Apa Sih Mimpi Kamu?

What is your ambition?

What is your dream?

Pasti sering, atau paling nggak, pernah ditanya pertanyaan seperti ini kan? Entah saat di kelas, saat melamar pekerjaan, saat diwawancara, ataupun saat ketemu sama kakak kelas yang pengen ngajak kamu kamu jadi downline  MLM dia. Kemarin pas saya ikut diklat, pertanyaan itu muncul. Jawaban yang diutarakan teman-teman saya beragam namun anehnya terdapat pola yang agak bisa ditebak. Ibu-ibu mayoritas menjawab “menjadi ibu yang baik,” bapak-bapak jawabannya “jadi sukses dalam pekerjaan,” para cewek-cewek dan cowok-cowok yang belum menikah kebanyakan jawabannya “menjadi sukses.” Perlu diketahui, semua peserta diklat itu kolega di kantor saya, jadi semua sudah bekerja.

Buat saya, pertanyaan ini adalah salah satu pertanyaan yang sulit dijawab. Iya, “merencanakan” mungkin belum masuk ke dalam kamus istilah saya. Saya  selalu mengikuti arah, plin-plan, nggak suka berencana, go with the flow kata orang sih, (mungkin) karena takut “bertanggungjawab,” berkomitmen terhadap rencana yang sudah dibuat? Hhhmmmm mungkin.

NB: pengen tahu jawaban saya pas dikasih pertanyaan itu di diklat? Jawaban saya “pengen nonton Liverpool FC di Anfield Stadium” J

kerisik daun bambu

kerisik daun bambu
jentik air hujan
bikin ingat kamu
yang di seberang lautan

matahari kita sama
tapi di sini nggak ada
hujan......

di sana nggak hujan?
semoga tuhan kasih hujan
biar kamu kangen aku

tapi kerisik daun bambu
itu privilese ku
di sana tak ada bukan?

Jakarta, 23 Januari 2013, ba'da ashar

Write Something, Haru!

21/12/2012

Ay-up mate! How’s your dooms day? Hehehehe. It rained hard just now, with strong wind and loud thunders; pretty much a dooms-day-like weather isn’t it? :D. Anyway, it has been bazillion years since the last time I managed to type several words for this blog hehehehe. Been quite busy, you know, gaming, SNSD-ing, procrastinating, I just can’t keep up. Lately my mind got stuck (even now), cannot find anything to write, until my friend asked me when will I write again for my blog (she’s the only reader of my blog, I presume). And then, here I am, having force-close my game window because my team got lost (twice), I then force myself to write. To be frank, I have no clue of what to write.

This year end, like any other year, the office is busy. I have to keep up the pace. Everybody’s in a rush, busy, buried in pile of documents. Again, I have to keep up, matching their pace. But one that I cannot stand is that business brings out stress, stress leads to bad temper. I complained a lot in twitter, that I don’t like busy people. Busy people are sensitive, short tempered, and no fun. Quite a few times I had to feel a little offended. At some point, I committed to not speak any words to those offended me, but yeah blame me; I couldn’t resist other’s humble smile. At the non-busy time, when the pressure lowers, those busy people are slowly getting more and more stable, and what choice did I have when they become normal and wear again their smile? Keep the silence pledge? I don’t think so. Yeah that’s life (well, I force-closed this paragraph with a big thing, life. Guess I lost for words. hahahaha).

Big things happened in this last months of 2012. On September 22^nd, a huge concert was held in Jakarta, the SMTown concert. A concert featured several artists from SM Management, a renowned Korean artist management. My reason to attend this concert was obvious: seeing my favorite K-Pop idols personally. And I bet you know who they are, yes the famous Girls’ Generation, and F(x), two well known girlbands. The concert was awesome, the atmosphere was impressive. I hope I have more chances to attend such concert.

And the last October, the 29^th to be exact, I officially married the girl I dated for nearly 7 years. This was an unforgettable moment, the moment of truth, like a dream came true. Standing with your beloved ones, shaking the hands of those humbly and sincerely congratulated your big day; it was such an experience. An experience I treasured so much, but this is an experience I wish I would never have anymore.  One thing dude, when you got asked “when will you get married” often, just be cool, for eventually your time will come. It is never too late, nor too early; it comes just when it should come. Don’t get married because anyone tells you to, but because you want to J.

Dude, what did I smoke? How on earth I got to this point? Talking about marriage. Hehehehe. Guess I got to finish here ;). Oke then, have a great holiday folks! Don’t eat all your food, the apocalypse seems to be canceled hehehehe.

