thoughts// in praise of mundane daily conversations

(Do you know the kind of couple who could talk for hours and never run out of things to say to each other it almost feels like they are living in their own bubble? D and I are like that. Even before we were an item, D would pick me up from school and spend the two hours gap between school and my French/piano class or his Japanese/drum class together; sharing a pack of vanilla ice cream at a radio station’s rooftop, eating cheap steak with fries at a diner called BigBoy’s, walking around Sagan/ Kotabaru/ Baciro area, or just riding around the city while talking. Sometimes the conversation would get so enjoyable that I would decide to skip the class just to be able to spend a little more time with him. Sometime, we would resume the conversation at night. One of those midnight-to-3am call was to accompany me during my first breakup (in which he said, ‘I can treat you better than your ex will ever be’—and he did). When he first watch the movie ‘Before Sunset’, he told me to go get the film at our favorite dvd rental shop. Later when we were an item, he said that the movie made him think of us. The intimacy of a conversation, hours of ‘remaking the world’, and the walk. Later in life--or more like 20 years later, we still walk around a city—in New York, in Brussel, in the Netherland, in Germany, in Senegal, in Darwin, in Jakarta, and just talk and talk and talk. That is probably why Woody Allen’s movie is so relatable. And just like Celine nicely put it “If there’s any kind of magic in this world…it must be in the attempt of understanding someone.”  

These past two weeks, we have been once again working on different pace, different time, and even different place after five months of practically spending 24/7 together in the comfort and safety of our little house. So, conversations were scattered between works, before bed, or in the morning. These are some vignettes of those little moments)

__________

1/

“Listening to this song, I feel happily sad”, D said as we are getting ready to bed. He played the song on repeat as I applied layers and layers of essence, serum, night cream, face oil—in that order. There is a good reason to call it a ‘beauty regimes’: coordinated, systematic, almost authoritarian, but hopefully not pointless. “You know, it feels like a time when one reach a maximum sad point of a song and you start feeling weirdly happy”, D continued his thesis. The song he was referring to is not particularly a sad one. But I understand what he meant by ‘happily sad’. A feeling that is well familiar yet sometimes difficult to put into words. ‘Happily sad’ is an oversimplified version of the word. I recognize the feeling all too well too, a melancholia or longing that somehow weirdly feels like a warm fuzzy blanket. In D’s premise, the song made him nostalgic of a simpler time—when there is nothing else to worry about but to pass the exam with agreeable grade. For me, it reminds me of that moment at the end of Max’s adventure in Where the Wild Things Are when he finally sail back home and find the food is still warm, waiting on the table. D has a more complex example of the feeling. When he was younger, it made him sad to watch a TV show when it is daytime inside the movie and it is night out there in real life. Knowing that someone somewhere might only start his/her day at the same time when we are finishing ours. Or that feeling of temporality on a Sunday afternoon—exactly at 12 midday he would hear the imaginary bell ringing: the holiday is almost over and it is time to go back to reality. The song reminded him of the moment before the bell rings. Before leaving a house and start anew. Before leaving a part of life that is no longer relevant. Before realizing that now, nothing but the phantom of it waiting for us there. We went to bed holding hand that night. 

2/ 

I was reading and walking on the treadmill (a dangerous habit, I know) when I read a curious term ‘lavishly economic’. I couldn’t really understand the term—but at that time, the clashing of the two words, the contrasting meaning of the two words interest me more. D was washing the dishes at the kitchen sink just the opposite to where the treadmill is so I yelled at him, “I found the word for our lifestyle!” Once he finished washing the dishes, he came closer so I won’t have to yell/ exercise/ read at the same time. “You know,” I said.. “lavish in a way that the daily things in our life might seem a little more elaborate than mundane.. but it is all actually very economical when you calculate the cost”. “You mean, like the urban poor of the broke-but-on-trend millennials?”, D asked. “No,” I said “the slightly older version who care less about the trend but enjoy the finer things in life—economically”. At the end of the conversation, we still didn’t fully grasped the correct meaning of that term.

3/

I was already inside the blanket when he started discussing whether we want to use the term ‘local belief’, or ‘local wisdom’, or ‘local genius’, or ‘indigenous knowledge’ (we both agree how we like this term the least). After almost an hour of word-by-word breakdown of the term, we decided to stick to ‘local embodied knowledge’, one we can all agreed upon. I remember once upon a time, someone asked us how does it feel to work with one’s spouse. I kid you not.. the work is never done, not even in bed. 

4/    

The moment when the cold spell cast through the Southern part of Java is my favorite time of the year. The sun is warm but the wind is chilled. The sky is clear blue and the air dry. It feels like an endless spring. In times like these, we would take the chairs out, eat al fresco, and just spend the day lounging under the sun. At the end of the day, D would sigh in delight—remembering similar days happened somewhere away, “Wasn’t that nice?”

