not so egg-nymore: 06.08

30 Juni 2008
08:29

Somewhere between Eindhoven and 's-Hertogenbosch, our train was running side by side with another train. Sometimes we went faster, sometimes slower, so I could see what was inside the other train. Unlike ours that consisted of rows of seats in a big wagon, it was divided into compartments with 6 seats each. The train looked shabby, almost like parahyangan

I haven't finished reading James Joyce's Dubliners. Heck, I haven't even started yet. But that was what crossed my head when our train slowly ran ahead the shabby train and swept through the compartments. I saw a little world with different stories.

A family.

A Japanese (or Chinese?) couple.

An Indian family.

Mixture of people that didn't know each other.

Two people making out.

A family.

Mixture of people that didn't know each other. One of them was a middle-aged Indonesian. He waved his hand at me.

And then, our train went slower and I saw the little world in reverse.

[346] 2 komentar
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20 Juni 2008
06:22

Ternyata, cinta orang dewasa itu rumit ya? Maaf, gue ga bisa menemukan istilah lain yang ga bikin sakit perut. Maksud gue, yang-katanya-cinta selepas umur belasan dan ketika sudah melibatkan sepasang buku dan/atau makhluk-makhluk kecil lucu tidak berdosa.

Berat.

Gue pertama menyadarinya pada suatu taun yang gue sebut annus horribilis gue. Ketika seorang sahabat mengucapkan delapan kata yang bikin gue kayak kesambar petir (tentu saja saat itu gue bukan sahabat tapi seorang oportunis pengecut yang gak berani bilang "Gue suka sama lo").

Dan ternyata, gue masih ketemu dan ketemu cerita-cerita seperti itu.

Kalo boleh milih, gue milih ga tau. Gue milih percaya bahwa cinta itu tulus dan suci dan melibatkan putri-putri cantik dan ksatria-ksatria penunggang kuda putih. Dan mereka hidup bahagia selamanya.

Atau mungkin, segala kerumitan ini terjadi gara-gara ada orang-orang yang percaya bahwa cinta itu tulus dan suci dan melibatkan putri-putri cantik dan ksatria-ksatria penunggang kuda putih dan mereka hidup bahagia selamanya?

aku ingin mencintaimu dengan sederhana:
dengan kata yang tak sempat diucapkan
kayu kepada api yang menjadikannya abu

aku ingin mencintaimu dengan sederhana:
dengan isyarat yang tak sempat disampaikan
awan kepada hujan yang menjadikannya tiada
(Sapardi Djoko Damono)

PS#1: Iya, Sapardi Djoko Damono. BUKAN Kahlil Gibran. Atau Taufik Ismail ;))

PS#2: Maaf kalo ada yang merasa tulisan ini menyinggung atau membuat geer. Ngga maksud. Namanya juga curhat.

[345] 5 komentar
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15 Juni 2008
03:51

Gara-gara tulisannya Vira, jadi pingin ngebahas grunge juga. Akhir-akhir ini selera musik gue agak-agak ajaib. Kalo gak jazz enteng, '70-an, ya... itu, grunge. Mungkin gara-gara nonton Into the Wild kali ya? Denger Eddie Vedder langsung pingin pingsan gue

Pearl Jam emang paling top. Mereka terdengar lebih dewasa, walopun "lebih dewasa" kayanya ga grunge banget

Ngomong-ngomong soal Pearl Jam, inget dong sama Plastik, 'Pearl Jam Indonesia'

. Gue inget dulu Ipang bilang, mereka pilih nama Plastik karena nama itu 'universal', dalam bahasa apapun, diucapkannya sama. Tapi, tentu saja, di pertengahan taun '90-an itu, belum ada Google.

Gue coba nge-google pake lema plastik band grunge, dapetnya ini. Ditambah ipang, agak lumayan. Gue sarankan pada siapapun yang lagi ngasi nama band-nya, pilihlah nama-nama yang unik di mata mesin pencari. Hindari nama-nama generik, apalagi kalo judul-judul lagu top 40 lo juga demikian irit kata-kata.

Akhirnya, setelah memasukkan lema insting psiko harmoni youtube, gue menemukan ini dan ini

[344] 0 komentar
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07 Juni 2008
02:44

Numb. Don't know what to say. Don't know what to do. Keep saying that this is not about me, so why bother? (sometimes I think that my fuzz about other people's life is probably just a getaway from my own messy life) I visited El's page this morning. I think he's doing alright. I miss him.

My Documentary Project. Yup, I'm doing it right now. The log's here, but comment goes here

Unless you have a 43 account, which is actually really cool

Climate Sceptic Sceptic. This week, I attended a very cool lecture about climate scepticism, given by Fred Singer (“the father of all climate sceptics”) and Hans Labohm. A guy half-jokingly said that all the audience present are climate sceptic sceptics.

Singer mostly talked about scientific flaws in IPCC report. I made a few notes but probably better to refer to his books or The Great Global Warming Swindle documentary. Labohm continued with political-economic analysis of what so-called son of Kyoto.

I was kind of neutral in this global warming issue. I accepted it as a fact, but I thought it's sometimes exaggerated. So, to be fair, I was a little bit on the sceptic side. However, after hearing the lectures, I cross the line to the sceptic sceptic side. I'm not really sure why. Their arguments were not much more convincing than those of IPCC's. On the other hand, neglecting the effect of CO2 emission might be contra productive to the quest of cleaner fuel, mind you, in the shadow of depleting fossil fuel (not to mention the sky-rocketing price). So, fortunately, Pavel Kabat came to the rescue. He presented sharp and concise arguments to counter Singer's arguments. It became a really exciting discussion to watch. Not much to counter in Labohm's presentation, but someone did and I didn't really understand the economic part.

