Formulaic Dharma

When I thought I knew how things were going to end, I always ended up with defied expectations and a bittersour aftertaste. Bittersour because it's the kind of taste you wish you can forget forever and not to be fondly reminisced once in a while like bittersweet. I believe this is why I rarely set any expectations at all, the least for myself.

Whenever I get involved in a social setting, which deals with one or more people who don't live inside my head (yeah, you read it right - there are voices inside, trying to say many, many things all at the same time, which gets really noisy at times), things had a way of spiraling out of control very fast. One moment you were laughing, the next moment things went whooosh downhill.

Every time I would be replaying the scene in my mind, trying to figure out where the hell it went wrong. The answer would always come shrouded in doubt because I can never be sure of anything. In the end, all I have of the whole process is a lot of bruise I inflict upon my intangible self. Oh, I must've said this, I must've done that. Oh, how could I be so stupid? So careless? How could I cause such trouble?

I wonder where this tendency for self-blame springs from. I wonder why I like it so much. For once, I want to try living without the fear of offending or hurting others. Trying to read people and please them all the time is so tiring, is it not? Perhaps then, without such fear, the self-blame game would stop. The world would cease being such a scary place. I would be able to wave the figurative middle finger without a shred of guilt.

But then, what an unfeeling person I would've become. I don't know if I would be truly happy like that. One suffers and suffers - perhaps it is the best state of humanhood (I know I'm inventing a lot of words right now, but shush) and from it, one's true self emerges.

So what does that say about me? I suffer from a perpetual guilt of failing, which leads to an endless fear about everything. I go through my day with countless scenarios inside my head, minute by minute, a perpetual sort of What Ifs factory, an infinite number of parallel worlds swirling within the universe of one. Imagine how many regrets, big or small, I have. Imagine trying to sleep like that. Imagine having to wake up to that. I truly am amazed that I haven't dashed towards insanity after all this while. 

Perhaps this is normal; meaning, others experience this too. Perhaps this is not unique, this is commonplace and many, many before and after me would've gone through the same tiresome thought process. If it is so, what is our true self? What emerges after the long torture of what-could-have beens?

Logically, I would answer (like the good student I am), "Self-reflection breeds wisdom, applied wisdom breeds enlightenment. Applied enlightenment breeds peace." It sounds good in theory. In fact it sounds perfect, like the answer to everything. If Deep Thought the Supercomputer had to describe 42, it would've said it like that (anyway, digressing a bit here, 42 is a pretty, flat number in my head, like a wooden bench painted white against a white background). But it is easier said than done. Much more so. Hence, the discrepancy between what we know to be ideal and the reality we face is the suffering itself.

Putting it in a formula:                                  Suffering = Ideal - Reality

where the ideal state is the enlightened state, and reality is what we're facing when we are currently unenlightened, hence:
                                                   
                                                      Suffering = Enlightened state - Current state

Epiphany! I've always been confused about how suffering can bring about enlightenment, but I think I might've started to understand it a little now.

So if this is true, at the end of my conscious self, I would've had the chance of finding enlightenment and finally peace. But only if I move on from endless self-reflections to wisdom (and even if I manage to do that, there's still the whole thing about applying wisdom to achieve enlightenment. Life is really not easy, hey?).

Anyway, the whole point of this rambling is to get my thoughts straight. And this is why I love writing. Amidst all of those voices in my head, only mine is heard when I write.

I can finally hear myself speak.

[Pics] Tree of Life, fly away baby

Tree of Life - 10/04/2012

fly away, baby - 10/04/2012

Dwarf's Dream - 10/04/2012

Just some things that I doodled in GIMP. Photoshop is beyond my means so I opt for the next best (free!) thing. ;)

On Sleep

 There's a sickening lurch in my stomach that always coincides with the tides of pressure behind my right eyeball whenever I stay awake past one in the morning. I suppose this is a way my body signals sleep deprivation, a sort of second alert of the impending crash that will happen sooner or later.

