Jokes aside, it really is weird that the decline of my general wellbeing(?) seems to have instilled in me a certain kind of creative hunger. In lieu of substance abuse or shaving off my hair, rock bottom has me publishing a new Substack newsletter.

Last Friday, I published the first post in a newsletter I call Average Consumer. I’ve written many versions of its description over the past three weeks, trying to feel at home in this new intention, to little success.

I guess I’ve been increasingly drawn to the idea of paying closer attention to the physical places and experiences that I navigate daily. A pretty basic desire, really, you’d think it’s second nature. Well, it isn’t. Not with the pull of aspirational realities on my screen feeding me the constant illusion that my life is bigger than this one I’m living. (It is a big life, but no amount of Day In My Lifes is going to put my reality on pause). In some ways, that has always been implied in my writing here on Slouching. Writing about the desire to own a car or a house are nothing but attempts at capturing how it feels to be in this city. But in many ways, I’ve also always shied away from outright saying that I write about Jakarta, or admit that was even my intention. Ickk, just typing that makes me nauseous.

Saying that I write about Jakarta feels like a huge undertaking. It comes with the burden of being correct, even more than other things in my life that I’m obsessed with getting right. There’s also the fear that, because of the nature of my writing (aka because I’m a sentimental piece of shit), I might be inclined to gloss over the uglier experiences, effectively creating the very tired over-romanticized representation of a place that is often far from romantic. But! To quote Addison Rae: I’m not a little bitch. So I will soldier on.

As of today, I describe Average Consumer as a newsletter about Jakarta through the lens of consumption. I mean that literally — because what are we if not consumers in a city where nothing is free — but also kind of in retaliation to that very notion. I feel like so much of the content by publications that cover Jakarta are centered around building hype for the ventures, and not enough are interested about the consumers’ experience and the needs, desires, complex internal battles that drive the way we consume. We contain multitudes, etc.

Average Consumer is excited about the latest brand of colorful insulated water bottles as much as it is interested in not having to spend. It’s excited about going out as much as it is about staying in. On a personal level, I want to be right and I want to be a romantic. Indulge in the pockets of joy that keep us going as much as distill the awareness even the most “tasteful” of us can’t shake that we are all just average consumers being clowned into scanning QRs to pay for things we don’t actually need. I hope that in the process of putting out this new newsletter I get to better capture the cocktail that is thrill, guilty, pleasure, rage brewing beneath the surface of our (let’s be real, my) existence.

Right now, my plan is to publish a little weekly list where I dump news and observations about things happening in the city, the first of which I sent out last Friday. In the future… I have ideas but I’d rather not get into that, lest I distract myself from actually writing, haha.

I’m not leaving this space entirely though. I think I’ll be here for the more personal writings, dump my media consumption list, and generally write about me. Maybe I can finally write about writing without feeling shitty. This compartmentalization feels kind of nice. I have a feeling I’ll be back here a little more, now that my brain is slightly more organized.

On a more technical note, unfortunately I haven’t succeeded in importing my subscriber list from this newsletter to the new one. So if you’d like to be in the loop, I hope you don’t mind going through the trouble of doing so manually here:

Average Consumer

Consuming the city before the city consumes us.

By Christabelle Adeline

Wish me luck!

I would tell you it’s my favorite dish in the whole world, even when it’s so spicy it literally makes me cry. But if you ask me on a deeper level, I’d tell you that it’s the dish my Oma would make me every day growing up. The dish I’d have for dinner while watching “Jin dan Jun” with Opa on a school night. The dish I had some 20 years later after rushing home in the middle of work one day upon hearing news of Opa’s passing. The same dish on the table the day Oma moved abroad for good not long after. Through deaths, births, departures, returns, and many a change in the family, the dish remained a constant. It’s the dish that my dad’s wife would go on to perfect and turn into an admirable hustle. If my much younger siblings grow into the kind of travelers who pack sambal botol in their carry-on, whoever they introduce their mediocre bottle of sambal to on the road will have this dish to thank for raising spice-loving adults. I’ll tell you it’s a dish you’ll find at restaurants, or on your food delivery app, but few get right. Certainly none as right as the one from home.

It’s the dish I’ll think about when my grandparents’ house finally gets sold. When the dreaded but inevitable move arrives and we dispose of decades’ worth of family belongings. This home is older than I am. A witness to lives far before mine and families beyond the faces I know by name. There will come a day when the house is no longer a “saved address” on every app with a map on my phone. When the zip code I’d learned to memorize when I was six joins the pile of useless information in the back of my head. When the neighborhood printed on my KTP will come up in conversations as a marker of time, nothing beyond the context of nostalgia.