5/ 

D was watering his vegetable patch when I stepped down the treadmill with Peter Mayle’s book that I read whenever I want to feel like walking down the street in Provence. I still haven’t took the walk in Provence but I imagine it to be slightly similar to walking down the Italian countryside. I sat on the grass and told him about Marathon du Medoc—a marathon filled with wine and amazing food, hopping from one castle to another, one winery to another, with amazing panorama, and everyone wearing fancy outfits. The night before, they would dance and eat carbo-loaded comfort food with as much wine and cheese they could possibly swallow—all done in yet another castle’s garden, on a white table and under a white huge tent. In my mind, it is an ideal dreamlike scene—a literary description that made my heart tingles with excitement. A midsummer night's dream kind of scene. So I look it up, and it surprise me to see how banal it actually looks. How very crowded and ordinary looking.. how the white tent for the dinner is just another big normal white tent, with generic looking table and cheap white plastic chairs where people eat in their t-shirt and short. This is not the first time I regret looking scenes I read up on the internet. It ruined the magic a little.

6/

“Does it worth the risk? That is the question for doing even the simplest thing these days”, I said when we decided to get out and meet more people during this pandemic. “Of course nothing worth the risk.. but there are things that worth a little more than the other”, D said, "for example, going to a KFC or a mall surely won't worth any risk, but going to KKF as a mean of support worth a little more". So we start calculating risk, managing anxiety, trying to live without worrying too much, dodging the virus but carry on living with precaution and even smaller circle. Like people living under the volcano, only without the proper warning system. “What I’m worried about is how fast people forget.. how the ‘new normal’ is almost feels like surrendering to the virus", D continued as there are two possibilities of the future that he sees: one, new normal as an excuse for people to hurry back to the old normal because people are stubborn like that and going out of comfort zone is scary (and also: capitalistic system is way too powerful to shake); or two, like Arundhati Roy poetically wrote about the pandemic as a portal. It is time to reassess new possibilities and how unsustainable the old way of life is before completely change and consciously calculate the way we consume, move, work, live. Zero km products. Zero km mobility. Local practice and knowledge production. Once again, being rooted instead of radicant.  

7/

“Sometimes I find Jogja boring—it feels one-layered. Like there is a uniformed perception imposed on it: slow city, hospitable, comfortable. Is it really like that or people who lives there are just trying to live up the expectation? Jakarta, on the contrary, is built upon a thousand different perceptions that makes it interesting and multi-layered”, D said. No wonder we can’t find any song about Jogja that is good enough. Most are clouded with blinding fanatics and nostalgia of the city’s past life that is probably no longer relevant today. “Your statement will upset a lot of people’, I replied.   

8/ 

As we lay down the bed after a whole day of work, I noticed how D is unplucking his eyebrows, leaving a small silly patchy area. I never ask but this time, I demand for explanation. Just out of curiosity. So he leads my finger through his eyebrow and he said, “You see, sometime I can find a hard piercing piece of an eyebrow and another one that is coarse to touch. To get the hard and the coarse ones, I sometime need to sacrifice the ordinary eyebrows.. thus the patchy areas”. Honestly, I find nothing sort of coarse nor hard. “You need a trained finger to find them”, he said—very seriously. It is so ridiculous I started to laugh.. and soon grasping for air, coughing while still laughing while he run to get me warm water and medicine. Laughing to D’s weird habit is still my favorite way to get an asthma attack.  

  

9/ 

“Have you ever imagined an alternate universe where you live a different life for making different choices in the past?”, D asked. “Sure,” I said “with a different house, probably fancier.. a simpler life that might sometime bores me, and maybe kids.. surely not the kind of life I would choose over mine now.” D told me he might be working an office job at the city in that narrative. “Actually, it was you who showed me things I didn’t know I wanted before. But now, I am exactly where I want to be”, I said. “I, too”, he replied, gently stroking my hair.    

thoughts // personal life in time of covid-19

Stage 1/ The Worried Shoes

It came in stages. First the panic-buying— figuring out the balance between having enough but not getting into the hoarding line: hand sanitizer, dry food, supplies of supplements, and immune boosters.  Then comes the strategic planning. Distributing the eggs in different baskets, making escape plans and standard operating procedures for every scenarios of the mundane daily life and of the worst. Then comes the anxiety. The what ifs. The overthinking. The moment I realize I ran out of wine, and dark chocolate, and anything else that can keep me off edges. Except for hugs. I’m lucky I have ample of that and the morning sun on a leisurely morning. Still, there are days of waking up in despair. And oh, the voids. Giving up to its lure is easy. To spiral down deep and stay in the dark for few days. The void is composed of miles and miles of thoughts where I can dive deep; and of dark corners where fear is the quicksand; or choose to stop and listen one by one, thoughts after thoughts—while crawling all the way back up. Dito was always there. Gently stroking my hair, scratching my back, keeping me sane. That was the moment when, for the first time in my life, I wanted to watch whatever horror movies I can find. Anything can’t be more terrifying than real life. I remember someone said at the beginning of it all, few days before they call it a pandemic: “It’s a curious time. We live in a science fiction movie”. At this stage, I dream of the most ordinary day when I can take a break from being concerned, to live the daily life without fear, and take off my worried shoes. 

