All you need is love (?)

Love is the answer, but while you're waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty interesting questions.
Woody Allen

Where there is love, distance doesn't matter.
Mata Amritanandamayi

If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.
Jean Baudrillard

Love suffers long, and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.... And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
The Bible, 1 Corinthians 13:4 - 8

Love can be compared to a double-edged serrated sword. It offers the most divine, and most preferable protection and joy that anyone could ever want. But, when it goes away, we are scarred and hurt beyond all imagination. Anyone and everyone who has felt the sting, bite, and poison of unrecquited or lost love knows what it is like to die a living death.
Elan Buckley

Love is watching someone die.
Death Cab for Cutie

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Falling in love is not at all the most stupid thing that people do — but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.
Albert Einstein

Love ain't nothing but sex misspelled.
Harlan Ellison, Title of book (1968)

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love.
Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

one distorted love

Love partakes of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like the soul, it is a divine spark; it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can limit and nothing can extinguish. We feel it burning even in the marrow of our bones, and we see it radiate even to the depths of the sky.
Victor Hugo in Les Misérables

Love loves to love love.
James Joyce in "Ulysses"

People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.
Ken Kesey

The famous myth from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God splits them in two, and now all the halves wander around the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Love's an excuse to get hurt. And to hurt."
Conor Oberst

For where thou art, there is the world itself, and where though art not, desolation.

William Shakespeare in Henry VI, Part II, Act iii, Sc.2

You know you're in love when you can't sleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.
Dr. Seuss

Love is a madness; if thwarted it develops fast.
Mark Twain

If somebody says, "I love you", to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? "I love you, too".
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, "Address at Dedication of Wheaton College Library, 1973" (1974).

How many loved your moments of glad grace
And loved your beauty with love false or true
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
William Butler Yeats

Diamond in the rough.

If my heart was as vast as the universe, Arfani would be the void, zero-gravity spaces between galaxies.

Pulp Fiction

Mia : Don't you hate that?
Vincent : What?
Mia : Uncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?
Vincent : I don't know. That's a good question.
Mia : That's when you know you've found somebody special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence.

Religion vs. Gender Equality

This morning, like any other Saturday mornings of mine, I had a teacher from the neighborhood coming over to teach me more about Islam. The tedious one-hour session includes 30 minutes of Qur'an recital and another 30 minutes of Qur'anic interpretation. Like always, it never stopped dragging on and on, mainly because I barely listen and crammed my brain instead with random thoughts like what to do tonight or which book to read tomorrow. What can I say, I never wanted any of this, it was my parents' brilliant idea to make me "a better, more sholihah person". Although what they don't know is, I perfectly know how to filter craps from infiltrating my brain cells.

Like this kind of crap:
The verses I read this morning were regarding women. As my teacher translated them, she explained that it is forbidden in Islam for women to be leaders. The reason is because women have more complex emotions than men, and they also have their monthly menstruation cycle, which would intrude their leading activity. When I asked for more explanation, she mentioned, as example, how the law is haram for women to lead prayers, because of the menstruations i mentioned above.

And it went further. Not just in prayers, my teacher said that Islam forbid women to lead, in general. It is said that men are more solid and stable, and they are more capable of leading than women because they have more self-control and are more rational. And women in the other hand are said to be given more advantage because they don't have to mind the things men should. They are obliged to just stay home, keep their skin covered from eye sights, and take care of their families.

I asked what if, in a community, there is one woman who is smarter, wiser, more experienced, and have more leader traits than all the men combined. Shouldn't she be a leader then, now that obviously she has excelled everyone else in her community and has undeniably fulfilled all the criteria to be a leader? My teacher said no. She's still a woman, and women can't lead. So what that woman has to do is, pass on her knowledge to a man and train him well so he could be the leader instead.

I asked, but isn't this a degradation towards all women? Shouldn't they be ashamed that even religion itself puts them a level below men?

My teacher said: Islam doesn't put women below men, but above. God doesn't want women to suffer hardships, so He (or She) assigned women to do much simpler yet equally important tasks, like taking care of family and fulfill their husbands' needs.

