Reality

Infinity times infinity.
No words suffice.

The Omen

Rain has been pouring heavily for the past few days, putting my neighborhood in a constant threat of flood.

My friends' relationships crumble to dust, leaving a trace of broken hearts.

A friend of a friend's car had a short circuit that broke into a real fire and real smoke.

A series of random unrelated contained events?

Perhaps.
Or maybe it's something else entirely.

Sometimes, the bad things around us happen as a natural and logical consequence of another bad thing,

which is exactly what happens to my world right now.

Yep,

Rick has come back to town.

Lembang 10

I took these in Lembang.
I should have taken pictures of natural landscape considering the spot, but my mood was going for objects.
I'm not a photographer (I don't think I can even be called an amateur one), that's why they're mediocre.
However, the experience made me realize how objects could be interesting.
Especially after a friend of mine bought a new camera and a very wide lens. It has a fixed aperture of 1/1.8 I think.
Blah.
This interest must wait.

A Series of Sketchshots

This is the first time I ever put a sketch of a friend's face on my blog.

The reason for it is because I was planning to make it more than just a sketch.
I wanted to create a group of stills that would display a character's vivid moments, hence make it easier for people to relate even when they didn't know who the character was.
But that was, of course, just a wishful thinking.

Rather than a group of four rectangles, I should have used a group of nine squares.
It would certainly make the job harder (even with the four rectangles, the space to draw the faces became so small that I had to sharpen my pencil over and over again just to get the little details right - and even now, I still think people who know her won't recognize her immediately), BUT it can be solved by using a bigger paper (A3).
I think it would somewhat deliver the message better.

Some other time perhaps.

A BRAND NEW Reflection on Relationships

I once wrote that a true relationship can only be reached when there is a common ground. The closer the common ground is to our hearts (beliefs, perspectives, what we love), the better it becomes.

In a way, I still believe that.

However, yesterday I found out an interesting take on a SIMILAR subject in a work.
In the work, the writer wanted to determine what really constituted a FRIENDSHIP.
He tried to do this by observing the ones around him.
From his observation, he noticed that people of different nature had good friendships. So, he concluded that differences between the persons involved were the ones that constituted a friendship.
In other words, differences make a relationship work.
Besides, differences give people a chance to complement each other, right?

However, as time went by, he found that people with more things in common also had good friendships, and even at occasions, better than some who didn’t.
This finding put the previous answer in shaky grounds.
Do differences really constitute a friendship? Or do things in common that really do the job?

He gave it another thought,
and finally he was able to reach a conclusion.

In Greater Sense

Have you experienced something like this?

• There's a well-known saying or sentence.
• Somewhere along your life, you suddenly find a much deeper meaning in that sentence, and you begin to see why it is so popular in the first place.
• You feel excited, ecstatic about this new understanding that has been revealed to you.
• You call your friend, telling him/her about it, hoping he/she will get the excitement that you get.
• But you're left disappointed, upset, and frustrated because your friend doesn't see your perspective. He/she is trapped in the popularity of the sentence, failing to see something valuable because it is heard too many times.
• So in frustration you say, "No, there's a wholly deeper meaning to it. If you see it, you'll get fired up like I do."
• "Okay," your friend says. "So tell me then."
• You open your mouth, but lo and behold, you can't find any words to explain it.
• And after a while of silence, you have no choice but saying that very same sentence again, no words added or subtracted, only with louder voice.
• And your friend replies, "Of course. I know that. It's obvious, isn't it?

Aaargh!
I hate it when it happens.

A couple of days ago, I had it TWO times in a day! One's involving a philosophical idea (not gonna touch it), and one's about Indonesia.

This is what I said.

Someone to Ignore Me

I have this female friend.
We barely see each other, and even if we did, we would just drown ourselves in consuming what's on the table in front of us or watching our surroundings.
In a way, she's not a best friend to me, and neither am I to her (I think).
However, I always consider my relationship with her as... something unique.

Why?

Because she's close enough for me to share the deeper things, but not close enough to get me hurt if she doesn't listen at all, which she most likely will.
It's not that she completely ignores me, she hears me, in fact, she listens attentively, it's only that she just doesn't take it all by heart.
Or basically, she doesn't give a shit.

I know how bad it looks, but actually, it can be helpful sometimes.
Especially in times when I feel like my head is going to explode and I'm already jaded of going through every bit of the problem over and over again.
When I decided to talk to her, occasionally, her stance would get to my perspective.
I would come to realize that the once-larger-than-universe-problem was something that didn't deserve my full throttle attention and worries.
Cool, isn't it?

Yeah well, anyway, I don't recommend doing that to your friends who desperately need you though.
You can turn up gambling for your friends' life for all you know.