Defying Gravity

Does everyone go through a moment like this? Dragging a painful conversation while a crappy band is playing Hey Jude in the background and waitresses in green shirts are passing by? How do you move on from something like this? How do you throw away four and a half years of your life? Pack them in boxes, ship them away, and just carry on with your life as if they never existed? What will you do if one morning you wake up and it hits home: you finally realise that everything’s gone, your life has taken another course, and you have become a stranger in your own world? When did you start wanting other things? How did you turn into this other person?

Maybe the only thing that’s different is the cast, not the story. Maybe you will move on. Maybe later, maybe not ever. Life will go on, whether you’re ready or not. Maybe you will carry those baggages for as long as you live, because you will never forgive yourself for what you have done. Maybe you will wake up one morning with everything you have ever wanted, but this. This, you will never ever get to have back. Maybe you’ll look back at this moment and wonder whether you made the right decision. Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t – you won’t get the luxury of finding out. Everything happens only once: your every decision, every step, every move. Once you take it, it’s over, done, and there’s nothing you can do about it but suck it in and accept the consequences.

I stared at you as I sat there.. and I just knew.

***

The Portuguese call it “saudade”: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land—all things born of the soul that can only be felt.
- Barnacle Love, Anthony De Sa

Me, Giving Up

Here’s the thing.

The problem is not because I don’t know what I want, it’s because I do. I want everything. I want the world. Not only that it is selfish, arrogant, and unrealistic, it is also hurting me. But I have chosen this road a long time ago. It sure is a lonely and possibly idiotic one.. but it is what it is.

Somewhere along that road, I somehow decided that feelings are bullshit. They get in the way of things and are the ultimate source of problems. And so I learned to master my feelings. You might think it is not humanely possible or that I sound like fucking Yoda, but it’s the truth. I have been learning to separate the things I want to feel and ones I want to dismiss, choosing the feelings I want to show and those I’d like to keep hidden. Do you want to know how that makes me feel in general? I feel fucking evil and just oh so goddamn exhausted. And with all this shit going on right now, I’m just furious all the time, and because I’m furious I’m tired, and because I’m tired I can’t be bothered.
Because trying to be strong is bullshit.
Because being stoic has taken its toll.
Because getting intoxicated no longer helps.
Because I’m so fucking tired of pretending I’m okay when, in fact, I’m not even remotely close to being somewhat okay.
And sadly, saying these things out loud does not make anything any better either.

And the irony of it all is that I know I shouldn’t feel what I’m feeling because I realise that whatever it is I’m in right now is exactly where I belong. I asked for it, thus I deserve this. I just didn’t think it would hurt this bad.  So here’s me, throwing in the towel. I give up. The world wins, I can’t have everything.

People look at me and they keep saying, “you should live today as if it was your last”. Do they even know what “the last day” is like? Well, I’m living today like it’s my last: fearful and fucking miserable.

Fuckers.

Long Live the Ice Queen!

Been wanting to post THIS.

Fur/leather. Gentle/severe. Delicate/herculean.

The best of two ends of a spectrum.

To see Alexander McQueen’s Fall 2011 RTW complete collection, click here.

Balmain: All Too Fucking Stellar

“You talk like Marlene Dietrich
And you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire
Your clothes are all made by Balmain
And there’s diamonds and pearls in your hair”

To see Balmain’s Fall 2011 RTW complete collection, click here.

Everything is, Mr. Hisaishi.

2010 Random Crushes

This might be a tad too late to post, but here goes my 10 biggest random crushes in 2010 in ascending order!

10. Bag crush: Mulberry Bayswater patent-leather bag. It’s so pink and so big! My all-black ensemble loves this.

9. Magazine cover crush: Johnny Depp for GQ February 2010 – for all the obvious reasons.

8. Fashion show crush: Michael Kors Autumn/Winter 2010-11. Not really a fan of Michael Kors, but this collection blew me away.

7. TV ad crush: Orlando Bloom for Boss Orange. I know I should’ve posted the TV ad here, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere online, so here’s the print ad version. Sans motion, stunning all the same.

6. Fashion spread crush: Metal Magazine Issue 20. Bastiaan Ninaber, Christian Brylle, Eddie Klint, George Barnett, Jakob Hybholt, Josh Beech, Paris Nicholson, Petey Wright, Thomas Wyatt by Emilio Tini. It’s the fucking mother-lode of awesomely-styled hot guys.

5. Song cover crush: Cleast Eatwood – Electric Feel (MGMT Cover). Every time I listen to this song, I die a little.

4. Boots crush: Burberry boots. Have you ever seen something amazing in something that (might) seem ordinary? I have.

3. Video music crush: Friendly Fires – Kiss of Life. There’s something about this video I can’t quite put my finger on, which is exactly why I love it.

2. Movie crush: Machete. No twist, no tricks. Just plain old gore.

1. Designer crush: Christopher Kane’s cosmic dress. Everything that excites me blended into one form. It’s __________ (enter positive adjectives).

Honorary mention

Concert crush: Cut Copy Live in Jakarta. Arguably one of the best nights in my life.

HANG ON. No books?! Ugh. I broke my heart.

Anyway, that’s about it I suppose. Now I can happily move on to my current crushes.. or lack thereof.

