About the Dino

"When I was a kid, i loved to draw a dinosaur!" he said.

He went on and pen the creature on her calendar. While tracing his ink strokes she was reminded about her own habit of drawing two fat fingers on her book covers.






Pinching her eyes and trying to find what's so Dino in the Dinosaur, she smiled and giggled thinking how funny it is, that now the Dinosaur has found his Peace.








And that now her fat fingers have found their use as to what they want to keep.

About hardships

Things get tough
And you curl on your bed
Wishing nobody was looking for you
Wishing you were a piece of crayon,
safe and sound inside the crayon box,
at least until the bullies come and rip you apart

Things get hard
You pray that you can stand tomorrow
Then you remember that you prayed the same thing yesterday
So now you add,
that you don't wanna pray tomorrow,
at least not the same thing

Things get messy
And you try so hard to keep it all together
You try so hard to make it count
Upon which you start wonder
how these tiny hands can hold so much,
at least until they break

About The Lunchbox (2013)

I recently watched "The Lunchbox" on DVD, in Singapore, after purchasing it at Mustafa. For those of you who don't know what Mustafa is, please, please, pleaseeeeeee do yourself a favor: google "Mustafa Centre Singapore" and put it as one of your go-to place when you go to Singapore.

You'll be amazed. This shopping centre opens 24 hours, and carries everything, I repeat: everything, you can think of. Clothes. Soaps. Medicines. Electronic goods. Footwear. Watches. Foreign exchange. even JEWELRY. Yes, they sell gold. At one point, they even sell cars. Like, yeah, cars.....

Anyway, not going to talk about Mustafa, even though if I had a chance to interview the owner, I would build a dedicated post website for them, more like a Mustafa fan club, complete with a how-to-find-x guide ebook. We can call ourselves: Mustafan.

About The Lunchbox (2013) now...
This film won so many awards, and I can understand the appeal. The premise of the film is whether you can fall in love with someone you have never met. First of all, if you like 50 Shades of Grey type of thing, move over. The Lunchbox is a love story that shows no physical interaction whatsoever in its 104-min running time. The only interaction that the two "lovers" have is through the lunchbox, that was mistakenly delivered to one of them.

"I think we forget things if we have no one to tell them to," said one of the lines in the lunchbox note exchanges.

Is it really true? When we were a kid, we were told to repeat stuff mainly so (I assume) we could stick it to our head. As we are growing older, the process of remembering stays the same, but what about the process of forgetting?

Forgetting is such a paradox. When we want to forget something, we need to first remember what it is we want to forget. And guess what? Sometimes we are stuck with remembering that we need to forget about X, rather than actually forgetting X. Confusing...

#spoileralert
In The Lunchbox, one of the lovers chose to leave. I think at the end of the day, separation is the first step of forgetting. Like some unsuccessful LDR doers say, "It's the distance."

Here's my unapologetically-amateur rating for The Lunchbox: 8/10
Directing: 9/10
Cinematography: 8/10
Editing: 8/10
Wardrobe/Make-up/Hair-do: 7/10
Acting: 8/10
Script: 9/10
Production Design: 7/10


Let me know what you think if you watch it by any chance :)

About the science of falling in love

This is how I fell in love

Exactly this

And I know it because I did it before. I've read about the experiment in a few articles before. Having an experience as a research assistant on Emotional Intelligence, I know a thing or two about Interpersonal Relationship and how openness can affect your relationship with (who you thought is) a stranger.

I don't know how to fall out of love with someone though. Can the reverse be true? Like you just need to not share? You just need to not care enough.

Anyways. It's also interesting if repetition can work just as effective. If this is what you need to fall in love, can you, say, do it again with a different person and fall in love again, just as much? Or will you then be reminded of how you fell in love with your previous partner (whom you fell in love with, by the very same process) and go back rerouting to that person? After all, romanticization is a powerful thing. If everything is as easy as it is though, I'll open a love clinic and prepare my troops of strangers to connect with you and make you fall in love all over again.

We love science, don't we all?