The pressure on the eyeball, I can take. But the nausea? I'm a slave to its whims and I know the only way to stop it is to lie down and try to get a shut eye. It doesn't matter that after the eyelids close I still see images in my head, running around, screwing each other, colliding and getting tangled in a mess that cross stories and genres. It matters not. Sleep will come, dreams may or may not, and the nausea will be gone.

Whenever I sleep, I always strive to wake up as naturally and as early as possible. But that's actually a lofty goal because my inner clock is skewed towards the unnatural after years of practiced insomnia.

So I wake up groggy, most of the time, tight-lipped and cursing inwardly (because it just ruins the whole day when your first utterance first thing in the morning/just before noon is a loud, "Fuck!").

Despite all that, I like sleep. Sleep's my friend. Sleep is where I meet interesting things, where my brain shakes itself loose and goes woo-hoo on me. Sleep is nice.

Having said all that, I'm going to bed now.

[Pic] Grassland

Grassland
Medium: Paint + Bamboo Fun
Date of completion: 06/12/2012

[Dream Diary] One

Wacky dreams are the norm for me. If it's not wacky, then I don't dream. This is why I like sleeping so much - the stories there are so much better. I've thought about starting a dream diary, but that's just too obsessive and time-consuming for my taste. Despite the degree of weirdness of the dreams, I try not to analyze them. It's a losing battle because each time I do that, I hear Freud telling me I'm a horrible person. And he's been dead for like, what, a hundred years? That creeps me out.

Hiawatha (Later Rio)

 

last night I had a dream about the child I lost

a hundred times within a single sleep

and his name is Hiawatha

I saw his soft arms

and somewhere in between the cracks

of waking and slipping back, his fingers

met mine and I held them

a thought remained when I woke

how love slips easy

I was shown his room

and a framed picture he treasure

Oh, my God

the soundless recognition of him

rang through me as I perched,

awaiting a sign that it was real

but none came

it was a strange dream

and no,

I didn’t see him anymore

3:29 - Chapter I

I imagined when my heart stopped for three minutes and twenty-nine seconds last year, I had died. But then I came back thanks to a strong cocktail of electric shocks and adrenaline injections and a rather loud litany of, “Live, live, live, live, live!”

That had been the surgeon, by the way, who was an emotional creature. Perhaps he said that to every patient that died on his operating table as part of his gimmick, but it had done the trick in my case. I had returned, my heart was pumping blood again and my brain began reversing its shut down process.

When I came to a couple of weeks later, I realized I had lost few things (mainly the sight and hearing on my left eye and ear) and gained a couple of other things as compensation. The old folks might now call me ‘touched’. Or ‘cursed’. My mom still called me lazy and I was forever ‘Delusional Wombat’ to my dad.   

Losing the sight in my left eye was hard to take and the loss put unnecessary strain on my right eye, so I wasn’t allowed to look at computers or LED screens for too long. That meant no smartphones that could entice me into partaking in the forbidden activity and my time in front of the computer was regulated by an egg timer.

While everybody else talked with their thumbs and other digits, I had to rely on old-fashioned face-to-face speech and passing notes in the class to communicate. My parents also had the initiative of informing the school that I needed to sit at the very front of the class due to this newfound impediment. The school happily obliged.

When I died during those precious minutes, I did not see anything. No tunnel and no light at the end of that tunnel. No horned devils or a scene from hell. No people who had passed away coming back and giving me advice. No angels, not a feather. Not a thing.

But I heard music.

Cooking with Dog!

If there's one YouTube channel that I think is mandatory for everybody to see, it is Cooking With Dog. The reason why I'm making such a statement is because this channel has succeeded in doing what other people have failed to do so far: making me want to cook.

Notice the emphasis on cooking. Usually when I watch a cooking show, at the end of it I'll say, "Oh boy, I want to eat that!" but never "Dang, now I want to try it making it myself!".

