New Year, New Hope

First of all, I'm gonna say happy new year everybody! I wish nothing but a joyful, healthy, prosperous and bright year ahead for you and your family....

There were so many things that happened in 2014. Either it was a good or a bad one, we should take them all as an experience that we could take some benefits for the future. We should be grateful for the bad days too! Because we might hate those bad days, but in the end those bad days make us stronger.

In Indonesia, there were some massive changes in 2014 because there was a presidential election and we elected Joko Widodo as our new president. Hopefully Mr. Widodo would lead Indonesia to be a much better country for years to come. Unfortunately, in the edge of 2014 Indonesia was strucked by two major disasters.. A big landslide in Banjarnegara and the lost of an AirAsia plane with QZ8501 flight code.. My sincere condolences and prayers go to the victims and their families...

Speaking of new year, it's the right time to make some resolutions for our life. Resolutions are good, but accomplished resolutions would be even much better. Don't let those resolutions stay as a mere remark and get rusty (like everyone did, including myself :p ).

For me, 2015 is gonna be a big year. I do have so many big plans for 2015, I hope I could ace them all and so does yours! Never stop dreaming because it's the possibility of having dreams come true that makes life interesting, isn't it?

Same Old Questions

"Who's your girlfriend right now?"
"When will you get married?"

In my country, Indonesia, those questions are the most common questions you're going to face in your society.

For me, in my opinion (mostly based on other people's experience) in every relationship there will be a moment when you have to choose whether the love of your life or the life that you love. Apparently, I already have chosen to pursue the life that I love first.. (no.. noo... it's not a denial hahaha :p )

That's the Thing About Failure

Have you ever met a failure in your life? When everything didn't work as you planned and you felt that your efforts were in vain? Well.. I have... And in my opinion, everyone has.

Life is not a wish granting factory, you couldn't just get everything you want. As I recall, there's no successful person who hasn't met any failure within his/her journey, isn't it? What I mean by successful is the best one, kind of person who was not only success in their career, but also change the world! People nowadays usually are being so liberal with "successful" term, they often reduce the level of "successful" in order to make themselves get into that criteria. We could learn from that successful person such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who got dropped out from their university before successfully built their own company whose innovations always be a major breakthrough in techno world, or maybe Soichiro Honda who was rejected by Toyota when he applied for engineer position there before eventually made his own factory which is being the arch rival of Toyota up until now. There are still so many persons that I couldn't write it down here.

The point is... Failure could feel devastating, but you shouldn't let it crush you. In some cases, failure leads to some people's suicide. In my opinion, it was wrong in any level! You couldn't treat every situation as a life-death matter, because you'll die a lot of times! We have to learn from that successful people, their motivation, their strength, etc. Especially for the strength, because the real strength didn't come form lifting weights, but rather from lifting yourself up everytime you got knocked down. Failure is important to remind us that we were not good enough, thus we have to work really hard in order to get what we want and to avoid the failures in the future. There are a lot of little reasons why the big things in our lives happen, failures were only one of that little reasons. Sometimes you have to go through the mud in order to find a precious jewel.

That's the thing about failure, it demands to be felt.

The World Teaches Us To Be More Grateful

Those pictures have been taken when I went to one of Merapi disaster victims's house. Lesson to be learned: be grateful for what you have right now, you'll never know when and how the world turns it out

Life...

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser, be wise..

Crazy-little-cheesy-but-real Thing

Well it's been a long time ago since my last post. My recent activities really took my time, I didn't have much spare time as before. By the way, today is 14 February which means today is valentine's day! Okay for a single like me maybe valentine's day means nothing. But it makes me wanna write about thing that I haven't wrote it there before, well yeah... love.

Talking about love life, my love life maybe isn't the one that every person dreaming for. I've been dating two times during my college time, and none of them ended successfully. As we know every relationship goes through stages which where and how stage develops is ultimately up to each person. While we always hope for the best, we often can't avoid the inevitable. The experiences I've got from it make me more mature and taught me more about what love is.

For you in the future, thanks for always being every reasons for me to be a better person though I haven't know you yet...
Happy valentine's day

Straight Edge and Its Misconceptions

If we look at people's culture nowaday, we can see that straight edge is a non-smoking, non-alcohol, non-drugs abusing, and non-free sex culture among hardcore and punk scene. Seems like if you want to be a straight edge you have to play and love that genre of music.

It's true that straight edge culture was born in hardcore punk scene, but that's not the point. Straight edge firstly introduced by an 80's hardcore punk band, Minor Threat with its vocalist Ian Mackaye who wrote a song named Out Of Step which its lyric contained straight edge things like “don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t fuck, but at least i can fucking thing”.

The “X,” Straight Edge’s universal symbol, emerged in the early 1980s, when music club owners marked the hands of underage concert-goers with X’s to ensure that bartenders would not serve them alcohol. Soon the kids intentionally marked their own hands, both to signal club workers of their intentions not to drink and, more importantly, to make a statement of pride and defiance out of not drinking. The movement appropriated the X, a symbol meant to be negative, transforming its meaning into discipline and commitment to a drug-free lifestyle.

Being a straight edge doesn't mean that you have to listen exclusively to hardcore, to wear a certain kind of clothing, to collect sXe (popular abreviation of straight edge) tattoos, to attend shows twice a week, or to be a pretentious, judgemental jerk. Straight Edge, at its core, is none of these things. Despite its misconceptions, the movement has a long way to go to live up to what I see as its true potential. Yet for all it’s contradictions, sXe has inspired thousands of kids to live intentional lives.

Being straight edge is not because you want to be cool, that’s why there's a slogan “straight edge isn’t cool anymore”. You don’t join straight edge, you take on the straight edge. You just get involved in the scene and start thinking for yourself.

It's not about the music you listen to, it's what’s the inside that counts.