Multi-faces

People are multi sided. Never too kind and never too evil.

They are just people, whatever experiences they have encountered. They can be sweet in one context and be generously salty in another context.

So do not decide whether you like or dislike them, at your most extreme judgement – before you see all their faces.

Wait patiently before you  come to the final decision as you have to waive it for a very long, long, long time.

Autonomy

Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere – on water and land.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

I cannot let people speak for me, lead me to decide realities. Realities are mine, whether they are wrong or right.

You do not tell me which people are good, which people are bad, which people are saints, which people are assholes. And wish I would believe you. Well, at least we’ll see. I’ll see.

I want to decide it myself and fully responsible for what I believe – when they are right decision, also when they are wrong ones.

TEXTING

I love short sentences. They are easy and give more clarity.

S-P-O-K enter
S-P-O-K enter
S-P-O-K enter
S-P-O-K enter

If you prefer writing long sentences in a paragraph – it is okay. I still read your message. But please do not judge me the way I write and send my message for you.

Nothing really personal but style differences.

 

 

Pictures

A picture says a million words, they say.
To me it is a stare into my eyes, it is attention.

Half world is comfortable with taking selfie and grofie and dronfie. I am in the other half world, that being taken in a picture is something overwhelming or I would say it is too intimate.

Refusing to be taken into a picture with you does not mean that I am angry with you. I am not part of half world where you are living. I live on the other side of half world, thus what to you is natural, to me is intimidating. 

Can you understand it?

 

Emotion-less

Years ago, I had to live in another country – far away from my closest people. There were friends, who told me their state of limbo after I was gone – because I wasn’t there with them. One of them told me she created images of me being there, so she could survive. One of them told people she felt companionless. When they told me,  I was like “Oh. Ok.”

It is not that I could not understand their situation, but I saw it differently thus the way I expressed it was not their favorite. Though I was there most of the time to chat with them and to support them from far away, still for them I was (am) a coldhearted monster. People may say I was incapable in sharing mutual respect as I keep giving them unusual and unexpected responses, which left people flabbergasted.

Relationship for me is like a party in a nightclub. It is social and entertaining, everybody lines up to get in because it is fun. Loud music, stage lights, thick smoke, dance, crowds. It will take a blink of an eye before I would make conversation that is considered by others to be tedious, hard to understand, or one-sided. In every relationship, I am waiting to be left out of conversations, for reasons that the way I speak and how I see the world are difficult to discern.

I wish I could be there too – at the night club to have fun with friends. I wish I was normal. The reality, I don’t think I have any knowledge of what sort of impression types of situation makes on most people. I acknowledge them, but my bizarre responds to them are socially unacceptable.

I bleed to know myself. I am still learning to speak a human language (why can’t they learn my language?)

How about my friends? One of them has declined our friendship, long time ago. One who has tried to stay – is taking off too. And I miss them all. I know that I keep in my heart. I bring them into my silent world. 

 

Our Demon

It is our demon, who prevent us from being kind to others. It is our demon, who fails us to see others as they are. We sigh at our dirty windows, dark soul. We see other people are as dark as our sight, as evil as our mind.

Then we blame on others. Excusing our demon as our strategy of protection from what our demon tells us as evil people, protecting us from others.

And our demon creeps even deeper, inside us – eating us alive.

 

Gojek: A Space of Relationships

I applied GoRide countless time. But, never been so anxious with an enigmatic connected presence (Licoppe, 2004), to describe what so called a sense of being intimate and attached from a certain distributed family.

Long story short, this is my email for Gojek’s customer service:

Gojek yang baik,

perkenalkan nama saya Endah Triastuti.

Saya pengguna aplikasi gojek dengan nomor hp 0812XXXXXX

Hari ini, saya mengalami kejadian yang sungguh tidak mengenakan dan membuat saya cemas.

1. ada telpon ke whatsapp saya dari gosend. Laki-laki itu menyatakan akan mengantar paket untuk saya. Saya menyatakan tidak sedang menggunakan jasa gosend. Ia maksa mau antar, saya tanya antar ke mana? Ia bilang ke warung buncit. Baik kantor dan rumah saya bukan di warung buncit.
2. Tidak beberapa lama, saya ditelpon oleh nomor yang sama lagi ke telpon (bukan whatsapp), menyatakan dari gosend dan mau antar barang. Saya bilang hal yang sama bahwa saya tidak pesan gosend. Saya tanya siapa nama penerimanya, ia bilang: atas nama Diah. Nama saya Endah, bukan Diah. Ia bilang: oh, nomor salah ya? Dan saya tutup.
3. Nomor yang sama menghubungi saya beberapa kali – tapi saya hiraukan.
4. Lalu tidak beberapa lama, saya ditelpon lagi dengan nomor yang berbeda – saya angkat dan lagi-lagi dari gosend dan mau antar barang. Saya bilang dengan kesal (karena saya sedang bekerja) bahwa saya tidak pesan gosend. Saya tanya ia ada di mana, ia bilang ada di warung buncit. Saya tanya siapa yang akan diantar? ia bilang namanya ayu. Saya bilang nama saya Endah dan saya ada di UI Depok. Lalu saya tutup.
5. Lalu, nggak berapa nomor yang sama telpon masih ngotot mau antar paket dan tanya rumah saya di mana? saya nggak jawab. Lalu ketika saya mau menutup telpon, ia sempat bilang: Ibu galak banget, bentak2.
6. Lalu, saya sms dengan mengatakan: ia tidak sopan dan akan saya laporkan ke gojek.
7. Tidak berapa lama, nomor lain telpon saya 4 kali. Lalu saya blok.
8. Lagi, nomor telpon yang lain telpon saya 4 kali. Lalu saya blok.
9. Tidak berapa lama saya di add di wa grup Komunitas Gojek XXXXX. Saya left.
10. Lalu ada lagi yg tlp saya – tidak saya angkat.
11. Lalu saya di add ladi di grup yang sama wa grup Komunitas Gojek XXXXX. Total saya left 2 kali.

Saya merasa tidak aman sekali. Saya sama sekali tidak punya order gosend.

Saya menelpon customer service gojek yang meminta saya untuk menulis email ini dengan menyertakan semua bukti (terlampir).

Semoga Gojek dapan mencari jalan keluarnya. Terima kasih.

We may agree that Gojek is a leading national mobile apps that share the face of modernity. It is where social and economy structures are entangled in the most high dynamic. Gojek is where people are, a communication-at-a-distance. 

Yet, my experience is an evidence that a communication-at-distance has reached its point of beyond distance. In contrast, it creates a space of intensified complex spatial relations. Why it is complex? Because of this:

So feeding my curiosity – I have tracked down the community that has added me to their online community in whats app. I found them, though. Not sure whether they recognise my number by looking at my face.

Gojek – though it started from an effort to sustain urban economic, my experience show there is a performance of closest and most familiar consociates community, that role continuously in time in spite of physical separation (Christensen, 2009). 

In other words, it is apparent that media instead of de-spatialise people, in fact reinforce close ties between previously anonymous people. Media do not diffuse them, as Fletcher has predicted in 1992.

In turns, “in this way locative media create, as the Brazilian writer André Lemos notes, ‘augmented realities [. . .] integrated, mixed processes that merge electronic and physical territories, creating new forms and new senses of place’ (Lemos, 2009).