The Best Place to Be

Only quotes this time, taken from the movie Chef and Apollo 13.

"...I'm, like, fucking lost."

"I think that's a good place to start."

- Carl and Molly in Chef

Television Reporter: Is there a specific instance in an airplane emergency when you can recall fear?

Jim Lovell: Uh well, I'll tell ya, I remember this one time - I'm in a Banshee at night in combat conditions, so there's no running lights on the carrier. It was the Shrangri-La, and we were in the Sea of Japan and my radar had jammed, and my homing signal was gone... because somebody in Japan was actually using the same frequency. And so it was - it was leading me away from where I was supposed to be. And I'm lookin' down at a big, black ocean, so I flip on my map light, and then suddenly: zap. Everything shorts out right there in my cockpit. All my instruments are gone. My lights are gone. And I can't even tell now what my altitude is. I know I'm running out of fuel, so I'm thinking about ditching in the ocean. And I, I look down there, and then in the darkness there's this uh, there's this green trail. It's like a long carpet that's just laid out right beneath me. And it was the algae, right? It was that phosphorescent stuff that gets churned up in the wake of a big ship. And it was - it was - it was leading me home. You know? If my cockpit lights hadn't shorted out, there's no way I'd ever been able to see that. So uh, you, uh, never know... what... what events are to transpire to get you home.

First Words of 2013

Do you remember the first words you say on new year? I usually don’t, but I remember mine last night, all thanks to the cat.

When the clock almost hit midnight last night, we were on a KFC spot on Kemang. She had this whole vow not to eat mammals and fowls but that day she was breaking it. I wasn’t hungry so I stayed outside while she was ordering food. The joint was festal and very loud because it’s in South Jakarta where even, I lie you not, fast food joints have their own sexy dancers. However, besides dancers, the KFC I was on also have this fireworks display going. That’s why I was outside, because I wanted to see it. And that’s why she was inside, because she’s scared of all the sound..., and of course because she wanted some poultry.

Anyway, the next day she asked me about my first word when the year turned. I was startled and couldn’t respond. “Well, I remember mine,” she said. She told me that right at midnight when people were screaming and counting down, she was instead yelling and ordering. Her first words were ‘upper thigh’. Not exactly profound words, I say. Of course, she meant them as a part of chicken she wanted but they’re actually not a far cry from the cat’s infamous sexual almost pornographic aura. So they still fit her perfectly. I then told her I still couldn’t remember mine, but at least my first words were with her because I didn’t talk to anyone else after the countdown. Laughing, she told me that in that case she knew what my first word was. It was a ‘no’, a simple ‘no’. It turns out that when I sat next to her, she offered me her food but I passed and said, “no”. Great, my word was even more superficial.

Well, I guess if first words in a new year were to describe how the year would turn out, then let’s just wish it would turn out with nays for regression and yays for upper thighs.
Especially if they are the cat’s. ;)

* Happy new year everyone!!!

What Are Clinical Pathologists? - A Second Year Resident's View -

In Indonesia, the laboratory can be described as a place occupied by three things: machines, analysts, and clinical pathologists. Machines are contraptions doing all the automated laboratory examinations, analysts are people operating the machines and performing the manual examinations, while clinical pathologists are medical doctors who click on the computer mouse. This unfunny role of clinical pathologists in the world of medicine has been a subject of ridicule and mockery. The machines are perfect and the analysts are experts, so why does the world of medicine require an extra person to authorize something that doesn’t need to be authorized? Even if some kind of authorization is needed, isn’t it best be done by the clinicians who treat and know the patients well, thus enabling them to directly compare the laboratory results with the real conditions?

It’s no wonder then to have a clinical pathologist’s protest in a seminar painfully dismissed by an internist. The protest was the fact that most clinicians do not include the patient’s diagnosis in the laboratory form, making it hard for clinical pathologists to produce a clinical interpretation. The dismissal was that a clinical pathologist’s interpretation was actually not needed at all. “We will make the interpretation ourselves,” said the internist sharply. Ouch... It seemed like there’s no use to have a clinical pathologist around.

