H is for Humdrum

- Hey.
- What’s wrong?
- Nothing. I’m OK.
- You don’t sound OK.
- If you say so.
- You wanna talk about it?
- What’s on TV tonight?

I am talking to myself again. Something’s happening. I think I may be experiencing real emotions for the first time in what might be over two years or so.

- Yeah, right.

No, really. For a long while now, I’ve felt like I’ve been sitting in a little room and while I’m in here, I feel invincible. My normal range of human emotions compacted to three: contentment, frustration and boredom. My fears reduced to two: pain and discomfort. My distinctions blurred. There is no difference between a want and a need. There is no ‘why?’ My motivations reduced to two axes: should and shouldn’t, and feel like and don’t feel like. But now I think it’s all falling apart and I’m no longer on cruise control. This sucks.

Am I going crazy? No. On the contrary, I’m becoming stark raving sane! I’m becoming normal again! And that’s the whole problem. I need to feel nothing again. I need to hold on to this.

Don’t worry. I’m just talking to myself again.
__________

- I before E, except after C.
- Like in ‘believe’?
- Yes, while ‘receive’ is spelt with the E before the I because it follows a C.
- Well how about ‘weird’ then?
- Well… you can remember that because ‘weird’ is a weird word.
- How about a ‘lei’?
- Um… well it’s usually the case anyway.

I am recalling one of the first rules I can remember learning about anything. The next day, my teacher (can’t remember which one this was) amended the rule by saying that it only applies to ‘ee’ sounds, like ‘grief’ and the aforementioned ‘believe’. Therefore the rule doesn’t apply to a word like ‘lei’.

- But ‘weird’ has an ‘ee’ sound.
- Well ‘weird’ is still a weird word.
- Then how about…
- Oh look, it’s a stupid rule, but learn it anyway.

OK, so I made the last bit up.
__________

This morning I woke up only to realise that it wasn’t morning at all.

I am reciting the first sentence of what will be my novel. It’s been about two years in the making now but I’ve only got three versions of the first page to show for it. (Note: Two years again. Something really significant must’ve happened two years ago. I can’t for the life of me remember though.) I have the story. From start to finish. It’s all in the head. It’s about this guy, and there are these other guys and this guy’s grandmother and there’s this girl. And then there’s me in it as well. Sort of.

The problem I’m having is that while I may have a story, I’m still looking for a voice. And I’ve been looking outside to find my voice inside. Somewhere within the words of Tom Stoppard, Michael Chabon, George Orwell, Bret Easton Ellis, Albert Camus, Neil Gaiman and Kurt Vonnegut I’ll find my voice. Hopefully. But I’m not there yet.

- Um… why don’t you use your own voice?
- No. I’ve heard my own voice on tape. I don’t like what I hear. I sound like a weenie.
__________

Everything reminds me of the Simpsons. Every time I see a gym, I hear Homer in my head pronouncing ‘gym’ as ‘gime’. Every time I see sugar (which quite often) I hear Homer again knocking on a door and calling out: ‘Sugar man!’ or Homer going: ‘First you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women.’

Thanks Homer for filling my head with crap. Good crap, mind you… but crap nonetheless.
__________

- Say something profound.
- Nope.
- Why?
- I have nothing profound to say.
- Wow, that’s profound.

It’s great being a hypocrite. Because you’re not accountable for anything.
__________

Endnote:
Mark this as a new day. For one thing, this may be the first time I’ve ever really written anything for myself. Well… it’s the first thing I’ve ever written for myself that I don’t envisage wanting to burn when I read it again in six months. But I realise that I am posting this up where the public can see and so, if you have read up to this point, I’d just like to ask one favour: Email me and write something. Anything. One line or ten pages or whatever. I’m not looking for praises or critiques. Just write me something if you’ve read this. That’s all I ask.

Thanks.

G is for Galaxy

I’ve been itching for three days now to do the letter G. I admit, I’m probably gonna have more fun writing it than you will reading it, but… if blogs aren’t meant to be self-indulgent, then I don’t know what it’s meant to be.

