not all is well today

It all started with this conversation with someone who we'd call Christina, my friend since high school. We don't chat often after both of us became working professionals. H*ck, if you're pursuing a career you can consider yourself lucky with less than ten friends who still want to chat with you albeit not that often.

So... she asked her signature "All's well with you?" question, and the rest is...

The rest is...

No, the rest is not history. The rest is my ranting. About how, technically, nobody can say all is well with him/her. There must be at least one, no matter how small, thing, that is not well with him/her.

But this is not the place for such rant. Neither was the time.

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what ksy has that my mother doesn't

... Fruit Roll-Ups.
-- The One with Ross and Monica's Cousin --

Besides that...
-- Bewitched by Bella's Brother --

I watched a YouTube video not a long while ago where Kang Seung-Yoon, a band member, stated something like "I don't want to make our fans feel embarrassed for being, well, our fans." He explained further that fangirling (and fanboying) is an activity that is frowned upon by a considerable amount of people in South Korea. "So I will work hard to erase that stigma."

He made people generally reply politely to him: "No Seung Yoon, I'm proud of you." 'I don't feel ashamed at all being your fan.' "You have worked hard."

Would he still get the same result had my mother's paraphrased words been used instead? "Be a good fan, do xxx and yyy for me, don't bring shame to your idols! And don't forget to do zzz! Don't embarrass us in front of our fellow artists!"

Consideration. It's a good thing that an artist could be so considerate.

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it should've been a heartwarming video

I saw a video of a lost cat reunited to its owner. The owner being interviewed about the moment they contacted him after scanning the 19 y.o. cat's microchip. "A couple of weeks before she called I thought there's going to be something special about this Christmas..." That's when it I lost it. There's nothing special for my Christmasses. I mean, aside from Jesus coming to the world and what it entails, and stuff. My birthdays, anniversaries, nothing. Nobody bothered to make them special.

I scrambled over to my snack cabinet at the first sting of tears on my left eye. Food has always succeeded to comfort me, but this time it failed. All the resentments came flooding me like violent sea waves: the latest one being having to go to work amid this Covid 19 outbreak, while my mother-in-law spent 14 months of minimum wage (my money!) in a whim to feed her ego.

I don't want to be someone who's drowning in tears at 7 a.m. holding a piece of loenpia Semarang. I believe nobody does. But can we really help it?

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how many books can you read per light years?

What was once considered pure fantasy... is now looking a little more plausible. Earlier this week, NASA announced the discovery of a possible Earth-like planet...
-- Potentially habitable Earth-like planet discovered 31 light years away --

"I had two childhood dreams that I thought would never, ever, come true," I told my pondering husband: "One was to be an astronaut, and the other was to have a library at home." I had to forgo the idea of moon landing the day I found out I didn't have perfect eyesight, which was sometime during my teenage years.

"With inflation rate and stuff, how come books now are significantly cheaper than they used to be when I was a kid?" I asked quizzically, gesturing to the unholy amount of books I just purchased. "Tomorrow I'm applying for astronaut!"

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unsure

My whole life right now is focused on ‘coping’ and ‘getting through it,’ so I’d like to make some time when I can just relax and drink some tea from a favorite cup.
-- Spark Joy --

I really love writing! I know I do! Marie Kondo told us about one of her clients, who after having tidying-up lessons with her, found out that she really did love her job. Me on the contrary, have this thin-but-unshakeable feeling that I should make writing my main job.

Will I succeed if I do?

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cats and their impeccable timing, a.k.a why i can't buy squid anymore

So I was stopping by a famous eatery near my home to buy their special squid dish, take-away when I spotted two cats nearby playing with each other. One was white and the other was orange.

"How cute! Are the cats yours?" I asked the lady who's making my order - secretly hoping that she'd be distracted and add more pieces than usual into the styrofoam container.

"Cats? I have a white female cat..." she popped her head to see outside, and the orange male one chose that exact time to bite the female's neck and mount her. "But never an orange cat."


The act that I'm sure will result in this in a few months.

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the downside of marriage life -- part eight

The husband and wife were about to enter a restaurant selling Japanese food when suddenly one of them heard his mobile phone ringing. "From work," he mouthed to her: "This won't take long." They proceeded to enter the restaurant, got seated, and were handed the menu, all while the husband's talking on the phone.

Five minutes later and the call didn't show any sign coming to a end, the wife called the waiter to place her order. Their order. She chose the strangest-sounding stuff from the menu for his hubby.

"Our apologies, but we ran out of shisamo," said the waiter. At that time the husband ended the call and flipped his phone shut. "Then we'll have karito," he said. And to his wife, after the waiter's out of hearing range: "And what on earth is a shisamo?"

"No idea," said the wife, "Why don't you google it?"

"From now on I will continue to order random things for you if call from work is taking too long."



And that's the story of how the husband almost ate the most terrified-slash-offended-looking fish, like you insult the fish' ancestor while threatening to cut it into seven pieces or something.

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well you see, the thing is...