Singer and Labohm were late due to traffic jam (which of course contribute to man-made greenhouse gases), so I got the chance to notice there were a lot of bronis (I refuse to translate this term

) Haha, this is really really an unimportant remark. But despite of this bonus, it was indeed an enlightening discussion

[343] 1 komentar
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05 Juni 2008
14:24

All this rumor about illegal software sweeping reminds me of my long lost 'resolution' to convert to Linux. Why? Well, I had a P3 notebook at that time. 128 MB RAM, 12 GB harddisk. Installing Linux was perfectly logical. After all, there are several reasons why Linux is better

My constraint back then was I can't find replacements for several softwares. The most important one was the proprietary Final Draft. It doesn't have a Linux version, and if it does, I didn't want to spend USD 300 on software either. (To make clear, yes, I did use pirated WinXP with pirated softwares including pirated Final Draft).

Now I'm using a more decent notebook with—thank's to Edo—legal WinXP. But I think I might switch to Linux someday on the condition that:

My notebook is alive
Everybody's using Mikocok have altered to Vista
And whatever the h*ll Bill Gates do to improve it, my notebook still can't bear the requirements.

By then, I'd convert to Linux.

And I already found a perfect software to replace Final Draft. Well, almost perfect. I present you... Celtx.

Well, there was already a version of Celtx 1.5 year ago, but it was awful. The layout was confusing, the file was barely accessible and it couldn't be exported to PDF. It was impossible. The only way to make the file available to other to read was printing it. But I didn't have a printer. And I couldn't open the file except in my own laptop. Couldn't copy it to Word or Notepad either.

But now... after a year, they fix everything. I downloaded Cinergy and Celtx last January. Having bad experience with Celtx, I tried Cinergy first. It has similar interface with Final Draft, but lot less powerful. Plus advertising. Well, yeah, that's all you can expect from a freeware, right?

Wrong. I tried Celtx and I was amazed. I like the clean-tabbed look that they adopt from Mozilla. It's still not as powerful as Final Draft, but most of the time it's enough. I already got really used to Final Draft's shortcuts and one of the coolest thing about Final Draft is you can customize them. I don't have it in Celtx, but the standard shortcuts are already quite similar to Final Draft's and I'm happy with that. The file organization was much better (the previous one was nightmare, you get a folder and a suspicious look file in it). And I can easily convert the file to PDF (and the result looks better than Final Draft's PDF, haha).

So, for you who don't want to spend USD 229 for Final Draft (is the price reducing? I thought it was 300 something), I really really recommend Celtx.

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04 Juni 2008
04:59

Anto sudah selesai makan, sementara gue dan Eddi baru meneriakkan pesanan ke Dodi.

"Gimana sih," Anto menghembuskan asap rokoknya. "'97 kok gak saling menjaga?"

Deja vu, an***t!

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03 Juni 2008
04:50

Being here in the Netherlands, one thing that sometimes annoys me most is the fact that a lot of Dutch people, especially the youngsters, are not aware of the shared history between Indonesia and the Netherlands. Of course they know that their oma or opa 'was in Indonesia in the 1920/1930/1940's', but they don't see that their oma/opa being in Indonesia was a part of colonization. It's not that they don't know anything about it. I even once heard my corridor mates making trivial quiz about VOC. It's just, we studied different sides of history.

On the other hand, we share too much things in common. When I took Dutch course back in Bandung, we always laugh at familiar words that we just found out at that time were originated from Dutch language. And here, you can find ketjap manis and boemboe nasi goreng and babi panggang in supermarket. We don't even have to go to Asian stores for that!

Last weekend, I went to tongtong festival in Den Haag. It's kind of weird that we went to 'Indonesian' festival while we probably wouldn't bother to attend back home, but anyway, there we were. Wandering around souvenir stalls, collect brochures for the next day Belmondo festival and also queuing in kooktheatre where we can have free bites (I had 'soto' with funny taste).

Anyway, there was a corner called 'De Njai; Portret van een vergeten oermoeder'. It displayed the history of Nyai (concubine) during colonization era. It was an ironic display. For instance, there were stories of each nyai, and told as a romance. "Her name was Minah. She was born in... He, Thomas, was born in 1869 in..." I mean, as if it was an equal relationship. As if there was a real love going on. Was there? I don't know. I'm pretty sure that Nyai Ontosoroh didn't love Herman Mellema. But of course she's a fictional character (is she?). But for the other nyai's, the concept of love was probably too abstract to grasp. And did the meneer really love the nyai?

I think the exhibition was quite an eye opener for some people. For me, it was quite unique because I used to overlook the idea that a nyai was also a mother, not merely a sexual slave. They gave birth to those indo (half Dutch-half Indonesian) children, but they were also treated like babu (servant). And they couldn't do anything when the children were taken to the Netherlands.

As always, we Indonesian made photo studio whenever possible. There was a pose with Reza in the middle, surrounded by us girls. And then we jokingly suggested to take the same picture with Joeri in the middle. As if he was the meneer and we were the nyai's. But... ummm... I think it would probably hurt his feeling if we actually suggested that to him. After all, he was the one who hanging out with us all weekend, spent Den Haag-Utrecht train ride to learn Indonesian language and tried to speak Indonesian all along with us. His oma was a nurse in Kalimantan. So I think he's not one of the ignorance youngsters. Or maybe they're not ignorance after all. I remember Sali's roommate story in 2005 Jiffest (forget her name), that the tutor said they were aware about unpleasant past between Indonesia and the Netherlands, and they were sorry and they were not part of it. So what do I expect? That they apologize all the time?

I think war and colonization are by any means bad. But when it comes to people, individuals, we enter the gray area. Like Setadewa in Burung-burung Manyar.

And I, on 5 May, standing before the liberation day parade, not clapping hand.

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