Why God Created Dogs

I’m a dog person.

I’ve known it since I was little that whenever a dog caught my sight, I melted to goo and my heart was filled with mixed feelings of affection (because of how cute it was) and fear (because the dogs that I had stumbled upon in most cases were unfriendly mutts who had taken the fun of chasing me around the streets).

Nevertheless, the urge to own one had never faded away, as it got stronger when local TV stations decided to play dog movies with friendly canine figures such as Lassie, Benji and that huge-ass Saint Bernard, Beethoven. In my mind, owning a pet dog would be like having a friend who would love me unconditionally, no matter what.

I craved for the canine companionship so much that I’d made constant whining of “Can I have a dog mum? Can I please?” to my mother to put up with, in which she always grimly replied with, “No. It’ll dirty up the whole house and make it smell like turds.” And even when I begged her to differ by saying, “But muuuum…” whilst displaying child-like cutesy-ness in order to melt her cold-hearted resolution, she’d stop me, as quick as lightning would, by saying, “No. End of conversation.”

So to fill such emptiness in my heart that only the presence of a dog could, I had to do regular visits to friends who owned dogs as pets. Yes, it was shameful, yes, it was selfish, but I was desperate, and besides, I honestly think they didn’t mind it at all.

Take my friend Syl, for example. I got acquainted with her during my university years, in which she had to endure being interrupted during dinner time because I turned up at the door of her apartment, totally uninvited, just so that I could have a squeeze on Ashley, her Pomeranian-Maltese pup. Yes, I had no shame, so sue me.

When I finally entered adulthood (haha!) and realised that I was like any other grown-up people who had to get up in the mornings and went to work to earn money, and coming back home feeling depressed and bullied (office politic, enough said), I really thought I was fooling myself because the child in me still, after all those years, yearned for the presence of the furry canine companion.

The feeling grew stronger as years went by, and I still cooed at the sight of dogs. So when one of my work colleagues told me she owned a chihuahua, I went to visit her place and even though it wasn’t the type of dog I would prefer to have, it was still one nevertheless. Beggars can’t be choosers, right?

At the late age of 25 I finally had the courage to rebel to my mother; I brought a dog home without her permission. We got into a huge fights, say things we didn’t mean to each other, and I threatened to leave home when she finally caved in with a final warning that I had to take care of it properly because otherwise my head would be on the chopping block.

After eleven months of ups and downs in raising a little mini dachshund pup, I sincerely have to say that adopting Micah as my dog was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life. It was through him that I learnt a great deal of patience, careness and love.

There were days when I felt like giving up when Micah had not yet learnt to master the art of housebreaking, and yet there were also days when I felt so in love with him simply because of the way he looked at me. No matter how many times I’ve yelled and spanked his little furry butt for being naughty, he always pounced back, happy as Larry to see me, licking me all over and displaying his love to me in such a matter-of-fact way that I didn’t have the heart to stay angry for more than five minutes.

Owning a dog is one of the best essentials in life, and thus I know perfectly why God created dogs; it’s to teach us human how to love unconditionally.

Do You Want To Be Happily Married?

What happens when two different individuals marry each other?The result is this:

 You can bet that’s what you’re going to see after about ten years or so;

The husband becomes pot-bellied, lazy and ignorant and starts to spend more time with his hobbies, or either find new ones (motorbikes, sports car, video games – you know, the typical guy stuff).

The wife becomes obese and develops high-blood pressure due to dealing with brats from hell, or what she calls her children.

The children are the exact clones of their parents – only ten times worse. They are the most obnoxious, selfish and spoil little people you have ever met, and they tend to show their true sides in public places like the supermarkets or the mall.

So obviously you don’t want the same thing happens to you, right?

Well the answer is pretty simple – stop thinking that ‘Getting married and having kids’ are the ultimate goals and achievements in life.

Find a partner that brings out the best in you and changes your life so that you can finally find your purpose; and no, it’s not ‘to get married and have kids’, unless you think you can do a brilliant job on it and actually do the world a greater good by doing so, then by all means go ahead and do it.

Imagine what it feels like to be stuck in a situation where you’re obese, unhappy, having bills to pay and brats to raise, not being able to make love to your partner because you’ve both fat and undesirable, and the last but not least, having to deal with all of the above for the rest of your life.

Pretty scary isn’t’ it?

I Choose to Rebel

What do you get when you’ve been a good, obedient daughter for the whole twenty-five years of your life?

You get slapped in the face, that’s what. That’s exactly what happened to me last Friday, when I refused to listen to another long and mundane advices (i.e: rules and obligation as a grand-daughter) from my grand father, which had been forced upon my head for me to listen to since I was a child.

Just name it and I can guarantee that I got it all; from stupid things like being forbidden to have a boyfriend who tattooed or pierced his skin, or getting a future husband who was filthy rich and guaranteed unlimited financial security (apparently that’s all a girl ever needs from a man), to touchy issues like racial prejudice based on the color of my boyfriend’s skin, and onto a more outrageous issues of my prerogative as a woman in which I was told that being a girl it was a must that I had to have children, because ‘that is what a woman is destined to do’. Riiiight.

