25

The year is 2020 and time does not matter. I haven't written a single word™ this year & upon being asked to, for this small project, here's what I wrote:

To live is to begin again at any particular moment.

Despite time not meaning anything, I still wanted to write a birthday post. It's been approximately 3 months after my turning [redacted] and it's not getting any easier. One time a friend of mine tried introducing me to this person who is 28, and I still think umm that's old? When it's really merely 3 years apart - the same amount of time I'd spent stuck in the same office doing/not doing the same menial tasks worrying about getting stuck and both fearing/yearning for change. My age is now apparently a common age limit for job vacancies (at least in my current working field).

Ageism and ableism felt so evident now more than ever and I would so much love to learn more about them, but alas. Not only have I not been writing I also read very very few, and this has somehow caused me to think much, much slower and keep forgetting things and (probably unrelated but) dropping things etc. I worry about not being good enough in documenting the vast amount of things I feel/think/experience and now by not exercising/forcing myself to pour it out I might have rendered myself worse and I worry if I'll ever feel better or be better or at least live up to my own expectations but

I'm not even making sense right now and future me might look back and scorn but anyways, birthdays right. Felt like a millenia ago but the year also felt long somewhat. I remembered noting the thing I hate the most about birthdays was being put at the mercy? Of how others treat you and being particularly seen and perceived and again none of this would matter should I learn to value myself truly and to stop living in the minds of others but apparently knowing the end goal and the way to achieve it doesn't make it any easier.

The year is 2020 and words does not matter. Feelings does. My mother was diagnosed positive with COVID-19 just 4 days shy from the end of the year, and I am a mess. Was, still am, probably always will, I just hope I'm getting better at hiding and/or living with it.

062. Existential fright

I haven't been actually writing in the longest of time & this feels so good.

I started watching Jenny Slate's Stage Fright on the following week(s) it was first dropped on netflix, but due to limited access to wifi (am looking at you, indie) I was unable to finish it in one sitting. Was actually pretty glad I didn't.

Finished up my usual birthday post on this blog which have been weighing on me for quite a while, turns out (I have at least composed two different drafts on several occasions, each going over around tens of pages but well bc it is a smol notebook I carry around on a daily basis) it is really marvelous, hearing yourself talk almost 24/7 and never shutting up on demand that you'd think you know yourself/how you sounded like, only to pour it out all candid and raw in words and find it is a different voice that shouts back. Whose is it, really, I wonder?

At one point of the documentary, Jenny goes on to explain her awful stage fright and her words just pierced through. It was like that for me, too, but that stage was having to exist on a daily basis among society. Having to be seen, to be perceived and misunderstood, simultaneously, day by day. I sort of have this grasp/guess on the things that could & would make me happy, but too often it is myself that hinders/manipulate/debilitate/deny myself of feeling good. 

[…] the thing that I’m the most scared of about tonight, is that, […] I will deny myself the moment to have fun. And I’m so angry at myself that that might happen, that I’m probably gonna make it happen.

The worst thing [to say] is “Just be yourself!” ‘Cause I’m like, “Oh, okay. You should see how many selves there are in my psyche, ‘cause some of them are fucking murderers, and they’re trying to kill me.” Like, I’m surviving them and living with them, you know?

[…] right before I go on stage, I am, presented with this essential question, which is, ‘Will they like me?’ And I know that they will once I start to talk. But I don’t earn the love unless I give something beautiful that goes out.

What will happen if they don't? Will it matter?

Maybe I'll have a drink alright.

24

So! 10th birthday post published by the end of November (at least, that's when this draft was written). Have just updated the blogger app & it's looking wonderful so I thought I'd write (usually I did my writing via my notes app or drafts of threads on twitter) anyways gotta stop talking in parentheses shall we

I remember my birthday being somewhat, ok not ok, I guess? That my acquired/forcibly inforced knowledge of what birthdays are supposed to be like manifested into myself always pondering always comparing always searching for what went wrong — I guess have ripped me off the ability to truly, without pretense, simply enjoy my existence being a year longer. I kept ticking on boxes, this and that, of things occuring on one's birthday that should bring happiness (it should be, for me, bring happiness, as a list less virgo is a listless one, but anyhow) I remember feeling... Quite lost. Mostly always during the previous years, but even more so this year. It's like, wow, thank you, I appreciate this, should this be your idea of what should make another person happy, but I'm not sure this is what happiness felt like. My own definition of it, that is.