Stage 2/ The Collective Grief

One day I learn its name and call it correctly. It was grief. It has always been grief all along in many different forms. A wave of collective grief. The magnitude and intensity of the crisis pulled me down like a gravity, yet, what gave it a face was more personal than that. I remember few months before, feeling helpless and hapless being sick in New York with a new-found knowledge that all those platinum membership of all insurances that we have won’t do any good in a country of such a bizarre system. I remember how my heart sank when I found Dito was having the same fever that I had the day before and how relieved I was when we both recovered a week before heading back home. I remember feeling that pang of grief again knowing my uncle was ill half the world away in one of the epicenter of the crisis, unable to see the doctor because the health system there is already overwhelmed. Although in Madrid, the city where he lives, the healthcare system is so much more humane and a doctor is checking up on him every day during his quarantine. I don’t dare to think of the country where I am now with a healthcare system slowly collapsing even before it reaches the peak. The potentiality of any type of grief left me petrified—a deer in the headlights. I don’t know yet whether or not to be scared of dying—but I know I am scared of the possibilities of losing people I care about. When my uncle recovered from the virus, he told us how his worst nightmare was the probability of disappearing—having an ambulance picking him up and off he go to the unknown with 50:50 chance of coming back home or disappear, never to be seen again. That feeling-- having my heart sinking to my stomach when I think of it, is grief. 

Stage 3/ The Nostalgia

And then comes the next stage: the nostalgia. Triggered by a bleak realization that the last trip I did in February, could be the last one before a long pause ahead. Also: an even bleaker thought, I feel like my days are numbered. If the crisis remain unsolved, any attempt to lock ourselves down from everybody is an active attempt to buy some time. So I start making promises. Promises are the thread of hopes to hold on to: visit friends’ newborns, eat crustaceans with uncle in Spain, take him to that super spicy fish place in Borobudur in return, finally go to King’s day with Go Eun, and one day—I will finally start a perfume collection. It has always been my obsession to create a library of memories of all the places I went to through smell. How orange blossom and bubble bath reminds me of Torino, how Amsterdam is the first Magnolia bloom, how Napoli is the smell of fresh linen and laundries, how Budapest is the smell of roasted chestnut and peppermint wind, and how New York is made of candied almond and dried leaves. Dito and I finally made that photobook of the places we went together that his father has been asking for. It made me happy but at times when I am not at my best shape, I feel like the places where I went on my own was not part of my life. As if it was swept under the rugs and never happen. Will I be able to remember things beyond the picture? Will I remember it better when I finally put it all into words? Finally write about that time when I sabotaged one of my dream because the circumstances was not ideal, that other time when two police woman who do not speak English at all caught us accidentally riding a tram without validating the ticket, and a panic moment in the airport caused by a bomb threat soothed by a big portion of KFC. 

Stage 4/ Sculptural Immobility 

The virus triggered this idea about sculptural immobility. It was as if you are cursed: wherever you last standing and with whom you chose to spend your time with—those are the life that you will live until an unforeseeable future. Your decision is set in stone. Those who are apart can no longer touch again. The far is far again. The world is round again. And time is long again. It feels as if we are collectively took an early retirement. The feeling is very much present at home (despite all the projects we are working on right now). If this home is going to be our universe for the next few months or few years to come—we need to fully commit to it and make the most of it. Usually, there is a feeling of temporality in the house—as if it is just a transit in-between trips. It is now finally time to clean the messy backyard, deep clean our windows, fix the broken kitchen shelf and change the lightbulb. It is now finally time to reevaluate our relationship with the home. We realized how our home changed the way we do. In 2015, we took down most of the artworks on the wall because we want to rest from visual stimulation at home. We don’t decorate it so much and focusing on keeping things practical and functional. The house now accommodate new social functions, unnecessary clutters are regularly thrown away, and it evolves the way we do. It can be messy at times but that's ok. We keep most books from Lir, from my childhood, from trips we went; but we let it scattered around different rooms (except bedroom). Since we don’t have the Space at the city anymore, our home that used to be the escape plan from work now turn into a workspace, making us constantly draw the psychological line between life and work. It is not as hard as it sounds and the workspace is not as empty as we want it to be but as long as we have blank spaces on the table, on the floor, or in my case: on the bed—we’re good. When it is time for 900mdpl, the life at home would suddenly being put on a higher speed. The house would be lively, people would take over my workspace and the fire in the kitchen would never stop burning. I would cook so much for everybody and I would reach my limit of social interaction every now and then; the people I work with would then helping me to protect my personal space that would feel so precious. Now that the house is empty, it became a universe of two. I sometime miss having people around no matter how drained I would feel afterward. We have 9 pet rabbits, but they live in the backyard and they are relatively quiet. Now the silence is so thick we could almost hear them! Every texture of the rain drops, every birds, every footsteps approaching, the wind, the tree, the neighbors fixing their roof, the roosters, the other ‘pet’ living at our ceiling (a Javanese ferret-badger). 

