Tahun-tahun S3

Tahun pertama S3: masih semangat dan antusias, dan merasa cukup keren. Tapi dipenuhi kecemasan tentang kelulusan subjects dan konfirmasi.

Tahun kedua S3: waktunya turun lapangan mengumpulkan data. Sedih melihat kenyataan hidup para responden yang kebanyakan orang susah dan miskin.

Tahun ketiga S3: pusing bagaimana data-data ini bisa menjadi sesuatu yang tidak biasa-biasa saja dan medioker.

Us and our time

Kita dan waktu kita

waktu kita
hanyalah antara dingin sang fajar dan wajah sang mentari
hanyalah cerukan dibawah sepuluh derajat Celsius
dan seberkas cahaya tak hangat dari jendela

waktu kita
hanyalah di antara dinginnya dinding batu
dan hangatnya selimut
dan aliran darah di bawah kulit epidermis

waktu kita
adalah saat gemerisik dahan
dan hembusan napas
dan genggaman jari-jemari

diluar itu
bukan waktu kita
diluar itu
kita asing dan lawan
kita buruk dan hampa
kita sunyi dan malas
kita tak ada
hanya ada kamu
hanya ada aku
tak ada kita

R&R

A baby birth and two funerals

You feel old when you live long enough to watch people who age-wise are your children, start to have their own children. I mean, people who you recall the day they were born, played with their parents, or even knew the parents before they married, and now seeing the children, having children. Oh the old Earth and universe. But as in every wisemen's book saying about cycle of life, or pathways of life, trajectory of life, life course, life path or so on..it is how time operates.

The weirdest tattoos

I saw a bike rider this morning while I was waiting for my tram at the end of my home street. A tall blonde man. Because it was red light, he stopped right in front of where people are waiting for trams. Then I saw something interesting in his thighs, -yes these people here do wear shorts in 10 degrees Celsius 😒- two tattoos, one in each thigh. 

The first tattoo, that in his left thigh, is a plastic chair, exactly, a plastic chair 😂, the white plastic chair that we see people use a lot in developing countries like in Indonesia. My parents had one set (5 pcs) of them, white, exactly like this one (see picture).

I looked at it for some minutes, couldn't believe what I saw, but I think I am correct. I saw the vertical lines and the rounded end shape of the lines.

The second tattoo, in his right thigh, is an octopus. Or baby octopus. A simple one, not a sophisticated one, a small one. Like the one below, just without colour, just a monochrome one.

In two minutes time, my tram was coming, and he cycled quickly into the traffic, to avoid being trapped with the tram.  

Because we'd talked about tattoos on Saturday night with my buddies, I still remember  this topic, until I bumped into these two funny tattoos I'd say, they are not heroic at all :-D. 

Two nightmares in a row

Yesterday, almost the same time, around 6 am in the morning (when I woke up and checked the clock), and this morning, 5.30 am in the morning (when I woke up and checked the clock),

I had nightmares. yesterday, there were 3 people, I could not recall who was the other one, but the other one is p, my friend who passed away last year, around a month from February. he was a nice guy, very kind, but in that nightmare, he turned into a sort of demon, and similarly, his face turned to be like a rubbery face, like a horrific clown, his nose and his head then got bigger and bigger and threatened to harm me, by using his demonic power i.e. to make a statue-like sculptures in the wall in front of me fall into me. The sculptures seemed to start to fall and I screamed, and p laughed, and woke up. I was so tired.

This morning, I had more or less equally horrific nightmare. I met T, my friend in GoR whom I did not see for a while. We talked about helping the poor or something like that, and she showed me the girls she helped, which apparently walked passed us, in a kind of traditional market. She asked how they were doing, they smiled and laughed and showed the bras or clothes that T gave them. One of them looked like B, the png girl who was just giving birth, -I know this from fb because she posted it and just congratulated her yesterday. They said thank you, I think, and T said to me that it's good to help the poor and in need. And after meeting T, I took a cab. While the cab was turning from parking lot, someone showed his face at the rear window glass. He was O, the guy who lived with use at home decades ago. He frightened me like a horrific clown. The cab left, and I was inside it, tried to talk to the driver, who apparently was O's brother, S. He looked exactly like his face that I remember from decades back. He initially talked normally, but then he started to scary me, smiling and laughing like a mentally ill person. He said bad things about my friend, mocked my family etc. I was so afraid because he drove. I told him to stop, but he refused to. He threatened to rape or murder or something bad like that. I screamed and he put a pillow on my face and laughed like a scary clown, so I kept screaming as hard as I could....and I woke up with that pillow on my face, in real life, gasping for breath. I was so tired.   

These nightmares showed a pattern:
- the room is cold, in contrast with under the doona (quite hot)
- I had a headache because of r (a man) in daytime, real life
- I was so tired and found difficulties in the daytime
- these men tried to harm in in a way over another in the dream
- these men are people from the past (one, life has passed away, the other one, childhood)
- the bedroom is cold like in a dark cave
- I prayed but a bit before sleeping
- I sleep on the left side, the right side empty and colder
- I have cold feet before sleeping
- I have cold arms during sleeping (at least when I woke up I could feel it).
- n1: yesterday daytime, I played the song cornerstone, the same song I kept listened in Jtown when p was at the hospital and died -- then P turned in my dream, became the evil power.
-n2: today nighttime, I talked with T about N, who passed away because of tb ---then O and S turned up in my dream, became the evil power.
- the same sleeping time: around 1am. It means, between 4th and 5th hour of sleeping, if it is cold, it's terrible, worst time. I just googled it, and it is called segmented sleep. When people sleep and wake up and continue sleep again, or doing their creative work: writing, drawing, painting, meditative activity etc. I think this was the time mom usually said she woke up and prayed around 3 am at night (if she slept at 10, it is exactly at 3 pm - like this - that woke her up and she used it to pray).

My nightmares, again, are the skewed version of my reality. Negative turns negative. Like a yeasted and fermented reality. Some things from real life are taken and skewed, like a bent reality I may say. And I recognise that cold is always there. Tiredness is always there. So that's the pattern and I think I have to start remembering it so that I need not to repeat them again.

The building that's not there anymore

I have been using this room 111 at the association's building since late October or early November 2018. Since then, there have always been a repair work in the building, or outage or power shutdown, like, every other week or so. And the construction work, geezz..it's an unending work, from then on.

This is how it looks like from my window

Last week, I saw the construction workers with heavy equipped machine or vehicle (a destroyer I would say), cut a building into pieces. Like, yeah, they cut that building into pieces! The machine was operated by an operator (for sure, eh?), and they started from the concrete roof block. I think it's Alice Hoy building, or the old ERC eastern wing? Perhaps, it's the Karma Café (or whatever oriental name it was), the café that I had the card, where I could have 10 coffees for one free, where they tick or cross the boxes every time you buy a coffee from that same café. The problem is (was): it's closed. And it's been demolished too perhaps, so it's not there anymore, with all the Education buildings and other buildings along Monash Rd.

Sometimes it's weird to see things come and go that easy. One day the building was there, the next day it's just, whoops, gone.

I think it over, a persons' life is like that too, one day it's there, the next day he/she perished, just move somewhere else, be it heaven or earth or hell or nowhere, dark total dark.

On other note, the memories are left for us the live ones to remember. We remember them. We dream of them. Like a lightning flash, the memories about them sometimes struck us a chord. Sometimes it appears in daytime, in your sleep or dream. It can come and go as fast too.