Cooking with Dog makes easy-to-follow, step-by-step videos that teaches you how to cook homemade Japanese food. Nothing fancy here, no flaming skillet or super knife skills needed. As long as you have taste buds and a kitchen, you can do whatever they do. Oh, having a Japanese or Asian supermarket near your place is an advantage because you'll need at least some basic ingredients such as cooking sake, hon-mirin and bonito dashi. Everything else, be creative! (Of course this is the part where you don't take me too seriously. My creativity in the kitchen has been a subject of ridicule for years due to the extent of which I substitute one ingredient with another, e.g. egg for water)

On each video, they'll post a list of ingredients in English and Japanese. The instruction itself is narrated by Francis, a cute grey French poodle with superb English. The Chef is a sweet, middle-aged Japanese lady whose deft hands can lull me to dream-like state whatever they are doing, be it cutting onions, mixing soy sauce and dashi stock, or simply just stirring a pot. Her movements in the kitchen are precise and efficient, and they will tell you why they do certain things. For example: when dicing onions, the easiest way is to cut along it but take care to leave the root attached. Rotate 90 degrees then make cuts perpendicular to the initial ones. Finally slice the onion from the end cut and voila! Straight away you'll have diced onions.

See? They got me excited about cutting onions.

I have so far tried three of their recipes: Chawanmushi, Pork Shogayaki and donuts. I'm happy to report that all have been a success, and I'm especially happy with the chawanmushi because it tastes better than what I had in some 'Japanese' restaurant. I will share with you the video here:



If you like Japanese home cooking, do yourself a favor. Try this one out! And of course, watch Cooking with Dog!

Oh, one thing. The channel may be in hiatus right now because they reported that the Chef got into a rather serious accident in January. She's currently in rehabilitation. I wish her a speedy recovery and hopefully she will be back all healthy, all pumped up again to cook! Man, I miss her already!

<3

Housewife

Celebrating International Women's Day 2012. I read this article from The Atlantic and was filled with an urge to write. The resulting piece is as follows:

Housewife

I am a housewife, Sari said. I take care of my husband and children. I have three children. Two sons, she added after a pause, smiling.

Sari's husband was an employee of a state-owned oil corporation. They lived in a two-storey, three-bedroom house with a garage that could fit two cars. Their house was located in one of the suburban development projects outside the metropolitan and it was within easy reach of a hypermall and a wet-market. The children’s school was also close by, just fifteen minutes away. 

Look, Sari said, pointing at a photo of her children. This is Arif, the eldest. He’s in the third-grade now. And this is his brother, Arya, second grade. The little one is Alina, she’s only two. I’m enrolling her in a playgroup next year.

The Coop

They were sitting at Bu Ikawati’s roadside kiosk when the light from the single bulb above their heads went out. “Yaaah, there it goes again,” said one of the men. The others only nodded while sipping their black coffee and puffing cigarette smoke, as if saying it was to be expected.

The smell of kretek, tobacco blended with cloves, filled the air. It was a balmy, sweat-filled night that had been denied rain for weeks. Syarief wiped the back of his neck with his hands. The mosquitoes that had previously gathered around the lone bulb were now making him their target. He swatted them away, only to hit Mansyur and caused his coffee to spill. That earned him a glare, and although they were good friends no words were spoken. His tongue was as heavy as the apology that sat on it. He knew it was there but didn’t bother to let it out.

Conversations were often abandoned at a night like this. Nights where they knew with certainty that the next day would be worse. Still no rain. The rice fields were parched. The longer the drought ran, the longer the silence was. Syarief wondered how many weeks had it been since he’d last seen a hint of drizzle. The riverbed was now as dry as the asphalt road. The soil cracked, the carcasses of their livelihood hung, withered and defeated. They all needed to make do without a harvest this season and the men had been working all sorts of jobs just to survive. These jobs, like the rain, didn’t come easily. Many of his friends and neighbors had been forced to go to the capital Jakarta to scrape a living.

The Holly War

 It was with every intention of malice that Holly, Chigusa’s Holland Lop bunny, bit my ankle and wouldn’t let go. I told her as much, but that girlfriend of mine defended the dwarf rabbit and accused me of delusions and oversensitivity. “How can,” she began, “such a cute creature like Holly have that kind of thoughts? Look at her!”

I looked at the big floppy ears, large eyes and button nose.

“Even Satan was once considered devilishly handsome,” I reminded Chigusa and made an effort to look in pain.