Last Saturday I saw Star Wars Episode II. It was good. Not great. Definitely better than The Phantom Menace but probably not as good as Lord of the Rings. But it’s a bit of a worry when the things I remember most about the movie are the costume changes that Natalie Portman goes through, and Yoda’s fight scene. Yoda’s cool. That scene alone was worth the ticket price. The next movie I’m hanging out for (no pun intended) is Spiderman.

I am but a novice when it comes to Star Wars. When Channel 9 played the originals again, it was probably the first time I saw them properly. I’m more a Star Trek person. And traditionally, in Geeksville, you’re either a Star Wars fan or a Trekkie. You can’t be both. But all this Star Wars hype going around has, at the very least, drawn me to consider the other side. And so I find myself trapped between these two galactic franchises with neither a light sabre nor a phaser to save me.

So, I will pit Star Wars against Star Trek in the ten most important matchups I can think of and let’s see who comes out on top.

Warning: What follows may only make sense if you know a thing or two about both the aforementioned franchises. But read it anyway…

1. Ship captains
Han Solo vs. James Tiberius Kirk
A close one, this one. Kirk might be able to take on Solo in a fist fight but Star Wars wins this one on account of the fact that Harrison Ford has had a better acting career than Shatner.
Winner: Wars

2. Pretty girls
Padme Amidala and Princess Leia vs. Jadzia Dax and a plethora of big-busted alien women in skin-tight uniforms (aka. Deanna Troi, Seven of Nine, that Vulcan from Enterprise etc.)
Tell you what, Trek wins out on quantity but no one in that camp beats Natalie Portman. Er… I forgot, were they meant to fight or just strut around?
Winner: Wars

3. Starships
Millennium Falcon vs. USS. Defiant
It wouldn’t be fair to pit the Millennium Falcon against the Enterprise. The Falcon wouldn’t even be able to dent it. And the X-wing? Don’t even bother. But even the smaller Defiant would have better firepower and comparable speed to handle Han Solo’s ship. Plus, it has a cloaking device!
Winner: Trek

4. Sidekicks
Chewbacca vs. Spock
Spock has his telepathic powers and that eyebrow trick. But I think Chewy’s waling would send Spock crazy with his oversized ears and all.
Winner: Wars

5. Englsih-accented wise-old-man types
Obi-Wan Kenobi vs. Jean-Luc Picard
In a fight, Picard wouldn’t even last 30 seconds against Obi-Wan. But Picard has also lived two lifetimes as three different personalities. This guy's a survivor! I’m saying this one’s a tie.
Winner: Tie

6. Planet-sized fortresses
The Deathstar vs. The Borg Cube
The battle of the geometric shapes! Hmm… this one’s tough, but I’m going for the Cube just cos I think it’s scarier to see a flying cube in space than a flying ball.
Winner: Trek

7. Big-eared midgets
Yoda vs. Quark
I think the Ferengi are one of the best alien races ever created, being one that worships profit as a religion. But after seeing Yoda in action, even all of Quark’s money won’t be able to buy him a victory here!
Winner: Wars

8. Weapons
Light sabre vs. phasers
What would you rather have, a light sabre or a thing that looks like a TV remote? I think this one’s easy.
Winner: Wars

9. Token minority race characters
Mace Windu and that black guy from the original vs. Geordi La Forge, Keiko and Guinan
Samuel L Jackson vs. Whoopi Goldberg and a blind guy? This one’s no contest! But I’m giving it to Star Trek for having a character who’s both black AND blind!
Winner: Trek

10. Artificial Intillengences
R2-D2 and 3CPO vs. Data and The Doctor
Need I even bother? Data by himself could take on those two with a hand tied behind his back!
Winner: Trek

Oh well, that’s the ten of them. I could’ve written so many more but… well… that would just be sad. So it’s Star Wars by a whisker! 5.5 to 4.5! Ahh, that did absolutely nothing and it wasn't even as fun as I thought it would be! I still like Star Trek better!

OK, take us out ensign.

Warp 9.

Engage!

F is for Family

Last night, as I was preparing for bed, I saw three generations of the women in my family go in and out of the bathroom, one after the other: my grandma, my mum and my sister. And I stood by the doorway of my room as an observer.

I was busting to go too.