About rejection

You can smell a rejection from a mile away, yet it stinks, so much, that you cover your nose and make sure it doesn't go through your nostril and it catches you off-guard when you run out of breath and are forced to sniff it when it's right in front of you. That's when you kinda have to inhale, involuntarily, the bad gulp of air, at once.

In short: it sucks.

About Thanksgiving!

It's been a while since I feel like writing something with lots of meat in it, so this post will be it. #punintended

Last weekend, as a part of our plan to recreate Thanksgiving-in-the-U.S. in Indonesia, my friends and I rent a service apartment in Kuningan Area (***w**d) where we can get together, bring lots of food, booze, games, and as I mentioned earlier in this entry, have our very own Thanksgiving dinner brouhaha...

and if brouhaha isn't the right word to describe it, I don't know what else will be.

As a start, our menu is something like: turkey . gravy . cranberry sauce . pizza . charcoal pizza . kfc bucket . lamb kabob . baked pastel . crab rangoon . brie cheese with fig jam . filled egg with fancy stuff . lasagna . macaroni schotel . risoles . sausages . salad . martabak manis . martabak asin . raspberry pretzel pie . nutella pie . apple crumble . wine (cab) . wine (cab + merlot) . wine (merlot) . grey goose . 2x24 bintang beer . 2x24 bintang radler beer . 

... yeah, something like that. I might have forgotten a couple, because who wouldn't after stuffing all sort of food into one's mouth like that?

We dined before playing more than one drinking game because everybody got bored pretty easily. At first, we played "heads up" in teams. Some teams are pretty good even though there are more than one occurrences where this happened:

A: *acting this one out, literally, minus the hotness*



B: BADMINTON!


...


We then named our cups to move on to cup games. Mine was named "alcoholic" because, you know, they just have the most baseless assumption that I drink a lot. We also chose a loser song to be played everytime one had to drink. Our loser song of the night was this.

We played King's Cup, Flip Cup, and countless card games to finish the liquor. Apparently that's the goal of the night (re: to finish the liquor).

At the end of everything, we feel pretty hollow about the fact that we need to get back to reality. Everybody misses those times we spent in our apartment in the U.S. with/without friends coming over. Everybody misses having our own "space" at a certain age when life doesn't seem too much cluttered with, well, lives, of us and other people, who suddenly pop in the way, saying "Hi, btw, you should think about us too. Nope, you don't have any choice and you can't bail right now..."

Regardless, two days are too long to be a Negative Nancy and should be too short to be a Hopeful Hillary1. We must remain grateful that we have each other, at least.

To remind myself of the fabulous 2015, this is the list of what I've been thankful for:
- a chance to travel more than I've ever had in years. 
- an elementary family who started to learn that I don't need to be available in every family business (and that I have needs to go out more than I used to).
- a brother who just earned his private pilot license.
- more than one accountability partner who gladly will slap me in my face when I'm acting less like a rational person and more like a douchebag.
- more than one BFF for life who gladly will act douchey with me when we feel like we need to.
- a job that can keep up with my moody self.
- alcohol.
- instagram filters.
- a not-so-bad transition to my 25-year-old self. I had a couple2 of good-cry days and stuff... I also had a breakout, which is not a normal quarter-life crisis reaction after I did my research (What am I? A certified late-bloomer?) but I think it could have been worse.
- a good mood that encourages me to start writing again...

And now, as promised...

Brouhaha Pictures!

these two boxes of pizza is the earlier food that arrived, so we happened to take a picture of them, before everything else came and we ate everything voraciously.

the eating group at the dinner table, the cooking group was at the back, in the kitchen, cooking...

big elisa's head and half of the squad

the girls.

nope, the one i was holding was not liquor, guys. It was a bottle of chili because, uum, i need to get hotter?

the guys.

nope, they weren't drunk. this is their usual selves.

candidly taken *seriously*

the complete pack

me and my cute love

May we keep the thankful attitude way beyond the thanksgiving weekend, and may being thankful doesn't stop us from being hungry young blood who chase our dreams and what-not. 





1 I made that up

2 Well, more than a couple.

About wasting 10 minutes of my day

and feeling good about it