Words and I

Looking down from the 4th floor window at my office, everything seems so beautiful. Tiny cars, tiny people, tiny houses, various rooftops, other high buildings, tall towers, the top of the tall trees, the whole football field and gardens. Wow! I am looking at the world! But sometimes, when I go down the ground floor, things I see seem to be common again, quite boring and uninteresting. 

I wonder if birds think the same way but the other way around?

What I am trying to say is, sometimes in life, you just have to look at things with different perspective. Just try to be in someone else’s shoes, for example. Try to look down when you always look up.

I know…. easier to be said than done    

I got an email today, telling me about some dogs which need to be adopted because the owner can no longer keep them. Some friends went to see them but dogs from original heredity (we call it a ‘ras’ dog or shall I use the word ‘prestigious’?) had already been adopted. They won’t take dogs from mixed heredity (we call it a ‘kampung’ dog, which means… well, ‘the minors’ you’d say) because they are not cute enough. Poor them. Even in animals world they have castes.

I thought we only had caste system in human’s world… eventhough God creates all human beings equal.  

Some employees from a bank came to my office today. They offered some financial programs, such as saving, deposit, investment, and insurance. With persuasive skills, these employees talked from A to Z about money and interest. The more money you have to invest or save or deposit or pay for insurance, of course the more interest and benefits you’ll get.

I am wondering now… Does it mean the richer you are, it will be easier for you to get more money if you join those programs? I think so. While people with small salary don’t have enough money to save each month, rich people just deposit their money and each month they will enjoy the interest from their deposit and their money is safe in the bank forever.

Well, for me, I just hope God gives me good health… and reminds me always to deposit many good deeds in my life and that’s much much more important than interest in the bank. (Anyway, I only get around Rp 20.000 for interest per month in the bank minus a few thousands rupiahs for miscellaneous fees…which means zero interest… haha!)

I have an old habit which might seem ridiculous for others, saying in my heart, "I hope you are fine," to people. At first, I did it to people I saw on the street, in public transportation, and anywhere, whose faces looked so sad, simple people who have to work hard to earn a little money, beggars, sellers on the market and street, buskers, and street children, old bus drivers, etc. Or someone who looked sick. Even to some policemen on the crossroads and angry politicians on television. 

Then I’ve learned to say that, too, to people who annoy or hurt or make me angry deliberately or not. It is much much more difficult. For example, to a bajaj driver who charged me too much for taking me to a place so near. I had never been to that place but my Dad said it was so near you could even walk. Because I was in a hurry, I took a bajaj. I thought Rp 5.000 would be fair but the driver insisted me to pay Rp 9.000 and said that it was a normal fare. Then later my Dad said the normal fair should have been Rp 5.000.

So, yes, I have been trying to say in my heart the words, "I hope you are fine," sincerely to those kind of people. It calms me down and I don’t get angry easily day by day. I am not someone who loses temper easily, but doing this also reminds me to feel blessed and be more patient.  

So, I hope you are fine, too, my family and friends!

It is a new restaurant on the sea I went to last Saturday. Two long bridges on both sides of the restaurant connect it to the beach. Quite a perfect place for visitors who require serenity, peace, and a bit privacy to dine.

It is highly forbidden to throw away garbages out to the sea because there’s a pool area on the beach near it. The restaurant manager must have a lot of troubles making sure no one throwing away garbages to the sea because sadly to say, littering seems to be a habit for my fellow countrymen. Sigh.

So came a fashionable good looking girl with a boy that evening. I noticed her because by way of her walking. She wore very high-heeled shoes (sadly to say again, I think most girls still choose fashionable and ‘painable’, rather than fashionable and comfortable) and she swayed when she walked, I thought she was drunk.

Not long after, I noticed her again, walking to a wash basin provided by the restaurant while her fingers sticking a cigarette end. There’s a garbage bin near the basin and she threw the cigarette end into the bin but… oops, she missed. The cigarette end was just sliding down the restaurant’s floor. The next thing she did was, she washed her hands and calmly went away without bothering to pick up her cigarette end.

Was it shameful for her to bend down and pick up some garbage on the floor and put it in the garbage bin? Was it hurting her PRIDE doing that? Who’s noticing her pride, anyway?   

"Owww… isn’t she such a cutie!"

I was hugging a cute white hairy little dog whose eyes like big gleaming greenish beads when my eyes caught my Mom’s look. Her face seemed to say, "What? Beautiful? Bi-yu-ti-ful? How can a dog be beautiful? You’re mad." You see, my Mom isn’t really fond of dogs. She loves plants instead.