Such notions proved to be personally troublesome, especially when I realized I had already enrolled in a school to be one. Bigger questions came up in mind. What are clinical pathologists really? What are they supposed to be doing? Is it true that they do not have a role at all in the world of medicine? And if they do, must they first be medical doctors?

I pondered as I went along. After about two years living in the environment, here are a couple of things I’ve noted from teachers, friends, and my own experience.

Lombok 12

The Things My Girl Has Ever Done

1. Saying that it was Judas who demanded to touch Jesus' wounds. I still believe it was Thomas.
2. Saying that Moses had an affair and took someone else's wife. I think she was referring to David taking Bathsheba.
3. Insisting that prayers from sinners are heard by God (doa orang-orang berdosa didengarkan Tuhan) because she felt she had read it somewhere in the Bible, only to have second thoughts when I said, "Isn't it supposed to say 'prayers from the oppressed are heard by God' (doa orang-orang teraniaya didengarkan Tuhan)?"
4. Pronouncing bear as beer, while still pronouncing a polar bear as how it is supposed to sound.
5. Pronouncing fusion as fashion.
6. Calling me Poo, without the slightest idea of what it actually means; and not knowing my full name for a full month, despite our relationship.
7. Saying lots of things in English. Some of the time it's American English and some of the time it's her own kind of English.
8. Failing to tell a buffalo from a cow. She once said that her Chinese zodiac was the cow.
9. Failing to tell a lion from a tiger.
10. Making one plate of fried rice with seasoning enough for two, forcing her guest at the time to live with the consequences.
11. Making very well-done toasts with too much jelly in it, forcing her guest at the time to live with the consequences.
12. Making a plate of spicy rice with one fourth of processed chilli, forcing her guest at the time to live with the consequences.
13. Putting me in a lot of mysery, agitation, and stress that sometimes make me want to go, "Aargh!" on her.
14. Running back to a bookshop while her flight was almost leaving, just to get me a few books.
15. Forcing me to study, because most of the time I won't.
16. Never failing to make me smile again, no matter how many times I want to go, "Aargh!" on her.
17. Telling her stories for hours nonstop, playing her loud music while she's driving, screaming around at random moments, making me miss her when she's not around to keep my ears full.

I care about my girl.
A lot.

Finding God's Will

There’s a story I once heard about a climber who climbed a mountain alone on a cold and moonless night. He climbed carefully because he almost couldn’t see. As expected from such a reckless action, at one point he slipped and fell. He didn’t go all the way down because he was still attached to a safety rope. Suspended in air, he thought about what to do. He couldn’t pull himself up because his arm was injured from the fall. He couldn’t cut the rope also because below him was a dark and bottomless pit.

For hours he did nothing. He was still thinking about the situation when suddenly a voice was heard. “Cut the rope and you will be fine,” said the voice. The climber was shocked. He turned his head around but he couldn’t find anyone. “Who is that?” he yelled. The voice didn’t answer; instead it said the same thing. “Cut the rope and you will be fine.”

The climber was perplexed. He was too scared to cut the rope. He tried to listen more but the voice was never heard again. He finally decided to ignore it. He spent the night suspended in freezing air, waiting for daybreak. The next day, people whom he was supposed to meet looked for him. They found him hanging, frozen to death, and only two meters above a steady rock. Had he cut the rope that night, he would have been saved.

The morale of the story is simple: listen to God’s will and you will turn out fine, do the opposite and hardships will surely follow, because after all God’s ways are not your ways.

In life, we are often faced with difficult options. They don’t usually concern ethics (which will surely make them somewhat easier to decide upon, such as to kill or not kill), and yet, they are important to us. Work problems, love problems are the commonest issues that usually involve this kind of options. Should I work here or there? Should I take a risk with her or go? Most often, there is no morally right or wrong value in these choices. They’re just options, and yet they affect us deeply. That’s why they are so hard to pick.

