perkaraperkara

My pedal broke when I was speeding just before the Harbour Bridge today. I haven’t rode in a while. Here, I am equipped with a shoddy road bike, whose pedals are barely attached to each other, ahead of the others. The pride before the fall. I feel like a mess. People stopped and I pushed my bike to the volunteers to give it a quick fix. After that it was just a matter of pedaling through. I sang the tunes of He Will Fall from Pete Doherty. I used to adore him. Someone thought it was cool to put on Hujan out load while cycling. So indie. The thrill was over once when I rode past the policemen on bikes and felt the tires almost giving away, all squishing into jelly. But I was fine, I was fine. I mourned on my old bicycle, thought of grave things, of and cycled until the finish line. A was with me.

We waited and listened to some Gypsy Jazz band till some officials came down and gave us certificates. I didn’t feel anything. I saw someone who looked like she was in charge of something introduce herself to one those officials; handbag, sunglasses and a tall head – saying “Saya ni orang orang kecil sahaja”. I remarked this to A, told her I do not want to be ever put in such corny situations, and she told I’m being incredibly chatty today. It was her way of telling me I am being weird. I greeted everyone I knew and spoke most of the time in English. I told her it was because I drank Starbucks yesterday, and gave her the free voucher I got yesterday. The barista was a jolly man, and told me ain’t it great to have a staff so jolly even before the places closes in ten.

I went back to hotel afterwards, and wondered how much the room cost. It was only a five minute walk to the Opera House anyway. Who would pay a thousand ringgit for a night? Those who can afford it. The soap smelled of lemongrass. I had salmon and bagel for breakfast and remembered the days of eating Onigiri in Japan.

We had smoothies after the cycle, and then watched little kids playing at the fountain. Y took a picture in front of the Hard Rock Cafe and told me she wants more than six kids. I told her I wanted three. She just broke up. We parted ways and I missed the train home by a minute and decided to hop on the slow train. It was hot and the tunnel suffocated me.

An hour later, I got off and walked to the walking track into the Royal National Park. The falls was 6.0 km away, but I had half an hour to kill before the next train. So I went in, until I found a clearing. The trees were tall, and I could see a fire from a distance. I headed back through the path and heard the insects. It could’ve been a rattlesnake for all I care. I thought if I was to be bitten, I wouldn’t have been found, because nobody would’ve known where I was. My phone was dead anyway. But of course I didn’t want to exit the world like that. The sun turned orange because of the smoke. We are suffocated anywhere we go.

So I jumped on the next train home.

I woke up at three only to tell F about my dreams. I dream bizarre things these days. From snowy mountains to sea cliffs to Istanbul. He says to me I never explicitly mention him here – he is presented, passingly – but then I say it doesn’t matter because I prefer not to talk of things that we talk. Life is mundane, anyway; there are walks, shopping, classes, reading, the act of moving. Some days are nice, some aren’t. He mentions tickets and that he managed to get 12 yesterday. The average was 15. It’s been two weeks since he started at his new place. So we learn to keep up the pace.

To be walled. Last week I spent a few hours reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. For the latter, I was overwrought in some ways because I could not comprehend the act of refusing to speak to another. Of course we can decide not to participate in society as such, to refrain from giving any information or indication of a will. This we see in some friends, who choose to remain silent and observe things instead. So things build up internally, nothing is ever communicated – one wells up with emotions, and thoughts until one day, one ceases to be. So our little Bartleby refuses to participate in the world by not eating at all. He doesn’t prefer to, anyway. An active choice to die.

Can we choose our own death, then? Is it morally wrong to kill oneself? I think someone tweeted this last night. Questions are raised but I feel nothing. People can will death, execute that will – whether they succeed or not – but they can never take control of the consequences of their death (and afterlife, if you will). With this thought I die a little.

I woke up around 6 again and then started doing my laundry. I clear the dishes, took a shower, and when I returned to my room I realized I am going to miss the raya prayers at the stadium. I revel a bit a this thought but continue to go through my emails and upload documents and the like. Around 8 I hung my clothes at the yard, made myself coffee, and cleaned my room. I wanted to go out but then the roommate inquired of my not wearing baju kurung; it was a special occasion after all. So I ironed my clothes and changed. I did my prayers alone as no one was up yet, with the help of Google. I never remember these things.