What “Never Mind the Buzzcocks” Can Do To Your Mental Stability

My first week of 2011 started off a bit nuts. I was living in the future-

-which sounds terribly dramatic, but that just means I got so caught up with my own thoughts, thinking about the things I wanted to do in the next couple of months while still being in the present. No wonder I got insanely fidgety. My body was stationary yet my mind was moving with such velocity. It’s like taking amphetamine right before you sleep. When it hits you, your body and mind would be so unprepared and so out of sync you’d be having mental spasms. Anyway. Cogito ergo sum depressus. That’s probably a bad translation, but you get my point. So, if thinking is the problem, then I should just quit. But how do you quit thinking? You don’t really. You can only be tricked into thinking you’re not thinking.

Just like what I’ve done at any given depression moment, I turned to the land of the free and home of the brave. Oh wait, that’s America, I meant the Internet. Right, because who needs a shrink when you can have the Internet. On my autopilot mode (acting as if on antidepressants) which runs on OS HD 10.6.6 (I think that’s pretty self-explanatory. No? Well, if I must, HD is High Distraction and 10.6.6 is the OS to my Macbook. So that totally-made-up OS – which is stupid and doesn’t make any sense and I’m not sure why I’m saying it, maybe partly because I can’t give anymore fuck, and mostly because I can’t seem to stop typing even though I realize I’m typing shit. HELP! – only means that I went frantic, abusing my laptop as a media for distractions. I can’t believe I just explained that), I thought about Internet porn, but the thing about Internet porn is that it can only distract you for so long. It’ll make you happy for 5 short minutes, but then you’d end up spending the entire night feeling even more pathetic, showering yourself in chagrin and self-loathing, then finding yourself wanting it more. It’s e-vil. So instead, I escaped to Tumblr (the hipster land), like a true hipster would (would they?), to find some very hipster stuff (obviously). I mean, what can be more hip than finding The Hipster Huckleberry Finn (edited by Richard Grayson) on Tumblr? But seriously though, there are some quite amazing stuff out there which can serve as an excellent diversion, like finding other people’s Tumblrs (who sound just as depressed as me) and also stuff like so, so, and so. Deliberately adding more things-to-do onto my pile of distractions, I went on reading some old stuff on metaphysics and realized I might just be in perpetual despair. Sort of like the feeling you get after watching Memento, but times infinity. While all of those were going on, I also drowned myself in electro-pop, slept at no earlier than 6 am every day for days, and constantly thinking about sex and alcohol – but sadly had neither. To top it all off, I received an email from WordPress congratulating me on my blog’s achievement in 2010 along with the breakdown. Last year I wrote 31 new posts. Nothing wrong with that, except that I actually wrote 43. I mean, why is that? Did I over-think things so much, too much that I did not post the other 12? That’s bullshit in retrospect. Which brings us to this point. I was determined to write something and just post the bloody thing without hesitating (though at this point I have a bad feeling this post is going to be shit, but not having readers sure has its perks! Kidding, oh my dear two readers).

So why can’t you want me like the other boys do?
They stare at me while I crave you.

Besides the fact that it’s so fucking true, those lines are also part of the lyrics to Crave You by Flight Facilities. It was intentional, me quoting their song, because we’ll be bringing in Flight Facilities to open for Two Door Cinema Club Live in Jakarta on February 15th!

And what has Never Mind the Buzzcocks got to do with anything? Nothing, really. Except that re-watching old episodes of the Buzzcocks had miraculously cured me of my depression (almost like exorcism, sans the gruesome part), therefore making it the most brilliant show ever made.

Happy New Year, everybody!

If this post makes no sense to you:
Maybe it helps if you read it while listening to Holy Fuck’s Lovely Allen?
No?
Yeah, didn’t think so either.

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

Protocol 301

“I’m not happy, and not sure if I ever will be. This isn’t something I can pass through, get over -  this isn’t some fucking phase. This is my life in its entirety – and I’m feeling eternally void and very much alone. If life is not enough, I reckon death would be.”

- A.

Quote of the Day #9

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it’s what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn’t really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I’ve felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I’ve been pretending I’m OK, just to get along, just for, I don’t know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.

Minister – Synecdoche, New York (written and directed by Charlie Kaufman)

Running on Bravado

You’re depressed when you’re sober, sometimes for no apparent reason. And because you need to distract yourself – you drink. The more you drink, the less depressed you become, but the higher your tendency to go overboard. The next morning, you get depressed envisioning the antics you did the night before – double that depression when your brain can’t recall what they were. And since the best antidote for depression is distraction – thus, you drink.

The more you care about the person you love, they act as if you’re putting a chain around their neck pulling it tighter, and the more inclined they are to either break free from you (because they feel suffocated) or get bored at the relationship (because it gets too safe). The less you care about that someone, the more they feel unwanted and question your level of commitment, but the more attached they get to you – which is a good thing, but you just can’t care less.

The harder you work, the more often your family kickoff a series of argument about the lack of time you spend with them. The more often you are at home, the unhappier you get because you constantly think about work and subconsciously blaming them for it, and if they don’t start a fight, you do.

No matter what you do, you just can’t seem to win the war.

And that is exactly why YOU SHOULD ALWAYS DO WHAT YOU WANT. Stop doing things just to please others. Be selfish. But when you are, have the decency to admit it and the courage to accept the consequences. Don’t nag. Don’t make excuses – you don’t need to explain anything to anyone. What you do with your life is no one’s goddamn business but your own. Don’t apologize, don’t regret. And most importantly: don’t blame others when life fucks you up. You, are your own responsibility.

Win the battles. Fuck the war.