A while ago, my brother came back to Sydney for a week. He's been in London since August (I think). There’s been a real family theme for me over the past couple of months or so. My uncle and aunty are also here visiting from Jakarta (they are also my God parents). They leave with my grandma in a week’s time. Another aunty, along with two of her kids, are also here. They leave today.

This is the first time that my grandma has had all her children in the one place since the mid-eighties. I can only imagine how happy she is. This time around, however, I can’t help but notice a certain sense of urgency ([?] I’m sure that’s not the right word but I can’t think of a better one at this point in time) about it. This could, after all, be one of the last times that such a reunion can happen. Everyone’s getting older and everyone lives so far away. I guess it gets harder and harder.

I spoke to my grandma this morning. She was worried about whether she will have enough time to complete a scarf she is knitting for me before she goes back to Jakarta. I told her that I’m sure it’ll be fine. I should’ve told her to just enjoy herself here before she goes back.

My cousins and my aunty, who were here until today, hail from Holland, or the Netherlands, whichever you prefer. When I was young, living in Jakarta, my family always made Holland out to be the greatest country in the world (well not quite, but it was a place where wonderful things come from anyway — up there with a lot of other Western countries). Which is fair enough really, since Indonesia was an old Dutch colony and all. But anyway, I believe that I was raised in an environment that promoted very little self-pride when it comes to culture. We distanced ourselves from any real feeling of national pride for Indonesia (we do enjoy the food, I guess). We half-heartedly celebrated our Chinese heritage but we had lost the language several generations ago and could only vaguely trace our roots back to the ‘motherland’. We indulged ourselves in a claim of Dutch influence (my parents are both fluent in the language) but… well… that’s just kinda dumb really. A lot of Indonesians really look up to Western people and Western culture. A white man in Jakarta is seen as some sort of demi-god (I exaggerate of course, but I think you get my drift). I just think it’s kinda sad how a people will quite blatantly acknowledge that 80% of the rest of the world is superior to themselves. And I guess I became the product of all that.

People ask me about my surname.

Harimanow

It doesn’t really mean anything. It sounds vaguely Indonesian but you’d be struggling to find another Harimanow family out there. It’s just a name my dad made up. Just a name — which is cool, really, cos it’s kinda like me: a mish mash of stuff — a generic Asian living in Australia and defining myself as I go.

So what’s my cultural background?

If you asked me where I was born, I could tell you that. I could also tell you where I live. I could tell you about my blood, my family name… and my other family name. I could tell you what languages I can speak, write or just count to ten in. I could tell you what kinds of foods I like, the kind of company I keep, what kind of songs I like to sing, the films I like to watch. But if you ask me what that all adds up to; what all that makes me…

I think I’d tell you to go away and let me watch my TV in peace. It is TV night after all…

E is for Enlightenment

I’m beginning to understand the limitations of my blog’s rather rigid structure. I mean, I have to think of only one thing for each posting. This is generally not so bad. I’m opinionated enough and arrogant enough about my opinions on everything to keep a gimmick like this A to Z thing going forever.

But the problem is, I have moods. I have days, weeks, months, even years (yikes) where I may not be in much of a mood to form self-contained discourses on any single subject matter. During these phases, my thoughts are a lot more disjointed. I may want to say something about some annoying tosser I see at Marrickville Metro, but I could hardly talk about them for more than three lines. And finding something else to talk about that could link one disjointed thought to another is often just too much effort, especially since I’m probably not in the mood to do that either.

E was meant to be for Entertainment. It was to be my tribute to the greatest invention of all time: Television. But now I find myself not in the mood to write it. I’m more in the mood to whinge and sulk and talk about losers, ugly people and other really mean things. I’m good at doing that. In high school, when the school newspaper had gone bad (after I left, naturally), my history teacher, Mr Short, said to me:

Christian, you should write a letter of complaint to FRED (The name of our paper). You’re good at that.

But I already made the commitment to stick with the gimmick of having each edition of this bloggerific journal talk about something specific. So, without any further introductory nonsense, I present to you a tribute to television, by one of its greatest fans, written at a time when he, frankly, would rather be doing something else.

