Black, black heart.

I cant help it Im drowned in an ocean full of hatred-ink spilling out from a stained wrecked submarine. I cant help it Im letting my own mind and soul corrupted like a thousand oakwoods eaten alive by a blazing fire. I cant help it I’ve been trying to take the wheel and steer, but I cant, cos the devil wins and its driving.

So help me, help me, God.

Fotografi à la Kadarnya

Ada berapa saudara/teman dekat kamu yang punya DSLR dan/atau toy camera? Pasti rata-rata banyak yah. Saya sendiri dikelilingi oleh orang-orang yang menggemari fotografi.

• Ditta sudah menggemari sejak SMP.
• Inu pernah ikut les di Oktagon.
• Puty baru saja ikut pameran foto di Goethe Haus.
• Ramtot baru mulai setahun belakangan ini, tapi sudah punya sembilan buah kamera.
• Gesit bahkan menjadikan fotografi sebagai mata pencaharian sampingannya.

Senang sekali dikelilingi oleh orang-orang seperti mereka karena suatu saat pasti ada saja karya-karya mereka yang dapat saya nikmati lewat berbagai media-media sosial yang ada. :)

Saya sendiri? Masih berkutat dengan kamera handphone yang kadang-kadang error. ^^

Bukannya saya tidak tertarik untuk belajar fotografi. Tertarik, sih, pasti. Setiap melihat hasil foto yang bagus, pasti terpikir untuk lalu meminta uang ke papa untuk dibelikan kamera DSLR. Masalahnya tepat sekali ada di sana: uangnya masih uang papa dan belum uang penghasilan saya sendiri. Teman-teman dan saudara saya rata-rata sudah punya pekerjaan kecil-kecilan sendiri dan/atau menabung untuk keperluan hobi fotografinya. Sedangkan saya masih bergantung dengan kebaikan hati si papa. ^^ Walaupun sebenarnya si papa membolehkan, pasti tetap saja saya tidak enak untuk mengeluarkan uang tersebut.

—

Entah ini berkah atau kutukan, sepertinya saya memang terlahir menjadi orang yang perhitungan dan tidak enakan.

• Dua konser musik terakhir yang saya datangi semuanya gratisan. Konser Hind beberapa waktu lalu di Sabuga dan Muse tahun 2007 di Istora Senayan.
• Pengeluaran untuk baju dan buku saya atur perbulan.
• Handphone saya masih model yang lama, dibelikan orang tua saya sebagai hadiah ulang tahun saya dua tahun lalu.
• Jam tangan saya lungsuran dari mama. Jam tangan lama tersebut bahkan baru ditemukan saat saya sekeluarga sedang beres-beres rumah. -__-”

Rasanya belum pantas saya meminta barang-barang di luar kebutuhan primer seperti uang makan (pangan), uang kosan (papan), dan uang bayaran spp serta buku kuliah (pendidikan). Kalaupun ada barang-barang kebutuhan sekunder dan tersier yang saya inginkan/butuhkan, biasanya saya melakukan semacam analisis kondisi terlebih dahulu. Apa barang itu benar-benar penting? Kegunaannya apa? Apakah bisa menjadi barang yang produktif? Dan sebagainya. Intinya, saya tidak ingin memberatkan orang tua terutama si papa.

Ada suatu mitos yang pernah saya dengar tentang sosok ayah pada umumnya, seperti ini:

Saat kita minta sesuatu ke ayah, walaupun awalnya beliau menolak mentah-mentah, tapi dalam hati beliau pasti berjanji akan mengumpulkan uang agar nanti beliau mampu memberikannya untuk kita.

:’)
Dan saya percaya itu. Makanya saya termasuk yang sangat hati-hati jika ingin mengucap permintaan ke papa. Takut nantinya beliau kepikiran. ^^

Anyway, back to topic.. Fotografi.

—

Walaupun kamera yang saya punya hanya sebatas kamera handphone Nokia 5220, saya mau juga dong sharing foto-foto saya. ^^

So here goes.. (….maaf tiba-tiba ingin menulis dengan bahasa Inggris. Labil. ^^)

♥ Risa’s Months in Photos: February – April 2010 ♥

Meet Ipipip the new hamster.

Im still not sure if its a he or a she. Anyway, Ipipip has been in Fendi’s good care since Feb 21st. I gave Ipipip to Fendi as his birthday present. (Feb 23rd)

Meet the rocks. Literally.

I study rocks a lot. These are some samples we use for engineering geology lab. FYI, those rocks, on that pic, are put on  a mesh. And its wrong to put heavy things on a mesh. So, dont. Unless you want your lab assistants get mad at you. (March 4th)

Meet the yellow-jackets from far-east ITB.

I mean, my fellow friends from GEA – geological engineering student body. That picture was taken after a 31 consecutive hours of meetings. I was tired. But I strangely felt happy at the same time. (March 14th)

Meet the Faber-Castell colour pencils.

