it should, it made me grateful to be alive. It got me to be more cautious, though. I had always been a naive-everything-will-turn-out-fine kind of person. But after the event, even the view of brewing rain before a flight disturbed me. Not to the point of Final Destination visions, but still disturbing. It is a good disturbance I think. It will keep me from doing anything stupid.

The second case didn’t really involve an accident in the sense of the vehicular one. It was only a thing that happened by chance. We (the same culprits involved with the car crash) were visiting a beautiful spot on the beach that had immense round stones scattered around. Out of nowhere, out of darkness, we were greeted by an old man. This is not a ghost story and he was certainly not a ghost. We just didn’t see him because he was standing on a lower level. He turned out to be the owner of the place who was by chance visiting to inspect the place.

The old man

He showed us around and told us his visions about the place, what he wanted to do to make it better. I loved hearing what he had to say. I didn’t know it then but now I think I liked his stories because he represented what I had wanted in life. He was working a project he loved by heart, he seemed to love his wife, and he was filled with gratitude and respect for the realities. He looked like an idealist and yet he looked content. It almost seemed contradictory, the idealism and the real world. But he seemed to pull it through. I want that. I do.

The third case doesn’t have anything to do with vehicles but rather with chances too. It is also the one with aches. However, as I said above, it is a story for another time.

In short, Natuna was great. It’s got its drawbacks but generally it was good. I like how you don’t need to go far to find natural landscapes. I like how everything goes pitch black in the night. I like how the place is not packed with people. I even like how I could see the blue ocean line behind my lodge, peeking through the tight branches of trees. Although of course, after the Viking woman told me that it was actually someone’s blue-colored roof, the view had been a turn-off.

Still, I’m grateful.
Glad I got to experience everything.
I just wish I didn’t have all these deadlines choking me the minute I got back.

Natuna 15

The Burning Meadow

The meadow was on fire. Flames started abruptly, anywhere, in various patches. Their color wasn’t yellow, it was white. The meadow had several stones laid down on it, forming a path and a small sitting area. Flames would form on the grass between the stones, but never on the stones themselves. The sky was dark, and everything was tinted in blue.

I ran as fast as I could, collecting my items scattered across the grass. The grass was green, bluish green with the light, but yet I thought to myself, “This may be an event of spontaneous combustion considering how dry the plants are.” I picked up my laptop cable which was already in a small flame. I panically tried to extinguish it by tapping the cable to the ground. “I hope it’s not broken,” I said to myself. I couldn’t find my laptop.

Suddenly I noticed a soldier in the viccinity. That soldier again, I had met him before. His uniform indicated he was a World War II soldier. The soldier was going to a log cabin that protruded from the hill. The door was large and round, and it had red and blue checkered pattern on it. The soldier knocked the door hardly, but nothing happened. It stayed shut. Somehow I knew, he was looking for his lover.

The log was above my level area. So there was nothing I could do. I wasn’t permitted to go inside yet. To open it, one had to acquire the key from the gnomes who lived in the next cabin. The cabin was just like the first, but less colorful. It was the cabin I was headed to, all running and panicking. I wanted to put my burned items there before I searched for more.

The soldier had to know that the gnomes in my cabin held the key, because after failing, he went straight to it. He arrived before I did, and knocked the round door hardly. It opened, and showed that its inside was divided into two levels, a higher half of circle and a lower one. A gnome was standing on the higher half. To my surprise, he was large, maybe even larger than me. He’s just shaped like an ordinary gnome. He wore long pants with straps and a shirt with long sleeves and vertical stripes. His clothes looked old, and they looked like something a lumberjack would wear in children’s stories.

The gnome parted his mouth but didn’t produce any sound. Perhaps he was about to say something to the new guest before the soldier stopped him. The soldier had pulled out his small caliber gun and put it up, right in front of the gnome’s face. “Where is the crystal key?” he asked. “I need to find my girl!”

-April 18th, 2015-