Razor Sharp Wit? Moi?

Several people have urged me to update my blog but I still haven’t come up with something original and interesting to write about. So I took Rima‘s advice and did some blogwalking (not that that‘s a hard thing to do) and stumbled upon Jakartass‘ Blogthing review on What Kind Of Blogger Are You?

Out of curiosity, I decided to go for it and here’s the following result:

You Are a Snarky Blogger!

You’ve got a razor sharp wit that bloggers are secretly scared of.And that’s why they read your posts as often as they can!

What Kind of Blogger Are You?

Surprised as I am, I personally don’t think that I possess anything that resembles a razor sharp wit – I’m not that smart. Here’s my confession: sometimes I stumble upon blogs containing articles that I find difficulties in understanding their meanings and points. I’m more of an everyday life, interesting things-people-observe kind of reader. I tend to get lost and confused when reading long and serious postings with crazy vocabularies like “deconstruction”, “pejorative“ or (hold your breath now) “antidisestablishmentarianism” in them.

Please do not confuse such words with creative vocabulary which is what people like Beyonce has done in order to become more expressive, i.e. combining the word booty and delicious into “bootylicious”, or those Queer Eye guys with their “fantabulous” and “shagtastic” expressions (come to think of it I’m not sure they’ve ever used “shagtastic” in any of their episodes, as it’s clearly more of a British thing but you get my point though).

Using complicated and difficult words has been the trick that some people do to make themselves sound intelligent and important, but I truly believe the real intelligent ones are those who keep it plain and simple, and real, especially.

To back my point up, here’s a quote I found from an article on ScienceDaily on Impressive Writing: “Writers who use long words needlessly and choose complicated font styles are seen as less intelligent than those who stick with basic vocabulary and plain text, according to new research from the Princeton University in New Jersey, to be published in the next edition of Applied Cognitive Psychology.”

I for one have been guilty into thinking that by using such complicated terms, I would be taken more seriously and perceived intelligently – which was why I even bought a book called (wait for it) Megawords: 200 terms you really need to know by Richard Osbourne. In it, you will find even more outrageous words like collective unconscious and structural functioninalism. You can tell I just picked those words by skimming through the pages randomly, and even though I’ve put a link for each of those words and have read the meanings in Wikipedia, I solemnly swear I still don’t understand a damn thing of it. Explanations from Urban Dictionary excluded.

Actually, it is a good book – might re-read it again and use it in my blog postings to impress …

No. No. It’s perfectly fine to use such difficult terms in your postings but using them in order the achieve a certain impression is definitely not. Moreover, it makes me wonder whether the majority of people in the blogosphere really understand those words and whether or not it takes them a long time to find out what they mean, and eventually, the ability to practice those words alone in their everyday life.

If I start an otherwise harmless conversation by saying, “Pejoratively, that skimpy little outfit that you call a dress, is disaster-prone because it does not conform to the socially constructive way of life”, I’ll feel like I’m kidding myself. Plus, I don’t want to get blank stares and people going “Say what?” as their responses.

Why should I, when I can just simply go, “Your dress makes your ass look big. Wear it.”

I Will Die At 83

Whilst cruising on Deb’s blog, I found a post that listed a couple of links to online quizzes at OkCupid. The others were quite boring, but the Death Online Test was rather interesting. On the introduction page, the Death test is apparently the product of research that began 5 years ago, in Harvard’s Math department.

The following is my result:

DEAD AT 83

cancer

The test result also listed the many possibilities of the cause of my death, in which they are:

56% cancer

24% car accident

13% loneliness

5% drowning of lungs (eh?)

2% wounds

Apparently, I have 20861.9 days left on this earth, as I have lived 31% of my life.

The question is; does the idea of dying scare me? A little, to be perfectly honest. Can’t imagine what it will feel like to be old and grey. I want to be forever young. Or much preferably, to die young.

The test sort of reminds me to live my life to the fullest and have more fun – that’s the purpose of life that I’ve chosen as an answer for the last question.