Of course I never took anything seriously – I figured by the time I actually get married he’d be long gone by then.Not that I wish for it, of course.

Nevertheless, my relationship with my grandparents, particularly my grand father, was of a normal one – when I was studying overseas, I sent him letters and gave him a call every now and then for a little chit-chat. Whenever there was a family gathering, I used to come up to him and say hi, and he was very affectionate to me as well.

But that was when I was the naive, obedient girl who was kept on a leash and being led around like a dog.

The problem started to arise around three months ago when out of the blue, my grand father instructed my mother so that I should get proposed by my boyfriend. For what reason, I couldn’t have the slightest clue.

What happened next was that my boyfriend was asked to come around to the shop (which my mother owned and practically lived in) by my mother’s business partner – who had no familial relation whatsoever – to have a little talk about having his parents to come over and propose me. My mother claimed she knew nothing about it.

Even though my boyfriend was previously advised to hide this from me, of course he told me about it anyway because he didn’t like keeping anything back from me, and when I found out what happened, I was shocked to bits and went absolutely livid, because that was not the way how I wanted myself to be proposed.

First of all, my boyfriend and I are working on establishing our own business, so our main cash and incomes are invested in it because we have planned this ever since we started going out together, due to the fact that we both hated the idea of working for someone else.

Secondly, whatever is left from our income is allocated to invest in a house for ourselves, which is the first priority after saving up for our own wedding – another future expenditure to think about.

Thirdly, I detest the idea of getting wedded off from the expenses of someone elses, especially my parents or his. I have a principle that since I am old enough to earn my own money, not to mention the amount that my parents had to shed for my overseas education, it makes sense that I should be able to stand up on my own two feet and stop being dependent on them, money-wise and all.

Besides, I don’t want my wedding to be everyone’s wedding, because that’s what happens when you let your parents pay for your wedding cost – you have to involve them and go along with their rules; it’s all about their friends and relatives and their choice of places, food and decoration and what elses. This places the control of things on them, and you have no choice but to agree, even if it puts off the reason why you want to have a wedding ceremony in the first place. This is why I chose to fund my own wedding, no matter how long it takes me to get there, at least I get to do it my way. Even if it was a gift, I refuse to take it.

Did my grand father knew anything about this? Of course not. He never bothered to ask and we never got the chance to tell him because the occasion never arise. I never really thought that marriage was still so sacred for him, after all that happened to his children. As far as I knew, none of my grand father’s children, including my mother, are in happily married conditions. Each of them suffered in their own ways, as the old saying goes, ‘Every happy family is alike, but every unhappy family is always different.’

Briefly speaking, my mother hasn’t been living at home for four years. My oldest auntie is stuck with a lazy husband who lives off her, and my younger auntie and her family are still living at my grandparents house so every little thing that they do are always watched and judged by my grand father, and the youngest child, my uncle, who was nearing forty, was still enjoying his life as a single bachelor who lives with his parents.

And I won’t even go into details about how fucked up it was that none of my parents or my grandparents even bother to talk it face-to-face with either me or my boyfriend themselves. Being the grown-ups they are, I really thought they would know what the word ‘respect’ meant. How can they demand us to respect them when they don’t even respect other people, regardless of what age they are?

Did they even bother asking about our plans for the future? No, they just jumped into conclusions and made assumptions of their own.

So that Friday, when I saw the look on my grand father’s irate face as he beckoned me with his hands (like I was a five year old) to come over, I decided; No more.

No more to being the obedient daughter who tries to please everyone and runs her life based on what others want, instead of what I want.

No more of this ‘because we have raised you and do all the things parents are supposed to do, you are obliged to make us happy by agreeing to live your life they way we want it to.’

No more family gatherings where everyone can gossip behind each other backs and interventing the personal lives of others, and all is done in the name of family.

No more parents trying to live their lives through their children because they were too selfish and ignorant to want to give any freedom for their children to be themselves.

They can disown me if they want – I’d rather choose my freedom.

Yes, I’m that selfish.

The FastNet Speedtest

I’m intending to observe the internet speed from FastNet for this whole month just to see whether the speed averagely sticks to no less than 512 kbps, so just to keep a record on it, here’s a broadband speed test that I’d done sometime in the afternoon:

And here’s the latest result which I’ve done a few seconds ago:

To be honest I was quite shocked with the first result. Strange huh? But I’m not complaining haha.

Why I Love Trance

Amongst all the types of music I’ve heard, Trance has been one of the biggest influence of my adult life. I got hooked with it in my early twenties – when other trance-lovers have already become club regulars, my activity to engage with the music is often only limited to listening to it. I frequent music stores only to find rare albums which I might take home and listen to whilst lying in bed and closing my eyes peacefully. Being an urban citizen, I find the combination of living, working and breathing (because there is so much pollution in this city) to be quite depressing to cope with, and I need a medium to escape every once in a while, just to bring back my sanity and rearranging my emotion.