I may find myself driving past the old house then, just for fun. It may be unrecognizable. Perhaps it will no longer be standing, some other family with a shiny new home in its place. I’ll wonder who they are and if they have grandparents who tells them “I love you” as often as they tell them “don’t get fat”. Is their family lore as complicated and weird and maybe kinda fun? Do their kids grow up guilt-ridden faux-rebels? I don’t know if being there will make me sad but it will definitely make me hungry. I can see that feeling coming from a mile away. A craving in my stomach only one dish can satisfy. I’ll wonder what this new family in this new house where my old family house used to be are having for dinner? Because I can tell you with complete certainty that whatever it is will not be as good as our cakalang rica, which truly is the absolute bomb. 🌶️🌶️🌶️

P.S. Uhhhhhh yeah this post is (inspired by?) a TikTok trend I’d fully intended on joining, except in true “me” fashion I ended up taking it way too seriously and writing way more than I was supposed to. Definitely way more than I could fit on the app, lololol. I swear to god I was going to keep this funny or cool or something in between, but alas I am only ever cheesy and cringe (or something in between). I really do love me some cakalang rica, you’d think I’d have learned to make it at this point. Maybe soon. 🥴

I.

One thing I’m starting to realize about myself is that writing was never a hobby to begin with. It wasn’t one of those things that my parents would always find me doing growing up, not an activity I would necessarily “look forward to” in my free time. No one ever saw me, as a kid at an adult party, just making stuff up on a piece of paper in a corner. I never really made stuff up I think, beyond cute scenarios of my crush liking me back, which is truly very on brand. From the beginning, writing was a necessity. It was a tool I’d discovered that, when put into use, gave me inexplicable release, a feeling that must have been so comforting that I wanted to access again and again.

By “the beginning” I mean seventh grade English class, which would require us to turn in the occasional essay and book report. While I dragged my feet through the latter, something felt different about those essays. I must have simply talked about myself in them (also very on brand), and it felt good enough as an exercise that I eventually thought: “Wow, okay, I could do this when I grow up. I could be a writer.” A clear and conscious decision that I gladly pledged my loyalty to.

Come to think of it, it is really so unserious how I, as a 34-year-old with a LinkedIn account, beat myself up day in day out trying to commit to this random idea that I had made on a random Wednesday afternoon at the young age of 13. Surely I did not have to do it? Surely I do not have to trust a kid with a barely developed frontal lobe so much? (I actually know nothing about the development of frontal lobes, so don’t come at me). And yet I did. Clearly I still do because here I am still writing about writing in a newsletter where I kinda swore I would stop doing that.

What I’m saying is, while I love writing, I don’t think I’ll ever find pleasure in its process, the way I think you are supposed to with hobbies, and that’s OK. I can get better, and I want to, but I don’t think getting better at writing will allow me to enjoy the process any more than I do now. It was never truly delightful. There was never a time where I wrote freely. Never knew of a period in a past life where I wrote like nobody's watching (maybe those book reports, actually). I stopped consistently writing a diary after middle school over fear someone might read them.

Writing became important to me before I could ever properly derive joy from it. I approached it with so much intention and seriousness — a reverence, almost, which may not necessarily be misplaced but clearly comes with so much self-imposed expectations. I used to want so bad for writing to be fun and feel good, but I’m slowly accepting that it never will be! Maybe it’s never meant to be! At least not for me. Two decades since deciding I was going to become a writer, the one true joy is really in having written.

II.

I’ve cultivated new interests in my adult life that have expanded my world in a way my 14-year-old self would’ve never imagined. At first I thought of them as hobbies, little sparks of joy while scrolling and contributing to the noise of social media. Little curiosities that I could learn to do something useful with my time. Things that could maybe become great life skill for when I leave civilization and join a commune/cult, whichever gets on my FYP first. But then I started thinking about these things too hard and too seriously that I suspect they, too, have stopped qualifying as something I do purely out of pleasure. If writing was necessity, these things are curiosity.