I'm a girl. When I poo, I do not wish other people to start calling my name - but my colleague did. Repeatedly. "Do you happen to be in here?"

The first time it happened, words failed me. Now I'm kinda used to it. "What?"

"The guest is having difficulties connecting to the wifi."

Rolling my eyes up, I mustered an answer. "Too bad, the guest will have to wait 15 minutes. I'm... busy."

But I couldn't finish the dump. My colleague had scared the poor poo-poos into hiding higher up my arse.

With such a mood I went off to the company's guest area. "Hi, sorry that you're unable to connect to our wif-" And like in the movies, the kind that cast Drew Barrymore, the guest lifted his d*mn handsome face. Like, super-handsome. I've never seen a company guest this handsome. Like the byproduct of a lab's crossing experiment between Andy Lau Tak-wah and Snoop Dog.



I know right? No longer hard to imagine...

While I was half-helping the guest half-dreaming about what our kid together would look like, my tactless colleague's eyes caught mine. The one who'd patrolled bathrooms in search for me. And I realized, in horror, that she'd probably told him what she had thought I'd been doing then.


Buh-bye ex future son.

But in all fairness, I wish that the internet in my country will get better now that it's half a year to 2018. I mean c'mon, it's about time. Don't you think so?

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haven't been blogging for a long time

... Sorry about that. So what do I do while not blogging? Not much, really. I didn't get far with my Chinese language learning, nor did I do many useful things.

I tried to reread the whole Harry Potter saga but got stuck in The Order of the Phoenix, a.k.a the fifth book of the serie. I spent like, a month reading it. Umbridge's reign was not easy to read. I think she's even worse than Voldemort. Dunno why, for Umbridge never killed anybody and Voldemort's victim body count is plenty.

I've also been going around shopping malls trying new scents, for my current perfume, Issey Miyake's L'Eau d'Issey, is but a few more sprays now. I think it won't last till end of this month. Still I haven't bought anything. My favorite so far is Caribbean Island Wild Flowers by Crabtree & Evelyn. But they only have it as Eau de Toilette, which is too weak in projection and sillage for me. It's strange, because their other EDT, Somerset Meadow, has OK-ish sillage.

Caribbean Island Wild Flowers smelt like canned tomatoes to me. I also noticed a faint whiff of butter and walnut. Those three notes were not listed in Fragrantica when I browsed the internet later. Well, that's what makes perfumes exciting, right? No perfume will smell the same on two people.

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what workouts can be done to achieve such fitness level?

There are two things you need to know about me: that I just opened the pages of an ancient book that says armed with a spear, a man fought and killed 300 others in one encounter and that I believe it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go back to my daily regimes...

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happiness is...

Happiness is knowing that you're improving yourself day in, day out. Happiness is knowing people who you love are safe and sound. Happiness is donating to the need of others. Stuff that are serious like that. But, hey, a trivial thing like browsing an online shop and seeing a shirt that's similar to the one you bought for less than a quarter of the price is also happiness.

n___________n Can't stop smiling!

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the downside of marriage life -- part seven

Not me, but a friend's.

The husband said, "Family is where you can be yourself, laugh at yourself and still feel happy." On a different ocassion however, the wife said: "My husband's family set three requirements for wives: wives should be able to do make-up, wives should be able to cook, and wives should be able to have children."

She continued, saying how the husband always taught her to never say no. She should learn to cook, she was not allowed to say 'I cannot cook'. She also had to produce offspring for the sake of her husband.

For the beauty, she said she's thankful to be talented enough in the field of make-up. Btw I think she's being humble here. She definitely has great talent in doing make-up -- her face is so different without it.

She concluded that she had become who she was because the moulding of her done by the husband. Remind me again what the husband said? Oh right, "Family is where you can be yourself."

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it wants the d

Liberty is being free from the things we don't like in order to be slaves of the things we do like.
-- Toaster's handbook; jokes, stories, and quotations --

In a kind of ironic turn of events, right after I blog about how the 'M' key on my laptop wasn't working properly, my bookcase's top row collapsed, and books came down raining onto the laptop.

Not collapsed actually, just had some loose screws... And tilted. I cannot find the exact phrase, English is not my first language.


Still at its place.

Somehow the experience was surreal. I was using the laptop at that time. My brain remembers it in slow-motion. Like a scene from apocalypse or disaster movie when the ocean creates a massive wave and it reaches its tallest then starts pouring water towards the camera. Only it's books, not water in my case.


The aftermath.

I was unhurt. Not a single book touched me. Strange I know, but then I saw my laptop. The biggest, heaviest book in my possession had fallen right unto it, among other smaller books. It was a Chinese-Indonesian dictionary, all the 1233 pages of it.


No banana, peanut for scale.

With heart still pounding, I came closer (I had somehow pushed my chair backwards). The lid was in an extremely reclined position, about 150 degrees, but there's life on the screen. I removed the books and loo', the keyboard's not whole! The 'D' key was missing!