Amelia took three weeks to pick a free night for dinner and it landed on TV night. It’s like as if TV night doesn’t count as a prior commitment! OK, granted, dinner was fun and all and I actually got to interact with human beings, but I missed half of TV night! Again, granted, it was the crap half of TV night that I missed but still… Oh yeah, this wasn’t meant to be a whinge session. I forgot.

Monday nights is TV night and under normal circumstances, don’t anybody try to call me or get me to go out on a Monday night! Unless you can arrange for an outing to include meeting a yellow four-fingered cartoon family, a detour through Ramsey Street and Summer Bay, a trip to the country, breaking into the CIA, attending a murder trial in Boston, and fighting various vampires and demons in Sunnydale, there is nothing you can offer me that I’d want! At least, nothing that a television cannot provide me. (Actually there is… nah, this site is PG-rated.) As the great Homer (Simpson) once said:

TV is a boy’s best friend. It gives so much and asks for so little.

Who said that TV makes idiots of us all? Everything good and wise in the world that I know about comes from TV (OK, there’s also school, uni, parents, other living people, music, books, etc. but that’s just a minor detail). Where did I learn about the existence of gay killer whales? TV! Where did I learn that Oprah doesn’t like beef? TV! Sure, now I watch a lot less TV because of other commitments, but during my formative years, it was TV that nurtured by brain and nourished my soul. And now I still have Monday nights…

But at the end of the day, TV is just a box with a picture tube, so to end this over-long edition of my blog, I would like to thank all the TV shows that have been the most influential to me (or at least all the ones I can think of at the moment). In order of what comes into my head first, they are:

Buffy the vampire slayer, Cheers, Angel, Alf, Thundercats, Astroboy, Silverhawks, Gummi bears, Ducktales, Becker, Alias, Star Trek: TNG, Star Trek: DS9, Star Trek Enterprise, Galaxy rangers, Lance Link: Secret chimp, Get Smart, The Practice, Picket Fences, Space: Above and beyond, The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Always Greener, Neighbours, Wonderworld, Cartoon Connection, The Simpsons, Herman’s Head, Married with Children, Duckula, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, The Flintstones, The Bugs Bunny Show, Home and Away, Beauty and the Beast, Degrassi Junior High, Saved by the Bell, The Nowhere man, American Gothic, Man about the house, Mr. Bean, The Goodies, Roger Ramjet, Batman, The Centurions, M.A.S.K, The Transformers, Inspector Gadget, The Late Show, The Late show with David Letterman, Tonight Live with Steve Vizard, The Panel, The Footy Show, NBA Action, SBS Cult Movies, The Afternoon Show, Vidiot, The Weakest Link, Dark Justice, Gilmore Girls, Ed, The Mole, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and apologies to all I have forgotten.

Thank you TV. Take a bow!

D is for Delivered

It’s not the first time that a girl has made me wait. It’s not the first time that a girl has made me wait twice. It’s just that usually what the wait delivers ends up not being worth the wait at all.

I waited months to get Michelle Branch’s album. It took so long to come out in Australia, when it was already doing quite well in America for a while. It didn’t matter that I had already downloaded every song of hers from the internet. I had to get it. Turned out it was worth the wait anyway. Turned out there were two songs on the album that I didn’t find on the net and one of them happened to be the fan-favourite Goodbye to you.

On Saturday, I had to wait for her again. I waited for about an hour (I guess I should’ve expected famous people to be late; mental note: when I become famous, be late for everything) for Michelle to appear on a little black stage in the corner of the Raindrop Foodcourt at Roselands Shopping Centre.

In the meantime, this annoying little blonde girl from 2Day FM kept on trying to get everyone to shout and stuff… with limited success. And closer to me, my friend Mark was making a half-hour international call from New Zealand to get a play-by-play commentary of what was happening.

11:39 am: Annoying 2Day FM girl promises for the third time that Michelle will come out in two minutes.

It was a mixture of the fact that I was tired, and that the rest of the disappointingly small crowd seemed equally lethargic. It was also that I had things on my mind, and that my back was aching. But the result was that I was annoyed. I was annoyed that I had to wait.

Then finally Michelle came on to the little black stage wearing little more than trackies, sat on a stool, greeted her audience and sang.

