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.

Just because I'm alone doesn't mean I'm lonely.

It's over midnite and I'm nowhere near sleepy. I hate it when I'm suposed to be doing something (like sleeping) but then I'm not. It opens up a gate in my head for random thoughts to come rushing in. And I hate having to think over things at this wee of hour, my brain is certainly not functioning well. I wish I had a switch to turn off and on the flow of my brain, or to temporarily erase memories. That way when I don't feel like getting burdened over thoughts, I can just shut the whole system down.

Right now I'm thinking about someone, but I'm not exactly sure what to think about since that person just kinda... dissapeared. Well that's not true, I am sure of what I can think about, coz there are lots of detailed ways to think about a certain somebody. Like the way that person smiles, talks, eats, smells, or even calls you names. But I mean, I'm not even sure if that person is still alive. Ok that's not true, I perfectly know that that person is still alive, it's just that that person seems to be dead rite now. I don't mean dead as in buried 5 foot beneath the earth, but dead as in not showing any signs of existence whatsoever. And if I think about that person over and over again, that would make me miss that person even more. And imagine if that person is actually *please god don't let this happen* dead, how shattered and broken down into blood-drenched, fragmented pieces would my heart be. Especially since that person kept going round and round in my head. So I'm just trying not to think about that person as much as I used to, coz everything is possible yet nothing is perfect. And still there's the friggin' Indian ocean that bids us part.

And there's this one more person, who's always either sleepy or tired and you couldn't possibly tell whether that person is in the mood or not. Ok fine that's not true, that person is always in the mood.

Oh and theres this last person, whose body makes girls wanna dry hump. Well at least I do. Too bad that person had been nothing but talks.

Well enough about them. I'm totally comfortable with being alone.

At least for now.