The Subconscious' Work of Art

That's what subconscious minds do, you know?

They screw you, fuck with your mind, and there's not much that you can do about it. 

Sure, you can fight it. You can choose to fight it, making it your personal battle to win. But even if you came out the victor; even if you managed to go past what it made you think, you're never going to stop having that battle. 

You're still going to get bad dreams; nightmares that don't make sense to you because you think your life is good and anything better than this would be just overwhelming. You're still going to wake up one day, or at least just struck by an epiphany that maybe, what you are, is that you are scared. You have been, and you didn't even know that. 

I miss you the most at 2am.

It is not until you got to stay up at 3am all by yourself that you realise how much of your world was fucked up. That you end up regretting 80% of the things your say or do during the day, and that all your sadness, your despair and your desperation, though overwhelming, is never truly unprecedented. Someone somewhere has been there in your position. Someone somewhere has grown out of it, and so you would (and should) too. It was not until the clock reaches 4am that you realise that solitude is a luxury; you don't get much of that these days, when in fact it is only in those few solitary moments should you be thinking about yourself and not much else. It is only then, when you allow yourself to think of even the things you wouldn't let yourself think during the day: that you don't wanna be here. you wanna be somewhere else. you wish you were with someone else. you wish your choices had been different. you wanna be outside of it all. you think everyone is liar. you think your life is lousy. you think your happiness is simply a byproduct of your manufactured mind. you wish your life was different. you wish it's something you can be proud of. you wish you can look around and point to someone whose life you'd wanna have.

But all of that are the things your mind made up when you were in solitude. They don't last. When the sun rises, you are you again. The precedented you. The you, that may not be the honestly you, but are you nonetheless.

Footnotes for my daughter

Since you've been gone

It would be a lie to say that your leaving wasn't that much of a big deal for my life.

In fact, it changed so much, if not everything. Since there's no more you, there's no more annoyances that got me insane. No more reminder for me to keep being considerate about the things I say or do. Since there's no more you, I am more me. But I can't claim it my life anymore. Because my life wasn't supposed to be like this. My life was supposed to include you. You are supposed to be here. 

But you bailed. I'm not sure if it was your right to do so, or if it was merely based on your best of intentions. All I know is that you left, and maybe you're sorry that you do it, or maybe you're not. Sometimes I don't know what to call you. A piece of my past? My life? Or something that just went missing? For the record, missing things tend to be found somehow. But you probably don't even want to be found.

I can tell that you have absolutely no idea how much your action affect people around you, which coincidentally, includes the people around me. You don't know how much it hurt them, do you? You don't. You're lying if you said otherwise. You don't know how much their hurt means to me, okay? And you probably don't even care, because you're so busy with your own universe now. I get that. But has it ever crossed your mind before, that you are the only one actually suffering from your own action? And that me, and several other people in this world that you willingly left for your new one, are actually the ones who get the most benefits? 

I'd say benefits because now I get to learn a lesson or two. 

I learn that you are a human person; you have your own wants, needs, and your own idea of what life's supposed to be. There shouldn't be a norm to tell you how to live your life, because, why should there even be a norm at all? Norm is a man-made cause, God didn't create it, so He probably didn't even intend for the world to have any norms at all. So why even bother punishing people for their deviation from the norm? Huh?

I learn that I'm such a powerless human being after all. It's not just me, actually. It pains me to say this, but it's pretty much everyone. People often don't realise that they don't have the power to control the things they want to control. They rarely realise that they weren't exactly in charge of the important things in life. People are people; we're selfish, we think the world owe us something, we always think we deserve more, and worse, we think the world revolves around us when it really doesn't. And we should stop doing that because we're going to block the sun if we do. I guess what I'm saying is... I couldn't make you stay. I couldn't stop things from happening. Heck, I couldn't make things happen sometimes. But that's okay. Because I believe in The Higher Power, and it's a lot stronger than me. I can't make you stay, because if you want to leave, you should be allowed to. It's your life, not mine; no matter how much it affects me. Sometimes when life (and karma) is doing its job, you just gotta sit back and be on the ride, no matter how unenjoyable that would be. And that's exactly what I learned from you. I can try all I want; but I'm not you and you're not me. 