And suddenly, everything disappeared and it was like I was a little school boy once again, getting giddy about a girl whose everything just makes me go:

wow

It wasn’t the looks (though she is pretty damn cute). It wasn’t even really the music (though that was really what made me come to see her in the first place). It wasn’t that the lyrics meant a lot to me, but that they seemed to mean a lot to her. It was the fact that it was just her, sitting on a stool with a guitar, singing to the people who cared enough to come and watch. It was her her demeanour, her casual attitude, her obvious love for performing. It was her explaining to us that the only reason she was wearing all that make-up was that she had just left a photo shoot.

At just 19, Michelle’s not just a singer; she’s a performer. She’s an artist, not really a celebrity. And I wouldn’t have really cared if I hadn’t gotten a photo with her (which I did). I wouldn’t have really cared if I hadn’t gotten an autograph (which I also did).

Saturday was just about a girl who sat down on a stool with a guitar and made me go:

wow

And after that, I went grocery shopping (one of my favourite pastimes) and my day was complete.

C is for Comics

When you’re me, it’s geek week every week. Just depends on what time of the week it is. Tonight at about 6ish, I will make my weekly pilgrimage to King’s Comics in the city and collect my usual package of funnybook fun.

Hi everybody, my name is Christian and I am an addict.

I’ve tried to stop. Really, I have. I even didn’t buy the King’s Gold Club discount card for two years (it offers a whopping 10% savings on all comic purchases!), thinking that maybe, just maybe, I would finally stop buying. But how can I resist when Kevin Smith (director of such films as Clerks, Chasing Amy and Dogma) starts writing Daredevil (soon to be a movie starring Ben Affleck and Alias’ Jennifer Garner! How do I know this? Cos I’m a geek!) or when Marvel decides to do yet another relaunch of the X-men series and rip you off with four alternate covers for you to collect? There’s always a new hot series to start, another old hero to die or come back from the dead or another semi-celebrity to jump on the comics bandwagon. How can I resist??

And at the end of the day I’ve had a standing order and bought everything off the standing order every week for the past ten years and when I think about quitting, I think: Who the hell am I kidding? How could I stop? What am I supposed to do with the extra twenty to thirty dollars a week that I’d save if I didn’t buy comics? You mean I’d have to actually go out and talk to people for entertainment? And TV’s only good on Monday nights!

The problem is that comics grow with you. Just when you think you’ve grown out of them, something will come out that says: “Well you may be too old for that kiddie trash, but try this one!” Comics grow older as the readers grow older. It’s true. Just ask any comic company. They’re suffering from the loss of sales that a kiddie market brings. Comics are no longer for kids. They’re now catered for readers who used to like those comics back when they were kids. They’re no longer something you buy at the newsagents but instead you buy them at specialist comic stores.

Ah, I’m beyond help. I’m in the loop and the loop just keeps going and going like a big vicious… loop. I am getting better though. I’ve stopped going to comic conventions for one thing. And another thing… ah, who am I kidding? It’s gonna be geek week every week for a lot more weeks to come…

B is for Bass

Actually all I wanted to write about was music, but MUSIC doesn’t begin with a B and BUSIC, last time I checked (which was about five seconds ago), isn’t a word in the Macquarie Dictionary — our national dictionary.

Yesterday, at work, something happened that pissed me off a bit. So I decided to take my mind off it and listen to some music. A cd was already playing (and paused) on my computer. When I turned it back on, it was S Club 7’s Bring it all back playing and I smiled. When I realised that it was the music that was cheering me up, I smiled even more. If I had been listening to, say, Fiona Apple, chances are my mood would have gone down further.

About a year or two ago, I was listening to Eminem’s 97 Bonny and Clyde with a friend in the car. If you don’t know, the song is about Eminem killing his wife. It’s the usual fare for that loon. Anyway, my friend got so scared listening to it that she had to get out of the car.

Is there a point? Not really. But I just think it’s interesting. Who needs subliminal messages when the direct messages will do the trick.

One last point I wanted to make. My friend Lionel did this market research thing about personal audio entertainment systems, and one of the things they came up with was that people liked audio thingies cos it gives them that personal time — when you can tap along on the steering wheel to your favourite song or dance to a beat that no one else can hear, and then there’s that much over-used quote “dance like nobody’s watching’ (that gets flogged around forwarded emails so often!).

