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Sabtu, 14 Mei 2011

Double Happiness!

So. There are a few things that make me happy these days. Some of them were too random that I forgot what they were and why they made me happy, but I was and am happy anyway.

So. About two days ago, after we have ICT class, Ms.Heny came to Jo, Yoseph and I and told us to stay at the class for a while. I thought we were scolded from something I didn't really know, so my heart skipped a beat. But then, she told us that Ms.Joice had prepared something for us as a wage from teaching English for kindergarten kids all this while. We were overwhelmed, but then Ms.Heny said that the amount was not much, but the most important thing was we got this from what we had done. So, at first, Jo and I didn't put our hopes too high.

So, the four of us entered a class with Ms.Joice where there were a lot of kids studying there. I was so shocked by how responsive the kids were; they waved their hands, they cheered, they called out, "Cece! Koko!" I thought they forgot us. I almost shed tears.

So, we stood in front of the class and some of the kids shook hands with us and thanked us and gave us the envelope. Then we took pictures and pictures. I was so happy. When we got outside, I was shocked again; the money was a lot more than Jo and I predicted! So we where happy. I even somersaulted through the hall.

So anyway, I don't really know the reason why I use a lot of 'So's in this post, but I just want you all to know that I am happy. Because when things that I don't expect to happen eventually happens, and they make me happy, it makes me wonder; life is always surprising, it won't let you feel low and down all the time.
So, have a good day!

Where on Earth have I been?

am so sorry for not posting for such a long time, because:
1. I am not able to turn on my computer because my parents accused me of staying late for browsing, which makes me sick like this;
2. I am sick most of the nights so I just lay on my bed after 9 PM.
Really, it's not like I'm having a massive headache or a dengue fever or typhus -- I'm just having a sore throat and a stomache and a flu, that's all. But if it's all combined, imagine the feeling.

Blogger Down

Hih, kesel banget Blogger ga bisa dibuka seharian kemaren. Refresh beratus-ratus kali tetep juga ga bisa kebuka. Upload lewat email, dibalesnya postnya harus kepending.
Trus tadi liat blog temen-temen semua pada ngalamin yang sama ternyata. Syukurlah.

Senin, 09 Mei 2011

Kutipan dari Komik Rokki

Mia: Mia pernah baca kutipan dari Robert Frost. Dia bilang rahasia hidup itu bisa dirangkum dalam tiga kata..
Rokki: "Masih ada hari esok."?
Mia: Bukan, itu empat kata. yang bener, "Hidup terus berjalan." 

Indonesia Dan Komik

Di zaman ini, komik sudah menjadi bagian dari budaya pop yang berkembang di kalangan muda. Dimulai dari masuknya komik Amerika lewat komik strip seperti Garfield dan Calvin & Hobbes yang terbit setiap hari Minggu di koran-koran, masyarakat mulai lekat dengan komik, dan ini menyebabkan komik Tintin dan Asterix & Obelix booming di masa itu.

Lalu muncullah manga Jepang yang menjangkiti anak-anak dan remaja. Kali ini pendekatannya berbeda - remaja tertarik dengan manga Jepang karena tokoh-tokoh berwajah imut yang ditawarkan, dan cerita sehari-hari yang ringan dan mudah dipahami. Belum lagi komik-komik yang diangkat menjadi serial televisi, seperti Doraemon, Conan, sampai Sailor Moon. Penonton kartun-kartun di atas biasanya tertarik untuk mengoleksi komiknya yang sudah terbit karena tidak mau ketinggalan ceritanya.

Namun tidak seiring dengan bertambahnya jumlah pembaca komik di Indonesia, jumlah penulis komik asli Indonesia malah jalan di tempat, cenderung stagnan. Tak banyak kelihatan komik asli Indonesia beredar di media massa atau toko buku. Mungkin memang beredar, tapi tidak sampai di telinga saya. Tapi bukankah itu berarti mereka tidak banyak diangkat, sampai orang awam tidak tahu?