It would be a lie to say that I don't miss you. I do. Pretty much of my life was built around you, so it's hard to believe that I have to erase you from this time on. It would be like my past was a string of episodes where we still got one of the major stars in it, and somehow we stopped hiring and move on with the next episodes without the complete cast. It might look like I do it effortlessly; but that's me. I do things without even knowing. Remember when, back in high school, I went through hard days without ever feeling tired until one day I got knocked down by typhus? That's how I roll: I don't stumble. I simply just fall. 

I still believe you'll be back some day. It's out of my or anyone's ability to tell when or how, but I believe you will. I'm not going ahead of time, but I know you will. They believe it, with all their might; so I do too. I just hope that when the time has come, it won't be too late... for anyone. That all of these broken pieces are not beyond repair. And that you, and I, will say sorry. Because we've both made mistakes. And it is only by forgiving each other will we be freed from the misery. So that in the future, we can live with ourselves, despite all the good and bad, and the better and the worse.

And until that time, I wish you well. Simply because you deserve a happiness, too.

Manic Pixie Dream Girl

It's been a very long time since the last I root for a literary character. Granted, I've been impressed with at least one character from every books I've read, but the last time that I rooted for one is with Leopold Gursky in The History of Love. Very recently, I root for Cassidy Thorpe from the young adult fiction The Beginning of Everything. 

Note: This is not a book review. You can see for it somewhere. I love the book, but this time I won't be talking about the book. I'm talking about a person. Who practically doesn't exist, but amazing nonetheless.

Cassidy Thorpe is not the first-person narrator of the story, but she's definitely the star. The reason why is simple. She's really bright; when I say bright it means she's both smart and beautiful, and really, really interesting. She is a debate champion who just transferred from a prep school to public school in a small town. Like almost every other girl the young adult novel's boys fall in love with, she's hiding something that makes her thoroughly mysterious and enigmatic at the same time. Anyway, she's also funny and cheerful, and a lot like the infamous Summer Finn from 500 Days of Summer. Her personality is something that leaves people imagining what she's really like. She casually refers things to Shakespeare and recite lines from poems by Mary Oliver that none of her friends ever heard of. She knows words in foreign languages that can describe a moment that English fails to do. Basically, she's your standard Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

I love her character for all the aforementioned things, but I root for her primarily because of her sense of reality. She refused to be someone's dream girl just because she seems to be one. She wants people to know that she can be superior; but she doesn't become a jerk about it. And most importantly, because she has the ability that is so lacking in people these days: knowing when to stop.

Girl on a Mission

Some of you might realize that I've been reading a lot these days. I've been reading and re-reading so much that sometimes I forgot that I have a life I have to live. I'm not going to claim myself as an advanced reader, because I know I'm not. Maybe someday, but definitely not today. But reading has always been a big part of me that probably isn't never really gone. Growing up, I'm an avid reader of comic books and encyclopedias and some other books that I don't know where to place in my bookshelf. From there, I started to write my own stories and blogs and thus I am what you see today. I guess somewhere along middle school and high school I got caught up with something that I ended up reading less. Of course, during that time, even though I wasn't into books, I was really into magazines that when I traveled, my bags got heavy with the local magazines I bought in each cities I visited. When I started college, my major requires me to do a lot of reading and perhaps nothing else, and reading fiction has been my way of training my brain to get used to reading super thick boring books, and so far, it's been working quiet well! I found this A to Z bookish survey from The Perpetual Page Turner and when I did it, I realize now that I'm so lacking in reading capability that I promise myself I would start reading more in the new year to come. It's kind of a challenge; and we'll see where this challenge might take me. 

Author you’ve read the most books from:

It's a tie between Jonathan Safran Foer and John Green, actually. Oh, and David Levithan. I know, some people think I'm very melancholic based on my reading preferences, but really, they write gold.

Best Sequel Ever:

I don't really read series (I really don't), but I'm gonna have to say... Andrea Hirata's Edensor. It's always the part where it gets so dark that gets them to see the light that had me.

Currently Reading:

Simon Van Booy's The Secret Lives of People in Love and the famous Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell.

Drink of Choice While Reading:

Tea in general. Starbucks' green tea latte, to be specific.

E-reader or Physical Book?

I'm actually more into physical books (I know, I'm so old school) But it's hard to find the books I wanna read in print, so I had to deal with e-readers these days. Anyway, e-reader's great for reading after the light's out, so it's quiet convenient.