Then I made butter cake. This happened quite suddenly.The roommate did Roti Jala and Curry. We ran out of eggs so I had to buy another dozen. When I asked her what colour did she wanted she said green so I put pandan essence instead. Our gold has turned to green. All the time I was doing this I wonder why she seems to take my every word as a form of scorn, never entertain my great concern (deemed repetitive). She quickly tires of my words or questions. Offensive. Impatient. So this is what happens when you have exhausted of each other.

At class I seem to be bored. The tutor mentions the difference between the legal and the ethical. The function of laws. I seem to have it in my head that rules are only meant for a guidance. One can bypass them if it doesn’t harm the individual or the society (or the state, religion, for that matter). But naturally I didn’t speak of this, and she is sad because few read the texts. No one spoke. After the class, I apologised because I couldn’t attend the last time. She still mentions the contrast between Engineering and Literature. I said that I find the subject relaxing.

After that I went to my friends and I called mother. She told me she ate rendang and I told her I am eating M & M’s. I read Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes until A told me to come down to fetch something. I went in between the machines and took her picture for her family. She told me no one replied when she sent them a picture of a bowl of Maggi for lunch. Such is life. Upstairs I sat reading and helped out figure Farhana’s assignment. Then I looked up Barthes’ book on Goodreads. Dish commented on a picture of RB posing on the beach that said “Alone, always forever alone”. Mine read “Ourselves, always ourselves”. I am amused by this revelation, and returned home by bus listening to Space Gambus Experiment. 

 

 

Between job and university applications, I seem to hang around doing essays, read books, and finish my thesis. Days are passed by quietly, with a spectacle or two in between. News; my bicycle was stolen, I walked 3km from Central station, I just started reading Taqwacores, I only know one song from KRU, and I met a new group of friends (I think I’ll stick around with them for a while).

Yesterday I had two job interviews. In the train, I wrote my essay, slept, read a bit, and glanced at people’s book covers and socks. At the hotel lobby, I sneak 2 packets of Hot Chocolate into my bag. I wade through the array of people with sharp clothes, heel wearing girls and try to put myself against them. That morning I was deciding whether to wear baju kurung or formal attire. Heels. I don’t have any heels. I only own two pair shoes; one for sports, one for spiffy occasions, and another whose sole has already worn out you feel like wearing socks. Baju Kurung it is.

It’s always a funny feeling, going to graduate fairs and attending these careers talks, listening to wealthy and healthy looking people, using big words like return of investment and career progression. I do not want to turn into with them, they with all their perfectly ironed shirts and straight backs and having a certain certified look of success. I do not want to have my life sorted out for living.

Someone came over to the house and after dinner talked about all these things that you’re supposed to do when you’re graduate. Buy 10 or 15 of Corelle plate sets and sell it more than what they do in Langkawi, travel as much as you can before you come back to work, register in so and so companies and associations to progress in life, attach yourself a good and rich husband, and so on and so forth. As if the grass is always greener on the other side, and that to work is to bound yourself in servitude forever. It’s all just terribly depressing. What’s the use of buying plates and fancy equipment and a big house if there’s no time to use them?

Each time I feel like this, I’d just retreat into my room and try to write about it, in forms such as these and others, and then I’d talk to my mother or father. They’d always tell me to right thing to do.  There’s 2 months left before graduation, so I must, must, must, soldier on.

 

It’s terrible really, to recount another’s declaration of love to you as something petty.  But what is one to do, though, when after the third meeting, one is confronted with words like ‘vibration’s and ‘something special’? It is enough to say it was nice. All too sudden, all too soon. That single outburst of emotion. So we seem to attract old lonely wandering men.

Perhaps I am just getting insensitive, meeting people, talking seems to be done almost carelessly; one shifts to one person/thing/day/place after another without any consequences. Talking to that famous vlogger, ML, for example, about Faisal Tehrani, literature, -isms, and whatever that happens to fancy him at the moment, only to be interrupted by bubbly girls wanting to take pictures with him, only to be asked to pose in a certain way. Peace. I shall give you peace. His Facebook statuses seem to be ripe with word-plays and sarcasm, which I find slightly amusing.