Well how about the opposite?

Sometimes I feel like dancing like EVERYBODY is watching or singing like EVERYBODY is listening. Cos the way I see it, unless you’re a professional dancer or singer or you have a certain fondness for karaoke comps, when you dance or sing, chances are, nobody is watching and nobody is listening.

Soon, I’ll have to think about writing like everybody is reading...

Introduction

I’m not very good with keeping journals. I’ve tried. But every time, I stop after a while. Firstly, I think that my life isn’t all that exciting. Secondly, because I am a dramatist, I will always attempt to make my life sound exciting even if it’s actually quite boring. The result of this is that when I do read over it again eventually, it will sound like wanky crap to me and that will piss me off, so I end up just ripping it up and chucking it away.

OK, let’s try again.

Another thing is, I seem to always get bogged down by trying to tell the back-story. In general, I don’t like to write unless I think someone else other than me will read it. As such, I feel the need to explain myself — my very existence. And in the end, my journal ends up becoming a biography of a person, whose life, frankly, is not all that exciting.

Christian Joseph Harimanow was born on…

Let me not fall into the same trap this time. So I will write no more of this introduction before I do. Again.

So let’s roll…


A is for Atonement

I believe that I have finally gained atonement in the eyes of the club gods, by being allowed to enter the hallowed gates of City Live. Before Friday, four straight attempts to enter this ‘RnB super club’ have been foiled somehow or other. The first two times we were rejected cos we came too late, the third didn’t work out due to a slight overestimation in the number of friends that I possess, and the fourth time, they were closed (How was I supposed to know that they’d close on Good Friday?!).

Well anyway, the night started off well enough. After Lillian parked her car on the other side of the equator, the first person I saw at Fox Studios (well, the first person I remember seeing anyway) was Tammin Sursok! (To the uneducated, she’s the foxy chick who plays Dani Sutherland on Home and Away — a show I like watch from time to time…) She was sitting by herself on this bench, practically begging for a desperate fan to come up and say hi (or so it might look to a desperate fan), yet all I could do was stare at her as I was walking past, trying to make out whether it was actually her or not. She was looking back at me, probably thinking ‘Who the hell is that freak staring at me?’ I’ve always liked her, but now that I’ve seen her in person, she’s definitely my favourite Home and Away character, no matter how many times my sister refers to her as the one whose head is too big for her body.

Dinner was nice, but I think I was too busy looking around to see whether Tammin was still around, while simultaneously trying to juggle the gigantic plates of Thai food on our less-than-generous-sized table. Though the food was spectacularly not bad, I got evil stains of what was likely to be basil and chilli on my jacket, which is part of my new wardrobe that I had acquired on a madly controlled shopping spree just a week prior. I managed to get the stains out yesterday though.

City Live itself was normal fare. It was fun. At times a good perve, but most of all it was cool to get down with my fellow black brothers and sisters, shake my bootylicious ass and embrace my non-existent African-American heritage.

I’M BLACK AND I’M PROUD!

I wish I could be one of the guys who gets paid just to stand on the stage and shout things like “Throw your hands in the air, and wave ‘em like you just don’t care!” Man, how many times does that line get used?! Although I felt at times out of place (but I always do), the dancing was fun and the music was surprisingly (as always) enjoyable, even though I’m not much of an RnB/Hip hop guy. But I like Ja Rule though, out of the current crop. That brother be keepin’ it real yo!

And there was this guy who sat on the stage, with a beer in one hand and shaking every hand within a 2-metre radius of him with the other. All night he was trying to talk to the DJ’s and pull up girls to the stage with him. He was so cool. Man, I wanted to peg him with a rock.

Anyway, I left at around 2:30 with a spring in my step and wishing that we had booked for a karaoke. Then I realised how tired I was and thought better of it. So we went home (after a pit stop at Pancakes); three thoughts in my head:

1. Dammit, I should’ve said hi to Tammin.
2. How the hell am I going to get this stain off my new jacket?
3. Ooh, she’s pretty cute. I didn’t notice before.

Peace out yo!