Fictional Character You Probably Would Have Actually Dated In High School:

Phineas from John Knowles' A Separate Peace. Or Wes from Sarah Dessen's The Truth About Forever.

Glad You Gave This Book A Chance:

Speechless by Hannah Harrington.

Hidden Gem Book:

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. I will forever reminisce this book.

Important Moment in your Reading Life:

Discovering that I love historical fiction. And that I could learn so much from them. I only have realized this after finishing Leila S. Chudori's Pulang and Markus Zusak's The Book Thief.

Just Finished:

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

Kinds of Books You Won’t Read:

Erotica. I just... don't. If I want to read some sex why not see porn anyway?

Longest Book You’ve Read:

Titik Nol by Agustinus Wibowo (568 p)

I know, this is quiet embarrassing that I never really read a thick book. I promise I'm going to read something more in the future. I promise.

Major book hangover because of:

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. It's so good that I can feel Esther Greenwood in my heart and somehow it gets to the point where it made me think of how depressing this whole life is. It's hard to get over this book, somehow.

Number of Bookcases You Own:

3. Two drawers at home and one in my apartment.

One Book You Have Read Multiple Times:

One Day by David Nicholls. I really like Emma and Dex. I really like the sense of reality the entire story has to offer. It's like reading someone's life forewarned, you know?

Preferred Place To Read:

In bed. And strangely, in a commuting train.

Quote that inspires you/gives you all the feels from a book you’ve read:

"I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem." from Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Reading Regret:

I regret not reading the entire Harry Potter series. And Lord of The Rings. I really do. Now I can't seem to find the time. *sigh.

Series You Started And Need To Finish(all books are out in series):

The Selection series by Kiera Cass. Thankyouverymuch.

Three of your All-Time Favorite Books:

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss.

Unapologetic Fangirl For:

The famous Ika Natassa novels. They're great, yeah. The only downside is how very typical all the women are, and how they are such a feminist and a non-feminist at the same time (they're such a girl). But the men are... sawoon~

Very Excited For This Release More Than All The Others:

Landline by Rainbow Rowell. See how much I've become so fond of Rowell? 

Worst Bookish Habit:

I bring my paperbacks every where in my bag, and they always end up rumpled, or dirty, or both. Even I hate myself for that.

X Marks The Spot: Start at the top left of your shelf and pick the 27th book:

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

A little story about this book: I really like Rob, for some very vague reasons, actually. So I ended up downloading all the songs mentioned in the book, and I don't like all of them but I enjoyed them.

Your latest book purchase:

Love & Misadventure by Lang Leav. I'm rarely into poetry, but hers is good. Recommended.

ZZZ-snatcher book (last book that kept you up WAY late):

I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb.

The book is about living in a country full of terror from God knows who's actually ruling the nation, and I can't help but feeling terrorized that I couldn't go to sleep before finishing the book. It's pretty inspiring though, so there you have it.

The Heroine of the Maladies

Malala Yousafzai is the girl we know as the youngest Nobel Peace Prize nominee in 2013 who fought for girls' education in her homeland Pakistan, and shot at the head by the Taliban one day after school. Her fearless memoir, I am Malala is a book voiced by a girl who loves her country so much in spite of what it has to offer her. In her tender age, she has chosen her battle: fighting for girls' right to education in her country, after seeing so many illiterate people in Pakistan living in endless misery. She was believed to be teaching westernization in a country so busy trying to fight for Islam, when all they do is straying away from the true teachings of the religion. In a culture so fond of sons, Malala stands taller and does so much more than what the sons of Pakistan can do. She has made some people back at home proud to have a daughter,and later on after the shooting she was referred to as the 'daughter of Pakistan'. She is only 16 when they nominate her to be the youngest ever Nobel laureate, and even though she might be small and young, she soars higher than other people much older than her. She didn't win, but that's alright. She's young, and there's still more battle for her to fight; the battle her idol, Benazir Bhutto, could not win as she was killed in a bombed accident. Reading her memoir broke my heart in ways I did not know possible. She believed in humanity, when people behead and slaughter other people in daylight; she fights for education, in a nation where all they could think about was how to build a good military system, winning over India and never turning into their poor neighbor, Afghanistan. It is such an atrocious world she lives in; but she proves that you don't have to be brutal to survive. As Ban Ki-Moon stated, "By targeting her, extremists showed what they feared most: a girl with a book."