So what exactly did I miss? That women should be happy because their world is smaller than men's? And how is restricting women from taking part of leadership in order to make the world a better place considered as an honor? On what basis that a woman cannot lead just because she's a woman, disregarding how proficient, visionary, and dedicated she is?

True, men are tougher in making decisions, because they are not easily disrupted by their emotions. But women, our overflowing emotions are the result of our feelings, and you can't lead a country or a world only based on your brain and logical judgments, you have to rely on your feelings to. Otherwise you'd be nothing but a dictator.

Nowadays, there's no such saying as men are smarter and more capable than women. Women are aware enough to set aside those limiting boundaries and step out beyond to what others can't reach. Lots of women have made the breakthrough of being successful leaders. Queen Elizabeth, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Hillary Clinton, Benazir Bhutto, Margaret Thacher, Indira Gandhi, to name a few.

Back to my religious lessons. So did my teacher (who is a female) plainly misinterpret the verses - like how terrorists misinterpreted jihad as a duty to bomb down their enemies - or was that really how women should be in the world of Islam. Either way, I am, as a woman, very much ashamed that the female clan has to go through that low of degradation.

This is exactly why I detest extremists and radicals.

How to spice up my super looooong holiday.

Today, as I was walking Arfani around the neighborhood (note: Arfani is my 16-months-old little brother), two little slum kids from the village nearby aged about 4 and 7 approached us and started playing with Arfani. Between curiosity and boredom, I talked to the elder one, and proceeded to have a very interesting conversation. Apparently they're siblings, and their dad left them since she was a baby. Now her single mother have to feed the mouth of 5 children all by herself. She wants to be a doctor, although by the looks of her entangled hair, dust coated face, ragged clothes and barefoot feet, her mother doesn't have the capability to realize her dreams. One of her friends, who happened to be living next door to her, had already given up school and is now busking on the streets to earn some more money.

As the minutes went by, one by one other kids started coming and joined out group. I ended up teaching them some English. It was by far the most useful thing i had squeezed out of my leisure time during the holidays. They ended up asking me to join their little Friday-nite fun in the Setu Babakan night market, they're picking me up at 7 :)

Holiday goal: Volunteer in the community library and continue teaching English. Hopefully.

P.S. I just discovered that my first kiss also had me as his first, How fascinating!

I don't need your money, I just need my life back.

You talk, you yell, you scream, but you barely listen.
You gouge your eyes out, shove your mouth with dirt, and clog your senses with mud.
You drown yourself in your so-called moral principle and expectations.
You break hell loose when others don't fulfill them.
You don't accept the word 'wrong'.
You don't even bother considering other people's values when they oppose yours.
You have strong faith in God but are faithless in dealing with human differences.
You walk on a dull, straight, narrow lane like a steel-made, programmed robot.
You think every single word that comes out of your goddamn mouth is as righteous as some goddamn proverb.
You are as dim-witted as tearing up a book by Salman Rushdie, and it wasn't even The Satanic Verses.
You raise your voice when others lower theirs.
You think you're a saint and whoever not following you path should get themselves "fixed up".
You don't think your past mistakes would make you a better person; somehow they made you more inhumanely arrogant.
You treat tears and pain like you diss birdshit on you window sill.
You perceive only the big picture and ignore the essential minor details.
You aim for perfect result without taking notice on the process.
You make decisions based on your own judgement, ignoring the impact they would do to others around you.
You can easily kill 6 birds with 1 stone, just because you hate watching them fly to whatever direction they want.
You make life looks like it's worth dying for.

I'm indefinitely going to burn in hell for saying this, but the first 14 years of my life was undoubtedly the best, because you were not in it.

P.S.
Please just shove those conservative, radical, insensible, gut-wrenching religious values of yours up your arse, because i would never ever want to be like you even if I had a fucking gun pointed at my head.

The night's still young.

Still not sleepy and running out of things to do or stuff to think about, I flicked through a folder of old photographs, in which some months ago I scanned into the computer for an English project. They were photos from when I was born up until now. I found two that I like the most.

13 Years Backwards

Rice fields were my playground, expanding further and further more until they collide with the faint line of the horizon. Just like the ocean, only greener. I wonder what I was pointing at.

3 Years Backwards

Forget the piercing or the dyed hair, I look sincere.