My relationship with clothes, getting dressed, sewing, and by extension shopping (lol), falls under this category. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve always been interested, perhaps even from a younger age than 13, but I simply denied myself that path because I was busy being A Writer. (I’m thinking of that time in sixth grade I told myself I’d strictly wear red for a week in the name of establishing a personality.) Thinking about and making clothes stopped qualifying as mere hobby because while I derive a great deal of pleasure from them, I also think about them with this funny concoction of anger and annoyance — the good kind — that I can feel growing in the pit of my stomach. They’ve become at once a delight and a bone that I want to pick with the world. Does that make sense? (I’m trying to “free write” so this might all be nonsense.) Of course there is joy here, too, but the joy feels more utilitarian. The kind of joy you feel when you get close to answers, or you realize you’re asking the right questions. 

III.

Music is probably the closest thing I have to a hobby. I’m not excellent at it, but I’m also not terrible. For two years in a row now I’ve written “sing better” in my annual goal setting page on Notion. It’s an embarrassing thing to admit but it’s true. This year I added “play the violin better” to that list. I’m okay enough on the piano to not hate the sound of my playing, but even on that, the room for improvement remains substantial.

There’s an essay in my head about rediscovering my love for music that I’m not gonna get into here and now, but I’ve spent a great deal of time these past two years wondering why I ever thought I had to stop playing just because I stopped going to church. Heck I started going to church again this year partly to investigate that question. Unlike the things I mentioned earlier, my relationship with music is free of the burden of being correct or even being great. Devoid of that burning passion to problem-solve. Any desire to improve is based solely on the desire to enjoy myself more. To hear myself screech less on the violin. To truly get to know the range where I feel freest to sing a tune. To brave the higher keys that I tended to avoid. Maybe even to sing and play an instrument at once, because that must feel so good to do!

Music is perhaps the only thing I don’t mind being “just okay” at. I can suck and laugh at myself. I can play the same song imperfectly over and over and over again without getting frustrated, regardless how many wrong turns I take. At 13, it would always take some reprimanding from my parents to get me to practice. But at 34, fully-developed frontal lobe and all, I am able to appreciate repetition as a means of developing muscle memory.

Most recently, I’ve been obsessed with doing Billie Eilish’s “L’amour De Ma Vie” on the piano. I sound nothing like her, but what a gift it still is.

Hi everyone! I’m happy to be back, after a month of conveniently letting life get in the way of writing. More on that in another post, maybe. But for now I’m here and once again trying not to betray my desire to show up on this space more.

What better way to come back here than with a Debrief featuring Rizky Rahad a.k.a. Ichi! If you’re new here, the Debrief is the segment of this newsletter where I ask people to share their burning thoughts and interests. And as for Ichi, I’ve always known at some point I’d like to have him come on here simply because I am always interested in what he has to say.

Tbh I took a while writing this intro about him, because I realize that despite having known each other for some time, I found it hard to pin what truly defines Ichi to me. There’s Ichi who everyone having a smoke break outside a Jaksel club seems to know. There’s Ichi who isn’t afraid to call out Vice Indonesia despite having been one of its most compelling storytellers. Also Ichi who, to some extent, is my “landlord”, lmao.

One of my most memorable interactions with him must have been back in 2019, the day protests against the problematic RKUHP bill were held. Some friends, him included, had taken to the streets and another friend decided to create a group chat to make sharing information easier (and to keep track of friends we know). The group was called Queeret Pedurenan, because most of us lived in the Karet Pedurenan area at the time. While I personally spent the day at work, throughout the day, it was endearing to witness friends checking in with each other and sharing updates. Ultimately extending care where possible. Writing this, I thought it couldn’t be more fitting that a protest-related group chat was one of my earliest memories of Ichi, because while I live in a bubble of constant reluctance and overthinking, Ichi has consistently been at the forefront of action-taking.

Over the years that follow, I’ll come to know Ichi as the person who will always take a stance, even if it means being the odd voice out. The guy organizing film screenings to show a way the medium can be used to push for justice. The uncompromising raver, who goes from the airport straight to a party (and vice versa) because why wouldn’t he? Ichi simply doesn’t exist for anyone’s convenience — not even his own.

More recently, he’s unlocked a new label, the author, with his book “Queers Shoot Back!” (Cahyati Press, 2023). An essay collection on radical queer cinema, the book is perhaps the latest evidence of his determination to live a full life, one that is in constant pursuit of unadulterated queer joy. Anyone attempting to define Ichi would do well to pick it up and — while he appreciates being occasionally tagged on Instagram — actually read it. xD

What’s an unpopular opinion that you feel strongly about?

• I think this is related to my book. More visibility or representation won’t get us anywhere. It won’t liberate us. People just need to stop getting so easily satisfied with new queer films on Netflix or Hollywood. Representation makes you feel the illusion of liberation — or that your right is getting granted — but actually it barely pays your bills and affects your living situations. So I think you just have to stop catering towards the mainstream and do more crime. Organize more, disrupt more. Reclaim more.