Dealing with such a situation, we may wonder what God’s take is on the matter. We may pray for Him to show His true will. We want His guidance. Just like the morale of the story, we don’t want to pick the wrong option, the wrong decision, the way He doesn’t want us to take. We refuse to be brought down to a path that leads us to bad consequences. We need the correct answer.


I used to think the same way, but for the last few years I’ve grown further and further away from the concept. The reason stems from my own personal experience. Unlike the story, the voice of God in my life, if there is any, has never been clear. He has never truly uttered a single word in my heart. Perhaps it is my fault, perhaps I sin too much or I don’t open my heart big enough, but still I have to admit that my questions usually go unanswered. It’s just like what the guy from the film The Island says when a clone questions about God: “You know—when you want something really bad and you close your eyes and you wish for it? God’s the guy that ignores you.” I don’t know what He wants in my situation. I’ve never heard Him say it. Sure, there are a lot of signs everywhere, but they so contradict each other that I think they are products of my own imagination. The voice of God is the sound of silence. I often feel lost and don’t know which way to go. And it is that kind of thought that used to make me very scared. I often thought, “If I’m a bad sheep who’s not able to hear His will, then how will my life go?” I feared that I would make a lot of wrong decisions and thus my life would be miserable. Had I just been able to hear Him, I would have gladly done what He said, but the fact was I couldn’t.


The experience drove me nuts until I decided to develop my own subjective truth. The story may be right for someone lucky enough to be able to hear God’s voice, but it is definitely not right for me. I even start to think of it as rubbish. The idea of God as a powerful being who likes to play guessing games with our happiness as stakes sounds ridiculous for me. I may not know who or what He actually is, but that seems a bit low... and off. The story stands on an assumption that life can only be good if it is done according to God’s will, and it can only be bad if it is not, while the will itself is a mystery. People who believe it and obviously don’t want to live a bad life will desperately try to uncover the mystery, regardless of its plausibility, and live accordingly.

But does it really work like that?

I don’t believe that that's the way life runs. The seemingly good choices don’t always make good consequences, and bad choices don’t always result in bad ones. Even a single choice can have various consequences at the same time, good and bad. Good things and bad things happen to anyone regardless of their choices. Everything is almost as if it is made out from chaos. And such a chaotic notion contradicts what the story’s trying to say. You cannot expect to find God’s will to make your life all good and happy. Bad things will always happen. Perhaps the whole point is not to guess which option is the one that God really wants. Perhaps it is about choosing one anyway and accepting all consequences that follow. Perhaps that’s also the reason why God always sits in silence no matter how hard I ask. God’s will is never really found standing behind the right option. Instead it stands with us - the persons who are trying to choose, willing for us to pick an option, live through it, and grow from learning to deal with anything that comes after.


When I first saw Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift, I liked what the character Han told the character Sean. He said, “Life is simple. You make choices and you don’t look back.” The statement is an oversimplification. Letting go of the past is never simple. But still I think it aims at a good point. Life is not about making the right choices, because sometimes there are none. It’s about living anything we choose. Good things may happen and so may bad things. But we try to go through them anyway, making up answers as we go. Perhaps, only then will God’s will truly be served (if He did will us to grow and not just guess correctly because correct options didn't exist anyway). And perhaps, only then will our prayer turn into what the character Maria in the film Sound of Music says. It is not “God, show me the correct path so I can be all happy,” it is “For what we receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.” I think now all I can say to myself is just, "Pick a choice, live through it." If God does exist and is as loving as everyone says, He will be there all the time with me while I grow through the consequences.

Yogyakarta 11

There were a couple of highlights:
- at one time, most of the family sat down together and painted (too bad I didn't take pictures of the paintings)
- we went to Kuwaru Beach, which was beautiful... and also eerie when fog descended and covered the whole place
- and, I got to meet my newborn nephews (there were two of them)

Happy times :)