English: Fascinatingly Inconsistent

“There’s nothing constant in this world but inconsistency” – Jonathan Swift

Indeed, inconsistency is what makes up the world. We may find consistency in nearly all aspect of this life, even in language. We have learnt English since elementary school, some of us even earlier, but we learnt it for granted. Thus, we seldom realize that some consistencies occur in this language. Dr. Albrecht Classen, a linguist from The University of Arizona, points out several fun and entertaining inconsistencies in English that will put us in awe and make us shout “how can I missed that” or “seriously.”

In his “English Language: Crazy Inconsistencies,” Dr. Classen shows us that an English word may come with different meaning, such as the word “dessert” in this sentence:

The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert

There are two exactly identical words and one nearly identical word in the sentence; but those three words have totally different meaning. The first desert means to leave or to abandon while the second desert means the barren or desolate area especially the dry and often sandy ones. And the other dessert (with double s) means the dish served as the last course of a meal.

In the other examples, we are shown with some interesting facts that there is no egg in eggplant, neither pines nor apples in pineapples, English muffin is not originated from English, French fries in not French. Also, we will find paradoxes in the fact that quicksand is slow, a boxing ring is square, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor a pig.

Do you ever have a nose that runs and feet that smell? Do you ever wonder if a vegetarian eats only vegetable then what does a humanitarian eat? How can a fat chance and a slim chance are the same? Why can a wise man and a wise guy be opposites? A wise man is a wise and trusted guide and advisor while a wise guy is an upstart who makes conceited, sardonic, insolent comments. Why is put pronounced as /pʊt/ while cut is pronounced as /kʌt/? Why does alarm go off when it rings?

Those are some of the million unique features of English. After all, language is the product of human’s intelligences, not a computer’s, thus inconsistencies may occur here and there. From here on, be aware of those unique features in every language you learn, and then you will find the fun in learning the language.

Compiled from various sources

Language after Twitter

Yes, this up-to-140-characters long microblogging site known as Twitter is gaining massive popularity these days, not only in United State of America, from which the founder of the site, Jack Dorsey, is originated, but also in the whole world that it ended the domination of Facebook in social media realm. Since the day it was created in March 2006, it has been rapidly developed as now there are over 500 million active users with more than 340 million tweets generated daily. The popularity of the site inevitably influences people’s social aspects. Language is among those that are not immune to the influence. In fact, many have said that language suffers most due to the limitation of 140 characters. Ralph Fiennes, a Hollywood actor said that modern language is being eroded, and he blamed “a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter.” The modern age people often find difficulties in the sentence with more than one clause and the words of more than two syllables. For example, the density of Shakespeare text can be a challenge in a way for the younger generation that perhaps the people of few generations ago did not have. Even the famous Linguist, Noam Chomsky also mentioned Twitter lingo* as “very shallow communication” and regarded it as superficial “it requires a very brief, concise form of thought and so on that tends toward superficiality and draws people away from real serious communication. It is not a medium of a serious interchange.”

In contrary, some believe that Twitter is not ruining language but in fact it enriches it and makes it better. Aside of the abbreviations and the substituted words as well as the leetspeak*, Twitter also contributes new phrases or terms that are used both online and offline. These specific phrases allow people across the world to connect and interact in specific topics. As for scientist, those phrases enable them to easily gather information from Twitter just by search those phrases or words in it. Twitter is full of a variety of language that people may don’t understand, however the people from around the world can converse and interact using those specific Twitter terms or phrases that are widely known. In fact some Twitter words are also adopted in English dictionaries such as Oxford Learner Dictionary that lists the word “retweet” and “hashtag” as meaningful words.

For centuries, human’s culture is changing, evolving, and thus resulting in various social changes that affect our way of life and not to mention the language. The new communication era, not only via Twitter but also other means of communication such as short messages or telegraph, changes our communication attitude thus resulting in language shaping. Is it bad or good? You decide. After all a surviving language is an evolving language.

@haru_haruu

*lingo: the vocabulary of a particular field of interest (Merriam Websters Dictionary)

*leetspeak: a communication where a user replaces letters for numbers or other characters (www.computerhope.com)

Digital Life?

Firstly, sing me a happy birthday! I’m the birthday boy today J. Celebrating the first day I breathed the open air of the world. Thanks to facebook for making the remembering other’s birthday easier, and thanks for giving me the things everybody always have these days on their birthday, the birthday greetings….on the wall, or now they call it timeline. Thank you for all the timeline writers, I do appreciate your wishes and greetings!! You rock!!