Stage 5/ The Search for Meaning

It’s ironic when I finally come to realize that the things I used to wish for are actually coming true. I used to wish I could have more quality time to be with my mom and Dito, and now I have plenty. I wanted to go to a place where time is irrelevant and I yearned for slowness—a moment to just search for meaning, to have unlimited time to just read, and write, and fully love, and to just be. To be fully present without an endless to-do list, grounded and not having to go to the next destination, without having to prepare for the next audition. Suddenly, time is all we have. Now it feels like time dissolves and days bleed into one another. Suddenly, I am in a place where time is irrelevant. Once I crawled back up from the deep dark cold void, I learn to embrace the abundance of time. I demand for the love that I deserve—plenty of it. In exchange, I love with all my heart. There are days when I feel warm inside and motivated enough to put on a pretty dress. It is easy to feel lightness and warmth on a sun-drenched house with mild microclimate that always feel like spring. As I continuously examine the quality of my life, everything went down to the essential. I realize I enjoy the home cooking so much and that the only thing I miss about eating at a restaurant is the anonymity and the idea of eating out. I realize I don’t need too much of anything to lead a wholesome life. (Although I  really miss the spa and having face acupressure done professionally). I learn to travel in place, cooking food that reminds me of places far away, and finally reconnect with my surrounding. At times, I ask myself: have I lived enough? Have I tasted enough? If this is the end, will I crave for more? Under what conditions and in which way would life be worth living? Everyday I would crave for a beautiful mind telling me things I don’t know. I want to feel alive. I want solidarity and riot and strike on how the world works. I want to be sure that nobody in my neighborhood is hungry. I want sovereignty for the people. Free from the control of capitalism, starting from the small circle of a family, neighbors, community. The crisis has got us questioning the system in general and it is reassuring to be part of a closely-knitted community and re-learn how to be together as neighbors and citizen of the world: a collective movement even without proximity. Hopefully, when we get to the other side of it, the world after the great mutation would require us to live more sustainably. While the virus is still learning about itself and continuously morphing—so is the world. 

Stage 6/ Embracing Slowness

We are now taking it slow. We are following the rhythm of the day, observing the lyrical environment, and embrace the weird moment when the world is being put into collective pause. Instead of a to-do list, I try to remember things that I enjoy doing when I am away: the walk, the newness of everyday life, the consciousness of things around me. I read. I write. I eat better, sleep better, exercise better. I evaluate the quality of life I am living, of all the friendships I have, and of the system of the world. Dito and I learn how to be self-sufficient, mindful, and dig down those forgotten skills we learned in school: how to start a medicinal herb garden, building things from scratch, and foraging among others. When I was younger, I used to dream of having a potager—an aromatic French kitchen garden and medicinal herb at the backyard with rabbits running around. The later are there, the potager is still just a dream. But I used to dream of a small white house with lots of windows to let the sun shine in. I dreamt of comfortable reading nooks and books everywhere I move through the house. Only now have I realized it is the childhood dreams that I am living in right now. When we get out of this, it is time to reevaluate the dreams and create new ones as an adult (and to finally live somewhere far away, maybe?) We still follow the movement of the sun through the house and soak the morning sun at our kitchen table over breakfast—but instead of work, we are catching up with whatever weird vivid dream we had the night before. Last night, I dreamt about a zombie attack, targeting on people with low ph. level. I was the only one in the neighborhood with a low ph level so they put me in a glass house. It was raining when the zombie attacked—it rained acid and people are safe outside under the rain. The rain won’t help me no matter how acid it was because my blood is anyhow non-acidic and the zombie can smell it. So I look outside at the people guarding the glass house and I catch my friend’s eyes, inaudibly saying ‘I got your back’ and my friend start talking to the zombie to distract it from me and then my friend turned into a box of square cheese ransacked by the zombie before it went away. I was spared.