I use them a lot in some of my labs. Did you know Faber-Castell is a German word? So we have to pronounce it like: fa (as in ‘far’), ber (as in ‘november‘), cas (as in ‘uang kas‘), and tell (as in ‘tell‘). Dont pronounce it like: fa (as in ‘faded’) and cas-tle (as in castle = istana). (March 18th)

Meet my sister, Shania.

She wears her hoodie frontside-back. So that it looked like her face was all hairy and scary. Does it seem scary at all to you? (March 27th)

Meet Fendi Yusuf.

We were on a car wash. At car washes, all that Fendi cares about is his car. I was busy taking pictures he would not even notice. (April 9th)

—

Nah demikianlah sekelumit foto-foto à la kadarnya dari kamera handphone saya. Walaupun gambarnya kadang buram dan no skill, paling tidak masih ada sedikit yang dapat diceritakan dan dikenang. Doakan saja suatu saat saya berkesempatan memiliki kamera DSLR yang mantap-mantap itu. But until then, meet my mediocre photos, amigos! :D

Adiós, cheerios!

Let The Favourite Things Cheer Us Up

This is for you whose mood is on the lowest peak of  its daily swing.

This is for you who would rather be a friendly stranger than a strange friend.

This is for you who lately have been losing the will to learn anything more from life.

This is for you who tingle every time your ear catches Thom Yorke singing, “Are you such a dreamer to put the world to right?”

For those are just as much as myself lately..

Anyways, most of all, this is for you who love The Sound of Music as much as i do :)

Enjoy!

raindrops on roses

and whiskers on kittens

bright copper kettles

and warm woolen mittens

brown paper packages tied up with strings

these are a few of my favorite things!

♥

cream-colored ponies

and crisp apple strudels

doorbells

and sleigh bells

and schnitzel with noodles

wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings

these are a few of my favorite things!

♥

girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes

snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes

silver white winters that melt into springs

these are a few of my favorite things!

♥

—

lyric: Oscar Hammerstein & Richard Rodgers.

pictures: click for source, else from flickr.

go and youtube the song, here.

♥

Semester 6

Namun, hari ini Lintang ternyata hanya seorang laki-laki kurus yang duduk bersimpuh menunggu giliran kerja rodi. Aku teringat lima belas tahun yang lalu ia memejamkan matanya tak lebih dari tujuh detik untuk menjawab soal matematika yang rumit atau untuk meneriakkan Joan d’Arch! Merajai lomba kecerdasan, melejitkan kepercayaan diri kami. Kini ia terpojok di bedeng ini, tampak tak yakin akan masa depannya sendiri. Aku sering berangan-angan ia mendapat kesempatan menjadi orang Melayu pertama yang menjadi matematikawan. Tapi angan-angan itu menguap, karena di sini, di dalam bedeng tak berpintu inilah Isaac Newton-ku berakhir.

” Jangan sedih Ikal, paling tidak aku telah memenuhi harapan ayahku agar tak jadi nelayan ….”

Dan kata-kata itu semakin menghancurkan hatiku, maka sekarang aku marah, aku kecewa pada kenyataan begitu banyak anak pintar yang harus berhenti sekolah karena alasan ekonomi. Aku mengutuki orang-orang bodoh sok pintar yang menyombongkan diri, dan anak-anak orang kaya yang menyia-nyiakan kesempatan pendidikan. *)

… Saat asa untuk terus belajar hampir padam, biasanya aku lalu ingat Lintang.

Semangat semester baru! Ayo cerdaskan bangsa mulai dari mencerdaskan diri sendiri! :)

—

*) kutipan dari novel Laskar Pelangi karya Andrea Hirata

When all else fails..

16 months and keep on going

actually i dont even know what true love is (what the hell, who knows)

i just posted it because i like the sense the sentence brings

and its just cute like that

:P

Its 2010!

And apparently i haven’t yet post any personal review for 2009.

Well.

Whats new in 2009?

- HMTG ‘GEA’ ITB

Yellow fellow! Thank you for being the best part of my campus life and all. Lets rock 2010 B-)

- Pangandaran + Jogjakarta backpacking

Its quite great, you can find and read the reviews here in this blog if it be your pleasure :)

- Managing a year long relationship w/ the boyfriend (and still going)

Learned a lot. Thank you ♥

- And so. many. personal. flaws. :(

Including social issue (boo. im such a failure.) and academic ones.

Not gonna elaborate em all, though. Just making sure that i myself aware of the issues and will work my heart off to somehow improve them :)

Yes, I will.

Please let me do you a lot better, 2010!

—

For a pessimist, Im pretty optimistic – Paramore

“Im otw Jakarta!” Is that grammatically acceptable?

Hello. Back again with me Risa who recently loves to hyper-analyze somethings.

Today I’d like to share some of my thoughts concerning a common grammar abuse.

Why do I dare say it as common? A simple parameter, actually: I found ‘em a lot in people’s tweets (yes, im talking about Twitter) :p

On people’s tweets, I get to see a lot of sentences like this one below:

sentence #1

Finally! Im otw Jakarta!

otw: on the way

Dont you guys think that there’s something not right ’bout that sentence #1?