When I listened to trance, I feel such bliss that I never experience towards any other types of music. The genre of the music does serve the purpose well – to make the listener get tranced out. Perhaps it has something to do with the harmonization of melodies, the builds up of musical forms and the repetitive beats, that for me, really stimulates my mind and imagination to go wherever I want to, or as described perfectly well in Wikipedia; to induce altered states of consciousness.

Unfortunately most Indonesian people associate trance with images of clubbing scenes where skimpily clothed girls and sweaty guys grinding their bodies together, looking suspectedly high and stoned. This is due to the fact that trance music seems to be associated to serve the enjoyment of a recreational-type drug such as ecstasy that serve the purpose to increase awareness of the senses, feelings of openness, euphoria, empathy, love, happiness, heightened self-awareness, feeling of mental clarity and an increased appreciation of music and movement.

As for me, I don’t consume it because I believe that without the use of drugs, such feelings can be achieved through careful listening since the music itself is basically designed to heighten the hearing senses and engaging the listeners with melodic tones and anthems that provokes the emotional sides of human beings in making them feel more in touch with their own spiritual sides.

Moreover, contrary to what most people might have heard or think, most DJs that are well-known in the clubbing scenes such as Armin van Buuren (DJmag.com dubbed him the No. 1 DJ for 2007) and John Digweed are very clean people who don’t use drugs, drink alcohol or even smoke, as those substances tend to influence their live performances in terms of interacting with the crowds through the selection of the songs being played and how well the change of one song to another can merge seamlessly thus keeping the song continuously enjoyable. Those are some of the requirements that can make or break a DJ.

Perhaps the good news is that rave parties in Indonesia are becoming more strict, as I have experienced it myself when I went to see Tiesto in 2006 as there were guards who perform thorough body checks and even on the tickets we were anticipated to wear comfortable clothes because:

a) you will be dancing, not waltzing, so high heels were a no-no.

b) it will be hot, so tank tops or t-shirts were recommended.

In Indonesia itself, reputation of electronic music in general has been ruined to pieces by cheap, copycats house music remixes, often called House Kota (Kota as in City) or Musik Ajeb-ajeb (I fucking hate that term!) that usually get played in traditional markets and public transports’ dinghy cars, usually blared out loud from a pair deafening speakers in order to attract the crowds.

To define what House Kota simply means, you only have to think of any Top Ten songs (either local or non locally), add some beats to it, increase the pitch and pace, and voila! – House Kota in an instant for you.

Which is why I tend to introduce trance to whomever I meet in order to change the publics’ perception of it, as well as enriching their knowledge of this particular music genres, since nowadays it comes in many different forms; either progressive, hardcore or uplifting, to name a few, and to each different forms they serve a different purpose to suit your moods and feelings. I prefer to listen to uplifting trance music when I’m working because it really gets me going, where as the progressive trance is chosen when I need to lay low and chill out for a while.

Despite its common mis perception, I’d actually think of trance as a peaceful music – when you get into rave parties or festivals, you are with the same people who, just like you, are basically there just to enjoy the music and the feelings that it gives to you, no matter what backgrounds they come from.

There is even a common motto that ravers all over the world hold to, and that is P.L.U.R. which stands for Peace, Love, Unity and Respect. There are many definitions of what those terms actually mean, and here are a couple that I’ve gathered from the net:

Wikipedia describes it as:

Peace – Hostility typically serves no purpose other than to defend an ego that is lacking inner peace.

Love – Acts and feelings of goodwill towards all others are a moral imperative with their own rewards.

Unity – This can mean either that: a) We are all united in the human condition, or b) As social beings, the feeling of connectedness with others is the ultimate end to our efforts.

Respect – A person must show regard for the feelings of others through their actions and inaction.

Where as Mdma.net has a slightly different tweaks of it:

Peace – Letting go of fear and living at peace with oneself, one another, and the planet for a greater good.

Love – As one learns to love oneself, one is able to love everyone else unconditionally.

Unity – A mutual, corporate bond is formed resulting from the love and peace experienced with one another.

Respect – Because of peace love and unity, one can accept others regardless of their beliefs or background.

From what I gather, P.L.U.R. exists because trance music bring the sense of togetherness to the people including in clubs and rave parties where everyone holds this motto as their ways of life. As for me, P.L.U.R. is an exceptionally great philosophy to practice not only in rave scenes but also in everyday life , especially when it comes to our behaviors towards ourselves and other people.

The only way to really know trance is to listen to it straight to your ears, so if you are totally unfamiliar to the sound of trance but would like to listen to it, you can go to Cnet and listen to the samples provided from many well-known DJs who make compilation or singles.

If you are a member of Facebook, (who isn’t?) you can even search for Trance groups that provide samples from upcoming artists who want to get their music recognized in the market. I found this out when I encountered a DJ/Music producer called Chris Dececio from UK whose tracks have been aired on the mainstream radio stations and he’d thoughtfully promoted his music through applications such as iLike, which allows Facebook members to listen to songs, dedicate or add them to their Profile pages.

So the next time you get to listen to trance, instead of thinking about the common negative perception it gets from the media (drugs, nightlife scenes etc.), try to listen to the beautiful sounds it contains and the ideas the music holds within.