Kalau jalan-jalan ke toko buku, biasanya komik Indonesia yang saya lihat cuma Benny & Mice (dan memang komik-komik mereka masuk jajaran best-seller). Ada juga komik yang ditulis Trinity, penulis jurnal perjalanan  The Naked Traveler.  Atau buku komedi Raditya Dika yang dibuat menjadi komik. Ada juga komik-komik terbitan MnC yang katanya buatan orang Indonesia, tapi tidak pernah kedengaran gaungnya. Sudah, itu saja.
Waktu jaman saya masih SD, saya pernah berlangganan satu majalah, Bog-bog namanya. Itu majalah asli dari bali, isinya komik-komik singkat tentang budaya Bali, ditulisnya dalam bahasa Inggris. Lucu-lucu semua. Dulu majalah ini beken sekali sampai di restoran dan hotel pasti ada. Di Gramedia juga pasti ada. Sekarang? Saya hampir ga pernah liat, tuh.

Saya beberapa bulan belakangan ini tahu kalau di majalah Hai ada komik stripnya dari teman saya, Kak Rauf. Dia penulis di salah satu komik yang diselipkan di majalah ini, judulnya Rokki. Dari sinilah saya mulai mengikuti komik Rokki dan mengetahui perkembangan komik di Indonesia. Awalnya saya skeptis - tapi ternyata komiknya bagus (no, I'm not sugar-coating it, komiknya bener-bener bagus) dan saya tidak menyangka masih ada komik-komik Indonesia lainnya yang belum banyak dikenal.

Ini saatnya industri komik bangkit. This is the time to take Indonesian comics to a higher level. Kalau ada di antara kalian yang ingin membaca komik Indonesia atau penasaran, kayak gimana sih komik yang dibikin orang Indonesia, silahkan kunjungi website Makko dan Rokki Comic. And spread the word!

Minggu, 08 Mei 2011

Have you read more than six of these books?

Have you read more than six of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only six of the 100 books listed here.Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. 
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2  The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [Partway through]
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Travellers Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby -- F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath –  John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina –Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernier
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Willaim Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabrial Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far from the Madding Crowd -- Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaids Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martell
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love in the time of Cholera - Gabriel garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On the Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson
74 Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylivia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - Charles Mitchell
83 The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie & the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I've read 37 books from the list! :D

Sabtu, 07 Mei 2011

Plato And His Words

"Understanding cultural differences is probably one of the most important things that as human we need to do, and haven’t done yet. Many of us are stuck in this ethnocentric state of judging cultures that are different from our own, that may not have the same values, the same beliefs. In short, ethnocentrism is judging.. without understanding. This inevitably leads to prejudice, or negative ideas, which can then lead to discrimination, negative actions." -Plato


Wow. I'm in awe. What Plato has said is just.. so true.

Kamis, 05 Mei 2011

Neil Gaiman and His Shocking (But Always Beautiful) Words

I've loved Neil Gaiman for years, and about two months ago I just finished Fragile Things, his anthology that I bought last year. Yes, last year.
I was about to write a review of Fragile Things when I stumbled upon his list of works and I saw The Kindly  Ones, a comic written by him. I googled about that comic and found a quote of the book:
"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life.. You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love." 

I love this quote because it's so funny that I don't even know how to response to it. It's really honest and true; it's like what we've been feeling all this time but we're just too afraid to admit it. It's hard to love someone. But the hardest part is.. We can't help falling in love at all. We will, at the end, fall eventually, and the circle goes back round and round. Because who doesn't need love, anyway?

Rabu, 04 Mei 2011

Tsk Tsk!

P.S. Thanks Google Translate for helping me with Chinese today!

Selasa, 03 Mei 2011

What Will I be? Que Sera Sera!

月, 我想告诉你 about 希望.Kalau ditanya tentang akan jadi apa saya nanti, jawabannya cuma satu: penulis. Menulis adalah salah satu dari beberapa kegiatan yang saya sangat sukai, dan saya ingin nantinya pekerjaan saya hanya menulis, menulis dan menulis.