Compare sentence #1 above with this sentence #2 below:

sentence #2

Finally! Im otw home!

Now, this, is a right sentence. Probably people might have wrongly adapted sentence #2 to make believe the correctness sense of sentence #1.

I have been looking everywhere on the web to find the explanation for the reason to why sentence #1 is grammatically wrong, but couldn’t find any ^^’

All i know is on the way being a prepositional phrase + home being an adverb (or adjective?) is grammatically acceptable.

On the other hand, on the way being a prepositional phrase + Jakarta being a noun is rather unacceptable. Or is it acceptable all right? Or am i just imagining things? Or do you really think im wasting my time contemplating on stuffs like these? :ppp

Anyways, if anyone happened to come up with a more satisfying argument to my hippity-hoppity problem above, please do leave comments! Thankiess! x)

alhamdulillah senangnya tadi hiking gunung batu lagiii x) this time its 100x more fun! :) :)

In My Humble Opinion: We Need God

No matter what, we need God.

Not because we are afraid of the so many horrifying infamous afterlife consequences - the underworld with its giant snakes and the so-called hell with all its blazing fire – that we need God only in the sense of needing a bulletproof vest, a saviour, or to conclude it all up: A Mighty Back Up.

No. Not because we all are little insecure creatures that we need one figure of a king of the jungle to save us from the viciousness of nature’s law.

No. Those are not the reasons why.

Those are not the reasons to why, how very unreasonable the proof of God’s existence is, in every man’s heart theres always a sense of longing for a thing to be called God, even if its only as tiny as a speck of dust.

We need a God because we need to have the feeling that we are, indeed, inferior.

We need a God to help us keep the feet of the best of our kind to stay still on the ground, when they feel like they can reach onto anything indefinitely.

We need a God to help us accept that the mystery shall just remain mystery.

We need a God to let go and stop trying to answer the unanswered.

And most of all: we need a God because we, men, with lots of each of our contradicting egos, need someone superior to set the benchmarks. To guide the rule-maker of the world to make rules. To help us live the world in much needed orderliness.

Or at least those are the basic reasons why I choose to think myself as one of the God-dependent human being.

PS: This note is actually a result of a long-been-contemplating thoughts of my mind as in reaction to many persuasive agnostic doctrins i often read lately. Hmm hmm. Yea I have admitted that im a too-much-worrier. I might get bald by my 30th birthday. So help me God. LOL.

Random Updates

Oh my. Sebelum nulis postingan ini gw mampir ke salah satu blog sahabat gw dari SMP yang bernama Ken Anjani aka Kenny.. Dia pernah wanti2 gw untuk ga ngelink blognya maka dari itu ga gw link deh ya Ken ^^ Btw if you know her you should probably google her blog up and there you’ll find her newest blog update yang menurut gw sangat, sangat bagus topik or wacananya. Lumayan tertohok juga bacanya.. Alhamdulillah bisa jadi bahan introspeksi gw =) I should really do something immediately about my current keansosan and insecurity, sebelum orang lain merasa tersinggung dan merasa the problem is on them, not on me. Huhu. Duh.

Oke. Jadi sudah 2 minggu lamanya blog ini tidak diupdate. Dan somehow i feel the need to burst out some updates about me. Just to make it clear: i do this purely for the sake of my peace of mind. Writing therapy you might call it. Cos I find myself at ease while rereading my old blog posts. Dont you guys ever felt the same way too, about your writings? =)

So hereeee goes:

1. This Ramadan i have already missed 5 days of shaum because of my monthly period. Huaaa x(

2. Today is Sept 8th. Means im currently stepping the front gate of me and my bf’s 1st year relationship anniversary. Cheers. No further lebay2 shout out needed ah. (in being very cool)

3. I have Structural Geology, Petroleum Geochemistry, Stratigraphy Principal, General Hydrogeology, Ore Deposit, and Optic Mineral and Petrography as my study subject for this new semester. Whoaa aint my subjects have the coolest names?? Hihi ^^

4. My personal favourite to date being: General Hydrogeology =)

5. My least favourite to date being: Stratigraphy Principal =(

6. I have just finished watching Boys Before Flowers (the Korean drama series). And it really, really is a bad decision to start watching it in the middle of a semester. I get distracted from studying, like, a lot. =(

7. I packed my boombox from my home, to my dorm. Love it =9 Im so into top 40s right now.

8. Besides top 40s, im currently addicted to western oldies love song and mellow Korean drama OST. Aheyy.

9. I love, love my dormitory a lot! I should dedicate a post alone to this account.

10.  I know, somethings are better left unpublished. Theres no need to go blurt it all out unfiltered. It doesnt at all mean that you’re being untrue. (on being able to post almost anything on nowaday’s web) =)

Thats all for right now. I think I have been blessed. Hopefully you all do too. =)

See you around, dear friends! =D

Probably the ultimate reason why im such a melancholist -_-

At times i feel like theres too many bad things happen in this world that i find it unappropriate for me to even think of having any fun -_-

And so i stay gloomy..as if it would solve any problem. But it wouldnt. And suddenly im becoming the problem itself -_-