Back to our story of unrequited love, anyway. It’s a disappointment really, when what you thought could just be an exchange of thoughts and ideas is tainted by feelings. The two cannot coalesce. Here the opposition of memory occur. Here I think, am I to where you channel the sum of your experience, but to him here is a great listener, who seems to understand me. The same gaze, look, gesture, speech can be interpreted differently by two people, and so it is a tragedy to when one begins to fall in love while the other is bored. It feels like a Milan Kundera novel.

I can be a terrible person when I write. I wish to be terrific instead.

Cycling with the girls, yesterday. Picnic. The joy of lying and rolling in the grass doing nothing but eat, talk and laugh. I dip my feet in the water and shudder. Why would Virginia Woolf drown herself in a river? I wouldn’t stand a minute.

The week passes by so quickly. There’s almost no time to reflect and do anything but the increasing headaches you seem to have. 50 pages an hour, you seem to see yourself progressing. Not bad, not bad at all.

Lunch with Susan. She keeps telling us to come to France, see her place Lille, Paris, and that she would cook French food for us. I told her a learnt a french word last week, parapluie. Umbrella. Tres bien. Tres bien.

Coffee with A, again. We keep go on rounding on the same topics, circling each, revisit, see if anything’s changed. Old friends are like that. You never seem to get past moments long gone, and the record plays again and again endlessly. I tell her I want to do several things before I go back home; Climb the mountain at the back of the uni, go for that 26km coastal walk, go camping, cycle to Stanwell Park, go to the center of Australia, and so on and so forth. Money comes to mind. And money shall we find.

Some days I get sad I feel like I don’t want to do anything at all but laze around, stare at ceilings, drink coffee, watch people from my window. Everything is okay yet everything ceases to mean anything for a moment. Even conversations, bumping into familiar faces seems agonizing, and the hurdle of words words words seem to amount to nothing but just blabber. What was the point of it all, you seem to ask yourself?

Je ne sais pas.

Depression. So we lists symptoms of what we think is depression. Or are you just reading too much of Sylvia’s journals? Here a friend seems to want to cease living (I feel that at this moment I can die –  the world is a prison – so she has the same notions of Ghazali), and there is another wanting to escape from it all (tumultuous turbulent, throes! i shan’t want to face anything anymore out of fear and anxiety!). Here one tries to find some passion in herself (shall I become content of just having a profession? how do i form my individuality, as a Muslim?) , and there another tries to throw herself into things things things, as many as she can, either as a form of distraction for herself or in order to feel something. We all become bored, in one way or another.

There isn’t an elegant way of putting everything into place, as I am no poet (nor a travelling one, Dish). Everything is a rough mess, and I return to my room feeling more disintegrated than before. This is Hemingway’s doing.

Passion, passion, passion.

I’ve always wanted to open a bookstore. I remember dreaming of this far back in highschool, when Leana and I would be talking of books and personal libraries, a room lined with shelves of books. When I moved to MRSM, I remember that every time I frequent Kota Bharu, just for the bus turns to the junction where all buses stop (just next to Syarikat Muda Othman’s bookstore), on the main road where you can see the KB Mall smack in the middle of it, there’s a little shop on the left, with a brown signboard BOOK CAFE. I never went there of course during those two years, because it was inaccessible (so my 15 year old self says) by foot. Later in those years only did I get the courage to roam around the city beyond the usual Pantai Timur, Mydin supermarkets, KFCs that the ordinary students on a day out would go to, into the Musuems, my aunt’s pharmacy, the big bookstore near the old pasar, to the nearly deserted DPB bookstore amidst the jewelry shops. But I never went to that shop, and I wonder if it’s still there. The sorrows of young Maisarah.

When I moved to do my foundation for a year, I think I didn’t read much (I can only remember reading Les Miserables, and Russian Short Stories). The bookshops in Alor Setar were either unimpressive or scarce, run by big chain. I bought Trainspotting in Penang.I think there was a public library behind the mall, packed with students and children, which left me with an impression that libraries too, should be accessible to the public (contrast this with the National Library,for example, that I visited with my father in Form 3. Barren.