The week of my birthday I happened to watch Ad Astra on such an, I would say, ideal watching condition: was joining a friend of mine on a whim and as a result got a separated seat, the seats next to me empty, was in a messed up state for the last several months & tired after a long day at work which requires me putting up a friendly normal working sane person profile. Not that it's always fake, but that's not the point. Don't you just love one of those occurings where everything just effortlessly clicked that it felt like a conspiracy? 

I hadn't cried that much in a theater for the longest time, just, pure feelings. 

(I admittedly cried manically all through 3 floors' worth of escalators by the end of avengers end game and during supper the same day would start tearing up by any mention of peter parker but! I stand with scorcese that this capitalism fed intricately designed to manipulate your feelings isn't really cinema!)

I don't even have that much daddy issues I think? But then again I'm an awful estimator of my general state of everything, so. It just felt very universal all the while personal. I guess that's what interstellar movies are all about. I loved it.

That being said, I'm not even close to my previous goal (that is to stop living in other people's head, assuming I still write my feelings this way), but I guess I've been avoiding developing a healthy way of seeing/perceiving/taking time to know other people & each their own social dynamics in (supposedly) favor of not getting myself hurt. I realize now that maybe, maybe it's the very thing that is ruining me.

Earlier this November I had this awful set of rashes on my wrist down to the middle of my arm that looked exactly like chicken pox, even though I already had one back in elementary school. It just happen so one morning, my arms feeling itchy, and turned liquid-filled-like and darkened by the next day. All I remember happening several days before was me waking up late one particular night from mosquito bites, a work related site visit the next day after, and the week before camping out in the outdoors. My mum decided it was probably some kind of virus, and with the right meds it receeded within the same week. Also on one of my birthdays in college, I was struck out of nowhere by this all encompassing gaussian blur on my left eye despite not having any minus or cylinder whatsoever. T'was also a virus, the same family/kind probably. I remember the doctor saying: "the main difference between a bacteria and a virus, is that bacteria works pretty sloppy that you'd feel yourself hurting even in the early stages; while viruses work a bit smarter that you wouldn't feel too much pain while your condition deteriorates even worse."

I guess this is my self inflicted virus. To not get myself hurt, to not feel, to render myself numb. To always feel too much, to feel always not quite right. To always seek extremes, to avoid them at all cost, to feel unexpected satisfaction from lukewarm relationships. 

Be present. Be. Breathe.

—

I'm steady, calm. I slept well, no bad dreams. I am active and engaged. I'm aware of my surroundings and those in my immediate sphere. I'm attentive. I am focused on the essentials, to the exclusion of all else. I'm unsure of the future but I'm not concerned. I will rely on those closest to me, and I will share their burdens, as they share mine. I will live and I will love.

059. A little tale about saying what you mean, and meaning what you said.

A boy and a girl sat in a car together, stuck in the unmoving traffic inside the parking lot of some mall somewhere around Jakarta. The radio was blasting one of Bruno Mars's hit songs, a must sing karaoke one, I suppose. They were inbetween conversations, when the boy said: "isn't it weird that you're not singing along to this song? I mean it's such a dancy and even a bit overplayed song, I'm sure you remember at least the lyrics to the reff part. I was just in a car with (our friend) earlier, and she can't stop screaming along to this song."

The girl looked puzzled. "I wonder," was all she could answer. She was really confused as well; as one of her most favorite activities is to sing absent-mindedly. She would sing on the shower to herself, while working on her assignments along with friends (and even around her not-so-close friends, although she was a rather shy person; but some songs are just impossible not to sing along to), during concerts, during church services sometimes as a singer up front at the stage, during guitar solos and the beating of the drum, even in secondary or third notes. She knew that singing for at least 15 minutes per day supposedly elongates one's life and even burn out some calories. Her mother, in particular, liked to remark her ability to remember so many different songs and their lyrics. In short, she loved singing. Why didn't she sang? Why wasn't it her initial reaction to sing whenever there was a halt in their conversation (as she usually does sometimes to fill up a silence)?