One of my sisters doesn’t like watching football games on tv. She finds it boring. My brothers and I think it’s such a beautiful game (and to me, it will be more beautiful when the players are skillful and handsome…. okay, don’t read this part )

I prefer traveling by trains than by buses or airplanes. The view is so beautiful along the endless railway. The houses, the vast paddy fields, the trees and forests, the mountains and hills, the rivers, the bridges, the tunnel long and dark, the sunset. The topless kids from faraway villages waving their hands cheerily at the moving train, shouting happily. I especially love taking trains to Semarang, a city in Central Java. Nearing the city, the railway is inches away from the sea, you can even get some splashes from the sea waves. So incredibly beautiful.

I think, it is just a matter of how you look at the world, don’t you think? Even when these days there seems to be more and more long straight black haired girls than a few years ago (ehm), there is always beauty in curly hairs… oops, I mean, in everything.

Peace!

As I stepped out the parking lot at the back of Gambir Railway Station in Jakarta one night, I was suddenly surrounded by quite a few taxi drivers. They were trying to get me taking their taxis. I had meant to take a taxi home so in no time I just followed one taxi driver who said that his taxi used an argometer.

It had been a tiring day and all I wanted was going home soon. As I sat myself on the back seat of the taxi, the driver slowly drove away from the lot and said, "I won’t use the argometer, you just pay 30.000 rupiahs and that includes the parking fee, okay, Miss?"   

Eww… wait a minute. Oh, nevermind. I was too tired to argue. Besides, his offer wasn’t so expensive. I figured that’s the same amount of money I would pay using taxis with argometer.

He was an old driver and from the look on his face, he was about to accept my disagreement or my jumping out of his taxi, but I just said lightly, "Fine, Sir."

When we stopped on the traffic light, a street child knocked on my window. I gave him some bread instead of money. "The love of money won’t get him anywhere, don’t you agree, Sir?" I tried to philosophize when the driver questioned me.

"Well, it’s true… but we need some money to live," he said.

"Who doesn’t?" (But don’t be too greedy about money…. I said this to myself.)

I know, taking care over 220.000.000 people is not easy. Especially when each person needs different things and is not easily satisfied. (Our old defense is, "Oh, can’t you see? It’s because we are human beings… we always need more and can never be satisfied! It is all soooo human, you know!")

But isn’t that why for the past 61 years, this nation has been creating a bunch of laws and institutions to take care of its people, so it’s said?

Mmm… is it so?  

One afternoon. I was in the classroom with a few classmates during the lesson break. I still remember it clearly. One of my classmates, Esther was her name, came up to the blackboard and with a chalk, drew a big picture of a dollar sign followed by so many numbers, then she exclaimed," My parents have a lot of money. We are very rich!" Then all of us wowed at her as if we really understood the value of the money she wrote on the blackboard. We were just a bunch of eight-year-old kids, mind you!

As a kid, I was growing up thinking that rich people were those with lots of money, beautiful houses, cars, and… er, some servants (My mother has never had a servant in spite of the chores which seemed so endless when my siblings and I was very young). I guess most kids everywhere think the same and somehow they want to be rich, too when they grow up or wish that they have rich parents.

The idea of being rich is so powerful that it shapes the mind frame of our society. Most often, someone’s success is judged by his big houses, his bank accounts, his luxurious cars, his rank and power at work and society. We are attacked by consumerism, the more we have, the better we are.

Will I ever be able to tell my future children someday that being rich is nothing to do with having a lot? That it means to feel blessed to be able to help others when we do not have any?    

After years of not needing a new bag, I decided to buy two small handbags a few months a go (I think the other one is not really a handbag… nevermind) because I was in a dire need of a handbag to attend wedding parties. But in the end, I only used one handbag and the other one… it’s still wrapped up nicely in the closet. I feel a bit guilty about it now.

A few months a go, I tried to bleach one of my bags. It’s not supposed to be bleached but I accidentally splashed the bleaching liquid on my bag when I was washing it. In a spur of a moment, I decided to soak my bag in a jug of water mixed with bleaching liquid. Voila! It became so clean and like a brand new bag.

A few weeks a go, I decided to wash it again using the same successful recipe and the result was… a chaos! The color of my bag is now like the color of a hundred years old bag.     

But I still have some old bags I can use. I hope I still won’t be needing a new one in a long time.

What’s in a bag?*

===============================================

P.S. Ilegally and in disguise taken from the famous Shakespeare’s ‘What’s in a name?’ ^_^