So here it came, once the facebook did its job…the greetings flooded my days. People faraway, wrote on my timeline, people near me, congratulated me..shook my hand…with their loveliest smiles I saw today, some did both…congratulate me offline and online. Not saying it on facebook is not “afdol” they said, and I was like…uummmm it works the other way around for me. I know, it was meant to be a joke, but let’s see from the “nynyir” point of view :D ….I mean if you have done the greeting offline (directly by meeting in the real world) then why would you need to say it in the online world? The thing is, for me, the one does matter most is letting the person to whom you want to congratulate your feeling, not letting everyone on facebook knows that you have congratulated someone on his birthday. It’s not like I don’t like them post the greeting on my timeline, and it’s not that saying happy birthday twice, offline and online, is bad…but yeah…saying it is not “afdol” really surprised me…. One thing crossed my mind is, has the digital world become that important? Some said facebook brings the far ones closer, and the close ones farther, and yeah…sadly it is true. Frankly, I was there…I used to be at the time when I communicate with the person about 3 meters away from me using facebook J. If  that is bad enough, I tell you what’s worse….the public display of affection in the social media…like saying I love you, oh I need you, oh I want to be always be with you…and other creepy things on social media when they have more private means of communicating like messaging or telephone. I mean, yeah, once a while..it is okay…but repeating it every minute and every day is like shouting to everybody you are eating donuts while everybody has already known/seen you are eating… it is not necessary. Then maybe you will say “I write what I want to write, it is my space, my account” yes you are right…and in the other side “I respond to what I want to, to what I see, to what is responsible of making me feel certain 

feeling”…..indeed, it is called SOCIAL media for a reason. Social means you, like it or not, will have too deal with others, communicate with others, interact with other, thus what you do will, more or less, have effect to others.

The digital life really gets more and more “important”…..even sometimes the real life gets less important than that. How many times I see people say certain things in facebook or twitter at certain occasions like “happy mother’s day/father’s day” for example…when they know, neither the father nor mother has facebook/twitter account… ridiculous isn’t it? What do they want? Show the love to the father/mother, or show other that they love the father/mother? If they mean the former, why don’t they just tell them directly…posting something on facebook for someone that doesn’t have facebook account is just not making any sense. Once, I got a chain message that said “send it to 10 (or..umm I don’t really remember the amount), if you don’t then you don’t love your parents” ---- that was just outrageous…how can you measure the love to parents just by how much you care to send a silly message to certain number of people. Come on……it is okay to have a digital life…but live it responsibly, and remember….no digital friendship better than the real one.


PS: My birthday is yesterday, June 18....I wrote it yesterday, and posted it just now...so yeah, when you read the first paragraph, pretend you are on June 18 ya hehehe  

Give glory to God and love the people (Raden Saleh, Maxen 1848)

Yesterday, my boss asked “does anybody have the interest in painting?” to the people at my office, “who wants to come with me to Raden Saleh’s painting exhibition?” she added, then I said “I don’t know much about painting Ma’am, but I would like to go to the exhibition.” And then today I with my boss and one of my office mate escape the office hour to go to the exhibition (I know, this is not a good thing…ssshhhh don’t say anything to anybody..okay? :D ). All I know about Raden Saleh is that he was a painter, and couple days ago I saw his painting at the internet…and I was like….hmmmm this painting is quite nice (and that was one of my reason I went to the exhibition).

The walls beside the door show two large red poster, written “Give glory to God and love the people (Raden Saleh, Maxen 1848)” on the right wall and the letter as well as the picture of Raden Saleh or Raden Saleh Syarief Bustaman on the left wall, from which I later learned that Raden Saleh once lived in Europe and as he was very talented, the government offer him to choose to be European or Indonesian….he chose to be the later.  The first painting I saw was the one titled “Winter” (or Winter in Netherlands…I was not very sure hehehe), as I overheard from an organizer staff who was explaining the painting to a group of junior high students that this painting was sketched by Raden Saleh’s mentor, A.J. Payen,  from Netherlands who had Raden Saleh finished the sketch. 

I like the painting, the detail amazes me given it was painted on 1830, gives me a chill of winter breeze. 

There were a lot of paintings exhibited, but you know, I went with my boss, and most definitely I have to be her assistant in taking her picture....since she is very fond of taking picture wherever and whenever (and the first thing she does is uploading them to facebook :D). My boss is a very...what we call it....cultural..uummmm I mean she like the exotic things ....like antiques etc. She also loves paintings, she knows a lot about them. From her, I learned that the most famous painting of Raden Saleh is the Arrest of Diponegoro, a historical painting about the arrest of one of Indonesian heroes, Pangeran Diponegoro which was painted on 1857.

Okay, sorry for the distraction...just focus on the painting, okay :D. They also exhibit Raden Saleh's sketches that were published in the books about painting for children. For a novice like me, the paintings were extraordinary, the details are amazing, some paintings really present the ambiance, certain feelings......as I see in these paintings...

 these are my favourites....I forgot the name, I think they have to do with "Mega Mendung". The feeling of fresh, bright, and calm illuminate me. I really love the exhibition, even though I don't really understand paintings hehehehehe. So if you like, spare some time to visit Musium Nasional (in front of Gambir Station) to see this exhibition before it is closed on 17 June.