Friday, November 06, 2020

Do You Have Any Friend?

"Do you have any friend?", it's like a sensitive question to people who don't have friend, me included :D Many of you will be like, of course I have and will start listing who and who. I'm not sceptical of your life. I don't know you, maybe you do have many friends, but the sceptical me just have to say, how many are really your friends though? In my adult life in Singapore, I have had people that I used to call friends drift away and now we're like strangers. Maybe they drifted away, maybe I drifted away and they didn't come closer when I did that because I would admit I did do that. I stopped contacting people to see if they would contact me and they didn't. It is hard to swallow when you realize that you are not that important in someone's lives, that you're like bottom on their list, but then one day I heard Wendy Williams said that she always believes friends come with a reason and a season. She's like saying, so don't fret too much about it. Sometimes I wonder if it would be different if I lived in Jakarta. Would Indonesians friends be different? My oldest and still friend friends are all in Jakarta and somewhere there's photo evidence to show we've known each other since kindergarten, though I don't have any re-collection of that :D

Some would counter there are Indonesians in Singapore too, but I think if we, Indonesians, want to be honest, we know that sometimes somehow being here in Singapore, some Indonesians are kinda shedding their Indonesian-ness and just be more, well less Indonesians, the nice caring Indonesians we are expected to be. Am I saying Singaporeans aren't as nice? I don't know. After 20 years, I still don't know. You can't paint people in broad strokes, every person is different and when it comes to me here, there are different factors at play. I don't know if they are not as nice or it's because I'm not part of them and I come from a country that's not top on their admiration list that I always feel like I'm on the outside. That being said it could also be that I'm just a flawed human being that I'm unable to have deep friendship here. It could be me, not them :D

Anyways, what's with the strange opening to this post? Well I finished reading Rules for Visiting by Jessica Francis Kane. It tells a story of a single 40-something lady (side note: my God, reading that, it's ominous to me, is it gonna be me?!?!) who's like doing life just like what I have been doing, which sadly I can only describe as surviving. Literally it's like all we do is just to make us alive to go another day not knowing what that next day is for :( In her life, she doesn't hang out with friends. She basically just follows a pretty much unchanging routine day in day out. Exactly like me. Well at least she lives with her father, who is family, at least she has that. She's not socially awkward or anything. It's just for some people which I can understand fully, it's like after you are done with the public life required of you, all you want to do is just be alone and when you follow that routine year after year, you end up with not many people around. Is it unhealthy? Perhaps. Anyways so the lady in the book has a lot leave time from work and as she's looking into her life which is pretty empty, she decided to go visit 4 people who do not live in her city who she considers friends and the book is basically about her self-discovery through the visits. In all the visits, she stays in the friend's house. Er ... that is something that I will not do, but I guess if you want that quality time with friends and see how your friends actually live, you should do that. It's not a thick book and very light in content. It even has a happy ending, like it seems she ended up with a boyfriend. There's not much enlightenment in it, but I actually enjoy reading it very much. There's comfort reading this book. Anyways, the lady is a gardener and the story is interspersed with short articles about trees and that kinda reminded me of The Overstory. The dad of the lady has been giving different tree sheets to her, suggesting the type of tree to be planted for him when he dies. It's nice I think, to have a tree to memorialize you. So anyways, I am currently reading the winner of this year Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Nickel Boys.

On other news, the American election. I'm not gonna lie, I was scared that first day immediately after the election, well it's day for us in Asia when it's night for them. I'm feeling much better now. Trump is not winning this. Still, there is still that fact that there are over 60 million Americans who still voted for Trump despite of all that he did or didn't do and that is, that is un-understandable. Don't get me wrong, Trump getting votes was expected, but to receive this much. At the current tally, he's receiving around 47% of all the votes currently counted. It's like, what?!?! WHAT?!?! You guys are okay with this, with what's happening in your country, with you losing respect in the world? I mean if you discount all the news and just make your decision solely based on what he had said, his own words, like in one of his last campaign rallies he said doctors are making more money by declaring the patient's cause of death as from covid-19 - you can still be okay with this?!?!? I do not understand. Seriously I think the rest of the world had some sympathy for America before this election but now seeing so many Americans still voted for him, well at least me, I don't understand. There is a wrong answer here and many Americans chose wrong.

Indonesia has had its polarizing elections in recent years with incompetent candidates and in one of my post about it, I wrote about the voters who chose the wrong candidate:

They already have the most representation everywhere. They don't get hassled as much as the minority. They never experience being targeted simply for being the minority. So why on earth these people still feel like they're being victimized, that they haven't been treated fairly? What's with the anger and all the aggression? Are they just plain selfish, mean, and bad to the core?

As an Indonesian, I know how it feels like to still feel disappointed even though the right candidate won. You hope most of the country would resoundingly dennounce all the bad, racist, fear-mongering politicking that happened and when that didn't happen, that when a lot of people actually endorse it, it feels so heartbreaking.

In The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, there's a discussion if democracy is a good system. One of the aristocrats in the book did not think so because everyone has a vote and he did not think that your common people can make the right choice as a person who's fully educated or understand the issue at stake can. I thought that that opinion is condescending, but Jakarta has a bad governor now because the majority chose wrong and I do think many of the people who voted for the current governor were misled, did not get the correct information, and basically not educated enough at the time of the election. That being said I still think democracy is a precious system, I don't want my vote to be taken away from me. I'm glad Indonesia has free elections. It has its issues, but generally Indonesians can vote without much issue and the process is pretty great, voter registration seems to be simpler than the one in America. Voting day discount is even pretty instituionalized now :D Still there are real challenges to democracy and I think for every democracy everywhere, the main challenge is voters education on the issues so that they can choose the right party or candidate. As citizens, we really do need to stay engaged with what's happening in our country. We need to watch how party or people govern and educate ourselves. I say that but I know it may still not work because there are people who get their news only from their own preferred channels and when that channels are questionable, then they're just misguided. It's an issue in America, it's an issue in Indonesia, but for all of us who love our democracy, we don't want it changed for anything else.

:) eKa @ 9:51:00 PM • 0 comments