Back in Gombak, there was Kinokuniya in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, that I would frequent almost every Friday on the way back to Bangi. The Big Bad Woolf sales. Hm, Book Xcess. Saba’ Islamic Media. Borders, where I got my first copy of Milan Kundera. Those events at the Annexe, with all those alternative books. So there I was, fairly happy with the selections that I could purchase, but nevertheless felt everything rather impersonal.

it is nothing but the moon that i see, standing in front of my bedroom window.

 

I love reading my brother’s blog. His is a world of realism, but nevertheless one full of childhood memories and hopes. I suppose seeing the world as it is in numbers and figures, he could not help but feel codified in that way too. A refined sort of normalcy, if there was a word for it. You can throw any sort of ideas to him, and he would bounce back things to you, A delight, a delight. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have begun cycling through the neighbourhood back in those days. I spent the first eight formative years of my life in the same grade as him, played with the same friends, the same games, watched the same tv shows.

See, we both had a thing for mathematics, and I would remember during school holidays, Akram would come up with some sort of math quiz, consisting of ten questions, and we had to compete to answer those as quickly as we could. This, together with board games, Pokemon, mengaji – I developed a sense of competition with my brothers. I wasn’t a nerd or anything, I simply liked calculating. Math made sense to me, so much that I would time myself answering simple arithmetic question to the hundreds in my head, seeing filled pages and water-filled bottles in terms of fraction and then turn them into decimals (I would always say I filled 2/3 or 3/4 or 2/5 of a page whenever I write essays. I am an all rounder). Turned into words, this would simply mean I always skim through a passage and describe what it means, rather than spell it word-by-word. I get impatient over processes, of showing calculations (Can one equate the two, to begin with?). But later through life we all learn this process of deferred gratification, or as my brother would say, leverage. Time is a great thickener of things.

At any rate, my essay has been handed back to me, and I am happy with my marks. The whole reason of my taking these English Literature subjects, is to learn how to formally approach and analyse a text. We read but only remember the sensations and impressions it has made on us, but sometimes fail to see what was the book all about, and how it places itself on the culture, history, and the people that surround him. It is not only enough to locate ourselves in a book, but it is as important to locate the book in its surroundings. This is the primary lesson I’ve learned, that is.

Orientalism is the subject of this week. Now only do I see what Al-Attas meant by these Orientalists (again, I never understood most of what he write). The tutor quotes Edward Said a lot, and I am stuck regretting having not read Orientalism when I borrowed it from Kak Z. Paintings. Otherness. How generalizing the West is, lumping everything that is not them as Oriental. Then the question of free will. Classmates arguing that one can is free to do what he wants to, as long as the other party (or parties) consents to his rights to do so. One is free to construct his own morality. Is man thus the measure of all things? Moreover, are our morals ever changing?

Blegh. I’m going to listen to Foal’s This Orient.

*

Lately I’ve been uh, criticized for my weekly excursions, (cycling and such), where I am the sole female participating. I am being advised that I should take care of my, associations.

I see her judgement purely from an usrah’s ideal communication point of view; where a woman must wholeheartedly reserve herself against any contact with unless absolute necessary. She speaks of respect for a certain friends of mine, whose been dubbed as the ideal woman that everyone wants to marry, irreproachable, irretrievable. Aaaah, to be judged for the external. rather than the internal. Character, personality, wit, and taste is thrown out of the window once they stumble upon the image of the woman clad in tudung labuh, staunch and reserved.

Forgive me but I am no fan of such passivity. I do not see why a simple chat with anyone can be labelled as nafsu, that can lead to the devil himself. Why this separation of roles of men and women to begin with? Can they not partake in the same activities, complement each other with ideas, that make together a whole? Why must everyone see an ulterior, shady motive behind everything?

If the idea of jaga ikhtilat, pergaulan, means to sit back and watch everything in passivity (as women ought to do), without ever allowing to speak their minds, or that our sole preoccupation is with marriage and children, and wait for someone to come knock at your parent’s door and propose you, then count me out. If we see our roles as much as it only concerns the womb, rather than the mind, body and soul, count me out.

I feel that I ought to speak when I need to, that I should take part when I need to, without fear of what people would say and judge.

*Sigh*

God alone knows my intentions.