  

• The obsession with marriage in Indonesia is so cringe. I cannot relate and will never think of marriage as sacred ‘til I die. If anything, it takes away from your role in your community because you’re only focused on your household or family unit. I think it was Maudy Ayunda’s wedding recently that triggered me a lot… It’s the combo of everything I hate about Indonesian society, which is the combination of our obsessions with the institutions of marriage, ivy leagues and neoliberal “girlboss” feminism. That is really the trifecta of hell.

• Similar to marriage, the attitude with work in Indonesia is so toxic and cringe. Your boss doesn’t care about you. Kalau besok kiamat and you go: “sorry bos, cuti yah, besok kiamat”, your boss will literally say “anak gen Z jaman sekarang nggak bisa kerja ya, dikit-dikit kiamat minta cuti”. We are at that level of toxicity. People should just stop working in general. It's going to be kiamat soon. Why are we working? Alternatively, we should be preparing for doomsday. With everything that’s going on in the world… I think what’s most important is to think about what you’re going to wear. You’d still want to slay during kiamat, you know?

What’s something you’re currently obsessed with?

• Not necessarily an obsession, but in light of the ongoing Israeli genocide against Palestinian people, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the recent global wave of collective work that is either mobilizing direct action against Western powers’ death machine — from PalAction’s shutdown of Israeli weapon factories to the activists stopping the US ships carrying military weapons in Portland — or dismantling Israeli pink-washing and weaponization of queer rights to justify the genocide, such as the works of the collective Queers in Palestine. Both of these works expose the pitfalls of neoliberal institutions and set an example of how radical politics, driven by the power of a collective, can effectively disrupt the genocidal, death machines.  

  

• I’ve also been obsessed with cosplaying as a gym bro on Instagram just to fuck up my algorithm and target market, and see what’s gonna happen. Just to troll, really. I don’t actually believe in that culture and I’d like to think I’m subverting it. Being part of it but not taking it seriously.

Who’s someone you think more people should know about?

• Definitely Ula Zuhra and her cegil arts. I feel like it’s a crime that she doesn’t have 10k followers yet. Well, I know why. It’s cause she’s annoying as fuck. But yeah, follow her and your life will change!

  

• Kenneth Anger and a group of avant-garde filmmakers in the 60s that were not overtly gay but they were so fucking queer. I feel like we as a society should look back on this era more and reclaim what liberatory queer politics could be instead of worshiping “Call Me By Your Name”, “Heartstopper”, or “Queer Eye”. I think people should know more about their dead queer ancestors. Wake up and let them haunt you.

  

What’s a life hack or advice that recently changed your life?

I’m seeing many friends  in Bali feeling so helpless with Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. I feel like part of why people feel helpless is because in Bali we don’t have many physical/political spaces to channel our rage and grief. What would help, I think, is instead of being overly-fixated with our social media, we should process the current events together with our closest communities and let our collective heartbreak radicalize us. In my case, it has helped me cope tremendously.

What’s something you recently changed your mind about? 

I recently changed my mind about mental health and ADHD. For the longest time I let myself believe that medications are a Big Pharma scam (which I believe is still true to some degree). Obviously I believe in the idea of mental health, but I was so skeptical of medications. Now, however, because of the current state of the world and my mind, I started taking meds and it actually works. We shouldn’t be ashamed of asking for support if we need one.

That said, as twitter handle/philosopher @jil_slander says:

“Psych meds aren't enough bro I need western hegemony to fall.”

What’s something you’re looking forward to? 

I’m very much looking forward to the launch of my book “Queers Shoot Back!” this weekend with my new queer family in Bali.

If you’re free, make sure you drop by! Details below.

The Debrief is the Monday installation of this newsletter. Visit past Debriefs with Stanley who quotes Kim Kardashian, Tari who likes her meetings labeled, Ula who is not a sapiosexual, Rocky who thinks about the Byzantine Empire daily, Erin who nerded out about Asean , Avi who talked about gatekeeping and Vero who hates ambient music. On Wednesdays, I tend to publish essays. On Fridays, I send out a brief pleasure list.

Welcome to The Debrief, the Monday edition of this newsletter where I ask people to share their burning thoughts and interests.