Only after cleaning the mess some more did I find the D. But the plastic thingy behind it was broken, the key cannot be reattached. Outside of that, the laptop's working fine.

So, what do I feel? Do I feel angry and betrayed and that life is pointless etc? Or do I secretly feel grateful this happened before I had the chance to bring the laptop to the service guy? You guess. ;)

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of laptops and fruit juices

So really even when they say something they're essentially saying nothing at all, its a technique politicians have mastered for centuries.
-- HMM888 --

I spilled fruit juice on my laptop a while back. It cost me a few tens of bucks to have it repaired, because they needed to replace the keyboard.

However, it still doesn't work properly. The 'm' key must be pressed harder than other keys in order to produce the assigned letter.

That, and some problems in other aspects of life, made me think. How easy it is to feel angry and failing in life when you handle one problem but the result is less than satisfactory. We human wants perfection. Like when I brought my laptop to the service center, I hoped that the technicians would be able to bring it to its original glory, and when they couldn't, I got disappointed.

What should one do?

Well, fixing it seem to be an obvious choice. Or get a new laptop completely. The laptop's already aged a few years old anyway.

However! One must do it with the correct mindset. Remember what I said about what's easy? Yes it is easy to be disappointed. Yes, it is easy to feel angry. Yes indeed it is easy to feel like you're failing in life (for those who like to exaggerate things like I do).

But take a look at people who are successful in life and you'll understand they seldom (if ever) choose easy. They are not super humans. Ask them if they're tempted to choose the easy way.

So be it. As soon as I find the time I'll buy a new keyboard for the laptop or some other alternatives. With an un-angry attitude, without a heart full of disappointment, without feeling like I'm failing in life.

I choose to be successful. How about you? ;)

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when the job gets the most of you...

"... this is one of the things that distinguishes us from animals and permits us to do great things, that we are not just pre-occupied with staying alive.
-- Robert Walker's answer to Why is the Dalai Lama seen as evil in China? --

I dreamt I was in an unknown place with some people I didn't know. There was a commotion on the far end, coming to my direction.

"Hurry gave it to her!" 'There she is!' "Bring it, bring it!"

Someone tried to shove a mobile phone into my hand. "This mobile phone is possessed by an evil spirit!"


"Excuse me?"

I refused to receive it. Instead I asked her: "Have you tried turning it off and on again?

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things i totally forgot on my second trip to china

... And I'm still kicking myself for those.

Number one is, flush before you use any toilets in China. This is the norm, unfortunately I only got it after the n-th times using their toilets. I was taking a dump when someone enters the toilet stall beside me. Right after I heard the door closed followed by the sound of toilet flushing, I heard her (or him, I don't judge) pee.

I was estatic about that, like having a revelation. That was a short visit about four years ago, and by the second year spent at my own country, I've already forgotten about it.

Again, on my second visit to China this month, I was using their toilet for the n-th times, wondering why it smelled awful, when a mother and her small kid entered the stall beside me. I overheard the mother telling her daughter something like "don't use the toilet yet, flush it first" kind of thing.

-_- I was not a smart person. And no, they generally don't flush after using the toilets. I'm sure there are Chinese people who flush after using the toilets, I just haven't encountered any.

The second thing is handbag choice. If you travel by MTR, you'd want one small compartment, secured by a zipper, accessible from the outside of the bag, not the inside.

As a visitor, you carry significantly more things around while riding a MTR. Your passport for example. And maps. And qingwen flashcards.

What? No, the compartment on the bag is not meant to store passports nor maps nor qingwen cards. You store them in your bag. In the main section of your bag where they belong. The small compartment is meant to store MTR tokens or cards. If earlier this month you saw an overweight foreigner stumbling with her bag in nearly every stations trying to find the tokens between all those documents and maps, you probably saw me.

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huo pangzi for the first time

I really really like this restaurant 火胖子肥肠煲 (Huǒ pàngzi féicháng bāo). It sells Sichuanese cuisine. I've actually eaten there twice during my stay in China earlier this month.

The first time I went there I ordered beef gan guo. There's a story behind this selection, but that's a story for another time, another place. I also ordered mapo tofu and stir-fried cabbages.

The next day I wasn't particularly hungry, so I only ordered seafood gan guo. Turned out to be one of the best things I've ever eaten! I ate the pot clean, even the onions, except for the chili-things.

They also have the best barley tea! It was free, and you first use it to sanitize your bowls and chopsticks. Although it is called tea, actually it is not made of tea leaves, but sesame-like grains. When I pay, I asked the cashier lady if I could buy the tea grains, I wanted to bring it back to Indonesia.


It'll lost its color a bit after you simmer it in hot water.

When I studied my receipt later, I found out that she put it as 一桶饭 (yī tǒng fàn), one container of rice.

The service was wonderful for China restaurants standard. The waiters and waitresses were helpful and very patient to me who can barely speak Chinese. Hey, I can write Chinese, but I can't do it orally okay? And no, no Google for you in mainland China. Good luck with that.

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