The Dilemma Of An Overseas Bachelorette

Contrary to what some might think, being an overseas graduate, or bachelorette is not always as peachy as it looks. Sure, we’re fortunate enough to have earned an overseas degree and being able to speak in another language, but the society acquires a common perception that those who manage to study overseas must be loaded, is the reason why it is so easy for them to judge overseas graduates as a bunch of snobs who look down to everybody else that are not on the same level as them.

To set the record straight, let me share a little bit about my personal experience. Being the naive girl that I was, upon returning from my study overseas, I thought getting a job would be an easy-peasy task, because an overseas degree must have been more appealing than a local degree, right?

Wrong. It was difficult for me in finding a job. I’d sent out resumes after resumes only to receive absolutely zero responses, and even if I did manage to score some interviews, they never led anywhere.

I was suspecting that my resume and the abundant list of work experiences was something that would have flawed it all – many work experiences probably meant I was not loyal enough (even though they were all mostly part-time jobs that I did during college) and carrying the title of an overseas graduate scared most people off because they probably thought I was going to ask a huge amount of starting salary which was equal to the salary of a person who had worked for ten years.

It was when I was all fed up and developing a ‘can’t-be-fucked’ attitude as a result of all the useless interviews that I finally, finally, got a job. Unfortunately, before I even started working, someone had leaked the fact that I was (gasp!) an overseas graduate, and before I even knew it, I had my very own persona labeled onto me; the snob girl who must have had a very grand life and very loaded parents at that.

That wasn’t the first time it had happened to me. In the brief period of me working as an English teacher in this small institution in Thamrin, I had received the same treatment – the other employees were not keen to be friendly with me, and I couldn’t immediately start chit-chatting away with them for fear of being too friendly aka SKSD (Sok Kenal Sok Deket) and scared them even more; besides, the Indonesian Art of Basa-basi was not one I had mastered yet.

Which was why it was funny that when we finally got to know each other, they were surprised that I wasn’t at all what they thought. As a matter of fact, I was just like everybody else.

I went to work using public transport, instead of a hand-me-down BMW and a personal chauffeur. And if you want to know what kind of public transport exactly, just read it here.

I bought my clothes at places like Matahari and sometimes Mangga Dua, not from Guess or Mango. Although if I had a lot of money I probably would, but clothes had never been an important aspect for me – I’d rather spend my money on books, to be completely honest.

I cut my hair at the local Johnny Andrean and experienced bad hair day because it was the wrong style, instead of coloring and rebonding it at LuVaze – I’m not freaking Agnes Monica, for God’s sake.

To be frank, I wasn’t at all as glamorous and so high class it practically made me a snob by default.

There was this one time when I was instant-messaging with one of my work colleagues in the Documentation department, and I mentioned something about ironing my clothes, in which she went, “You can iron clothes???”

And my reply was, “Of course I can – who do you think did all my laundry whilst I was being overseas? A freaking maid?” (this was said sarcastically of course).

And then she goes, “Wow. I always thought you were this really rich person who never did any house chores and use Body Shop products.”

Honestly, I did not know what Body Shop got to do with it all, but OK, whatever floats her boat.

Perhaps it is common to label supposedly rich people as snobs – because they are wealthy, then they are entitled to be arrogant. So it must be weird to see a rich person not being smug about their richness, because many of them are.

I remember what this other colleague said about this Javanese girl in the R&D department who drove to work using a Suzuki Katana and just recently changed her car to a Toyota Soluna – bear in mind we’re talking about Japanese car ranges here as opposed to European ones that are identical to belong to the rich and famous as well as the Indonesian high-ranked officials i.e. corruptors; “Even though she’s rich, she’s a very friendly person.”

Wow. That “even though” bit really got me. As if being wealthy – or living an abundant and sufficient life – was a weakness, something to condemn to, and an excuse to make sense of their judgment.

Which is why whenever I met new people, I dread the very question of, “Where did you graduate from?”

