Save an Arrow

As I rest my eyes upon her
and present myself to her presence
Cupid appears before me
and lifts up his bow and arrow

You can go home today, I said
Save yourself an arrow, I continued
The thing you want for me
That thing I already am

*written on a train ride because of reasons

Most Happiest

Today I had lunch with a friend. She was telling me about her love life when she said something about how she picked a significant other. She only picked someone whom she thought would make a good companion. She wasn’t bothered much about his status or wealth. A good companion... That was her criterion.

There’s nothing revolutionary about the above paragraph. However, like most old, overused ideas, its sense of weight only grows larger as I grow older. I too, can’t agree more. A good companion... That is also what I’m looking for.

When I wrote Encounters, I was talking about how although it doesn’t seem likely, people do meet and connect. It is this kind of bond that I crave, a relationship where you truly see and be seen. I remember when Patrick Jane, the protagonist of the series The Mentalist, spent his days in seclusion somewhere in Central America, he had no one to talk to. Everyone was speaking Spanish, a language he’s still adopting. One day, he met a woman at the beach. She was an American. Patrick Jane eagerly tried to start a conversation with her, anything he could think of. It had been a long time since he talked in English and he missed it. “Being understood is an underrated pleasure,” he said in a reflective tone.

Being understood is a great pleasure for me too. And also of course, if I may add, understanding someone. Perhaps it’s because secretly, I’m afraid of loneliness. Perhaps it’s because like the thinking behind The Celestine Prophecy, I’m an incomplete person, looking for completeness in the soul of others, making it some kind of a defect that I have.

I don’t know.

Although, sometimes I think it’s simply because deep down, I believe that happiness doesn’t mean a thing unless it is shared.

I don’t like people in general, so that is an odd thing for me to say. I’m a quiet extrovert though, so it kinda makes sense. And although I’ve often times said that I hated people, it amazes me that almost all my fondest memories always involve someone. May it be a moment with friends or lovers, I’m happiest when I’m with someone. It’s funny.

When the film Into the Wild was released, my friend warned me not to watch it. I had always shown a tendency of doing things alone that he was afraid it would make me worse. I think he was dead wrong. The film was about a young man who was disgusted by people and the social structure and so lived his life in the wild in isolation. It didn’t work out for him. His supplies ran out and he was forced to eat plants, accidentally eating the poisonous one. In the last moment of his life, he wrote his realization in his book, “Happiness only real when shared.”

I guess the theme resonates in a lot of hearts, because a lot of films seem to adopt it. After having a great success without the presence of his wife, Jerry Maguire said, “Our little company had a good night tonight. A really big night. But it wasn't complete, it wasn't nearly close to being in the same vicinity as complete, because I couldn't share it with you. I couldn't hear your voice, or laugh about it with you.” Even Barney Stinson of How I Met Your Mother said, “Whatever you do in this life, it’s not legendary unless your friends are there to see it.”

I’ve always wanted someone. I guess I’m one of those miserable people who were born to share. There’s hardly anything grander for me than a true and honest connection. It's a must have for me. We may come into this world alone and leave it alone, but I think... it doesn't always have to be that way.

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.