Debris

It's terrible to see the kind of junk I have accumulated in just a couple of years: questionable clothes bought on a whim, unopened jars of fat-loss cream, lipsticks the wrong color, scrunchies that no longer scrunch, handbags with missing handles, vitamins and miracle cures greying away in bottles, toothless combs pasted with pastilles and tangled hair, lonely earrings, pinless pins, namecards for people I can't recall, receipts and unclaimed receipts, bits and pieces and things that amount to a lot and amount to nothing.

A life of flotsam and jetsam. I'm being washed back to shore, but my ship's sailed away.

mokciknab muttered at 11:35 am ~ ~

Urinating on Utility

In Indonesia, utility companies don't send you bills unless you request it, and you have to take the initiative to find out how much you owe them and pay the amount at the bank. Such muddlers that we are, we sometimes forget to pay on time. So far the utility company would just send us a notice to pay and we'd settle the bill, and all is well.

Yesterday though, the man who sent us the warning notice asked for money, and threatened to cut off supply if we didn't cough up. I was too sick to deal with him, so I called my husband home. When Saiffuddin arrived, the man had doubled his original asking price. (He had other friends with him, and he was being thoughtful). My husband told him he'd comply, and asked him to wait for a moment.

He went inside the house, took the right amount of rupiah notes, peed on the money, and carefully fanned them dry. He then handed the money to the utility guy, while making sure that the guy grabbed the urinated end.

Needless to say, Saiffuddin was happy for the rest of the day.

mokciknab muttered at 10:49 am ~ ~

It's been so long...

...that I actually forgot my blog address.

Blogging is therapy, and I guess in the last couple of months (or maybe more), I just didn't need fixing.

There were plenty of whingeing, politics-wise, in other, more important blogs so I didn't need to add noise to the chorus.

And I didn't feel like navel-gazing or telling people what I ate for lunch.

So why resume where I left off?

Because I'm leaving Jakarta at the end of the month, and it's heartbreaking.

Because I quit work and have nothing to do all day except lie around in my pyjamas and trawl through whingeing political blogs and news aggregators.

Because I feel that I should try flexing my writing muscles again, after more than a year correcting other people's grammar and trying to make sense of Indonesian news reporting.

Let's see how long this will last.

mokciknab muttered at 5:15 pm ~ ~