I’d contemplate lying, but I have never been a very good liar, and if I do lie, it will all just get out of hand in which they probably go, “Oh, you went to so-and-so university! What year did you graduate? Perhaps you know my friend Budi, he was the manager of the student lounge?”

See? Not a very good idea. So now you would have understood my dilemma – if I’m being honest, I’m definitely going to be judged as a snob as to what has happened before, and if I do lie, I’ll just get myself into more trouble. And all of that is only because I have spend a few years of my life being overseas.

Hardly a big deal – but not to some people.

If Indonesians Elected Me As President

I had trouble trying to sleep last night, and as I was tossing and turning, I thought about this crazy blog post that I’d been meaning to write. The idea came during the tagboard conversation at Cn’s where we were all saying that if we were the Indonesian presidents we would do such and such.

Now I know Indonesia has a lot of problems to deal with right now and these so far were the ones that got stuck to my head over and over again:

Number One:

I would get rid of all those bullshit shows like Indonesian Idol as well as stupid sinetrons that teach us nothing but creating more significant gap between the poor and the rich, and hypnotizing the nation that life was all about being an all-time tortured Cindefuckingrella and bloody teenagers plotting to kill their mates over puppy loves stuff.

Instead, I would create a brand new, reality-TV show called “Dead Corruptor Walking“, in which every week there would be one corrupt government official chosen amongst several, to be shot to death and the voting would be done via SMS-polling. So the nation could choose themselves!

But since we all knew that practically all Indonesians were corrupt, there would be a specific amount of money to be set as a limit as to how corrupt they were. So if it was in the range of billions of rupiahs, death was definitely definite, where as if it was in the million range, the corruptors could be fined in which all the money would go to …

Number Two:

FPI! No, not to support them more, but to support for their immigration to the countries they have been defended and supporting immensely, such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon, etc.

This was obviously for the better of them – they would and could have a better future there. So you see, the “Dead Corruptor Walking” and the “FPI Goes To …” show was tightly related.

Number Three:

To commemorate the May ’98 tragedy, every year in May, for the whole month alone I would replace all the huge banners and billboards with the pictures of the riot’s victims – yes, those raped ones included. Don’t worry, no one should be recognized since most of the bodies looked like they were beaten to a pulp and badly mutilated no one would even know the victim was in fact human or not. I think this was the tragedy no one should forget as it was the degradation of Indonesia at its worst. Had I known who was responsible for it, I’d hunt them down and bust their asses myself. Well, not by myself technically, but … you know what I mean.

Number Four:

Okay – this whole Lapindo mud flow thing must be ended immediately otherwise it would take over Sidoarjo and Surabaya and soon we’d have nothing left! So whoever started it must by all means finish it! Start as you mean to finish, get it? There would be a month’s notice for this sort of thing and if no response was given whatsoever I would drag the whole Bakrie brothers’ stupid ass and force them to live right next to the mud themselves.

I’m running out of ideas – who’s up for number five?

If You Can’t Write It, Draw It

The internet connection at my place has been down since Tuesday, which really pisses me off beyond no end. Instead of swearing off to another useless Customer Service officer from Fastnet, I decided to channel out all that energy into a better use.

So I made a drawing instead. In the meantime, I’m back to Telkomnyet Instan. Don’t even ask how slow it is – I’m practically growing a beard just to load a page – any page – up. I’m going to give it another four days to go; in the meantime, it’s back to hunting for another ISPs. Jeez. The tedium.

It’s amazing how dependant I am to having unlimited internet connection that when it was seized out of me I feel as if a huge aspect of my life is missing. It’s not so much as having no internet connection at all but more like having a really fist-eatingly slow one as the only choice I have right now that I might as well just forget about it.

It makes me realize how used I was to having a fast connection that even a slow 31.2 kbps that Telkomnyet is offering is no longer an adequate rate for me.

Anyway, enjoy the picture, and forgive me for not having a good enough blog post to read but at least you have some thing to please your eyes!

*) Outlines created in Flash and coloured in Photoshop.