Saya ingin menjadi penulis novel, cerpen, atau skenario. Untuk menjadi penulis profesional, sebenarnya tidak butuh pendidikan khusus, hanya giat berlatih dan rajin memebaca, voila, kamu bisa menulis dengan benar. Tapi kalau mau serius, jurusan Creative Writing juga sudah banyak tersebar di benua Eropa dan Amerika.

Di Indonesia sendiri ada universitas yang menyediakan pendidikan Jurnalistik sebagai jurusannya, yaitu Universitas Multimedia Nusantara yang berlokasi di Serpong, Jakarta. Jika memungkinkan, saya akan kuliah di situ nanti. Setelah lulus, saya bisa bekerja di koran/majalah sebagai jurnalis, sambil tetap mempertahankan idealisme saya dengan terus menulis cerita fiksi.

But if I couldn't get into UMN (or if I couldn't leave my family in Bali), I would take Psychology in Udayana University in Bali. I've had a passion of learning about people for long, and I also want to study more about mental behaviour and syndromes. Even though being a psychologist is not my priority now (and to be honest I don't have nothing in mind about what to do if I graduate as a psychologist), it's something that interests me the most, too. And the lesson I learn in college would be useful when I write novels because I have to deepen the characters in my story, so my characters would be understandable and real.

There are also a lot of plans in my mind that aren't even related to my future jobs. I want to own a little bookstore with a cafe in front of it, with me as a cook. It would feel great if I own it because I like reading so much and I love eating (and cooking) almost as much as I love reading.
I want to own a publishing or a magazine company too. I don't have a strong reason why.
And last, I really really want to build a school for special needs children. As what I see, school for special needs children are hard to find, with teacher and curriculum that I feel are not really good.

是我完成自己的未来叙述..

Stop This Train


No I'm not color blind
I know the world is black and white
Try to keep an open mind but...
I just can't sleep on this tonight
Stop this train I want to get off and go home again
I can't take the speed it's moving in
I know I can't
But honestly won't someone stop this train

Don't know how else to say it, don't want to see my parents go
One generation's length away
From fighting life out on my own

Stop this train
I want to get off and go home again
I can't take the speed it's moving in
I know I can't but honestly won't someone stop this train

So scared of getting older
I'm only good at being young
So I play the numbers game to find away to say that life has just begun
Had a talk with my old man
Said help me understand
He said turn 68, you'll renegotiate
Don't stop this train
Don't for a minute change the place you're in
Don't think I couldn't ever understand
I tried my hand
John, honestly we'll never stop this train

See once in a while when it's good
It'll feel like it should
And they're all still around
And you're still safe and sound
And you don't miss a thing
'til you cry when you're driving away in the dark.

Singing stop this train I want to get off and go home again
I can't take this speed it's moving in
I know I can't
Cause now I see I'll never stop this train

(think I got 'em now)




This song is from John Mayer, written by himself. His songs are my kind of songs - meaningful, slow and often accoustic, give me a hazy aftertaste. Stop This Train is one of my favorite song, tells us about how scared we are of aging, getting older, and seeing the bad parts the world (and life itself) as we grow up. There is always two sides of everything - one side of us always have the desire of growing, getting bigger, being invicible. While the other side is scared and insecure, afraid of what tomorrow brings. Always want  play safe only in one place without   being eager to take risks.

Senin, 02 Mei 2011

Halo Senin, Apa Kabar?

Hari ini Senin lagi.. Ketemu pelajaran Mandarin lagi, Social Study lagi.
Mandarin, kita belajar kosakata yang sudah dipelajari dengan menggunakan flashcard lalu dihitung poinnya.

Social Study, belajar bahan ulangan Sosiologi dan PKn, menurut saya asik, meskipun bahannya banyak. Lalu kita belajar untuk kuis. Saya dan Thio berhasil menjawab semua pertanyaan, tapi karena menjawab semua pertanyaan itu lah, nilai kami tidak sempurna.

Saya bingung dong! Lalu saya tanya Thio, katanya, kalau pasangan kita ga bisa jawab, berarti kita kasi pertanyaan menjebak yang bisa menjegal lawan. Saya misuh-misuh deh dalam hati.