The answer didn't come right away, as they was quick to move on to another topic. But time passes by, and, the answer came through a flashback of memory.

Several years earlier, the boy and the girl were in the same class together, and were chair mates for several months to almost a year, perhaps. And even before that they were acquainted since early years of kindergarten, so they were at the very least, good friends. They talked a lot as they are both very chatty, and through this they knew each other's characters, vices and virtues pretty well: there are almost no pretentiousness among them. Each knows each other very well, the author supposes.

One particular day, the girl was singing around absent-mindedly as per usual, when the boy, perhaps half jokingly, but perhaps true as well, told her that she was off key.

That's it. She couldn't remember what came after that: what was her initial reaction (though she was sure she didn't really make a fuss about it and even kept on singing)? Did she ever sang again in front of him? Did she noticeably sing less after hearing so?

One, perhaps thought to be harmless, remark, was the basis of one's constrain to a supposedly unconscious mere act of joy (that is, singing absent-mindedly). Isn't that somewhat remarkable, that something so trivial could alter one's habit without her even realizing or deemed so?

058. Gold pray

I still remember my first encounter with Coldplay's music quite clearly. I'm not quite sure whether this happened somewhere before or after I've known them as a band and discovering their radio/mtv friendly songs like fix you or yellow, but here goes.

Back in the glory days of tumblr, I used to look up to my following for, mostly aesthetics and literature references, but also good music. Tumblr is a very personal social media, in a sense, that the content you're seeing in your timeline is really personally curated and in some way a personification of those you chose to follow. The social media is also well known, nowadays, as one of those secretive, 'you don't know me on tumblr' tagline, meaning you can really know someone from so many perspective and depths and layers through what they posted or reblogged, all kinks and shades and weird stuff. It was really one of the best of times to be on the internet. (Am looking at it with the rosy tinted glass the way people used to look at, perhaps the wonderful chaos that is Woodstock.)

This wonderful chaos was also what made actually searching for something on tumblr rather very difficult, as the tags are most of the time not properly correct or even available (and the ones that do are usually not quite the one you were searching for). In other words, time and patience are the currency in exchange for stumbling upon wonderful things.

The media/song player of tumblr, back then, was a mere plain white box, about 0.5 * 4 cm in size, with a simple black 'play' icon on the middle left side. One fine day, I stumbled upon this song post with no actual written title, or even written anything, I think. I forgot what it was that compelled me to listen to it, as my fragment of memory showed no text underneath the media player (tho perhaps I've just forgotten what was written underneath and took the liberty of erasing it), but I pressed play anyway. It was Clocks by Coldplay.

The intro was what must've felt like to float in a slow, forward motion through the clouds, all smithereens and specks of white sparse cotton, a bed of stratocumulus clouds under your feet, a warm golden glow from the setting sun.

The task at hand, back there, was to find out the name of the song and of the band. There was no clue left behind whatsoever, no shazam or soundhound or anything. The only solution I could think of was to google one of the lyrics, usually the reff part that stood out therefore might've been the actual title. Now, the reff part of Clocks isn't much an actual word/sentence, and the rest of the lyrics isn't exactly crystal clear to the ears of an ordinary middle school kid from a third world country having first discovered the internet only several years before.

I try my best not to take my piece of memory for granted and dramatize it so to the extent of forgetting which was actually real and which was what I think was real (then again, this piece of writing is in a way a dramatization of such memory, but, still), after several listen, there was this certain punctuation in the way he sang 'closing walls and ticking Clocks', you see, so I must've googled something along the lines of 'clocks song/clocks lyrics', which was rather absurd if you think about it. And that's how I met one of the most wonderful otherworldly magical musician/band in the universe.

I wrote this several hours before watching A Head Full of Dreams, tho. My heart caves in (as in, its still an ongoing process right now). I love them so much.