Some of you will remember a time when this newsletter used to be called Party of Three, named after the three segments I would write each time I sent a letter out. Earlier this year, I knew I wanted to have that name changed and try something new. For months I brainstormed alone and with friends but couldn’t arrive at a name I liked. I adopted my IG handle Pages Not Found as a placeholder, but remained generally unhappy with it… until one night, while out with friends, I think we were talking about writing? Essays? Joan Didion? when one friend jokingly quipped that one of us should write an essay collection titled “Slouching Towards Blok M”, and while the comment was made in jest, I thought the perfect name has finally found me. I loved Slouching — the book and the posture — and I love Blok M. I also love that is sounds silly. I asked that friend a few days later if he would mind me adopting the name for my newsletter, which he didn’t, and so here we are. I am ever so grateful!

Today in Debrief, I have Stanley, who is that friend who gave this newsletter its name I like to think we go way back. We were first introduced eight or nine years ago by the very friendly owner of this lovely coffee shop we used to frequent. Every time I’m there, Stanley would be there on his laptop, writing. In the years since, he has gone on to write for a variety of publications local and international, from The Jakarta Post to the New York Times, although being the zillennial that he is, you will also find his extremely online pop culture commentaries on Twitter and on the sideline of gatherings.

Stanley is a breaking news journalist based in Jakarta.

What’s an unpopular opinion that you feel strongly about?

As a card-carrying conformist, my opinions are usually extremely popular so I’m going to struggle with this question a bit. But hmm, let me see.

• I don’t think couples or friends should take up the entire sidewalk or that conveyor belt thing at the airport (a “travelator”?). Like, okay, we love love or whatever, but Mary, some of us have somewhere to be. I am also generally a fast walker,  so this is probably just a me problem but seriously! I think I’ve spoken about this at length with friend of the newsletter Erin Cook, but Christabelle thank you for giving me the platform – nay, the soapbox! – to say all this.

  

• I also think “Outer Worlds” smokes “Fallout 4” in terms of dystopian-FPS-games-with-leftist-undertones. That game ate. What’s between seven and nine? Ate.

What’s something you’re currently obsessed with?

Not to get, like, whomp whomp all of a sudden and kill the vibe, but I haven’t been obsessed with anything lately.

Jeff Rosenstock’s new album maybe, and imagining myself as a post-hardcore singer with a clarion voice every time I put that on. New things genuinely freak me out these days; I almost have to dare myself to watch this, listen to that, read that. I still get excited for new records to drop, but even that lasts for like what? A day or two days tops? I remember my stomach churning and giddy every time something fun was going to happen but now… not so much. I miss it though.

Sometimes I like to chalk it up to COVID when going through the motions was something you had to do instead of something you chose to do. We get to do things now, but I just don’t. I may have never lost my sense of smell or taste but it doesn’t mean I didn’t lose anything!

I do remember the last thing I waited with bated breath for: “Bottoms” – the Rachel Sennott / Ayo Edebiri movie. Boy did they not miss.

I’m also obsessed with the cats back home I guess. Ain’t they just fun little critters? The way they ignore the cat tree you spend good money on and go to town on some unused shoelaces?  

Who’s someone you think more people should know about?

I think people should know more about David Graeber, the anthropologist. I haven’t read his stuff religiously the way I’d like to, but reading “Bullshit Jobs” or “Debt” reconfigures the neurons in my brain…in a good way! It helps me to see most things as they are, and not as they should be. People smarter than me can definitely whip up a more cogent and coherent takeaway of his work, but I would highly recommend his books to you, Slouching Toward Blok M readers.

While we’re on the subject of awesome writers or thinkers, I’d like to raise: Tjamboek Berdoeri, an Indonesian journalist/writer. I’ve only read parts of “Indonesia dalem Api dan Bara”, but it’s some of the most cutting, exemplary narrative journalism ever.  Idrus was also a pretty sick writer — loved how restrained his consternations were.

What’s a life hack or advice that recently changed your life?

I have the best advice for women in business: get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days. You have to surround yourself with people that wanna work. Have a good work environment where everyone loves what they do because you have one life. No toxic environments and show up and do the work. (Hehe.)

Oh and baby wipes. Bring them everywhere. There’s nary a thing those bad boys can’t fix. 

What are you most excited about in the coming weeks?

I recently figured out that maintaining friendships is a thing you gotta actively do, so I’m excited to hit up some of my buddies and actually follow through with it. 

Christabelle you might need to fact-check this but “Killers of the Flower Moon” is coming out next week or something right? Right, so there’s that.

(Note: “Killer of the Flower Moon” is now out!)

What’s something you recently changed your mind about? 

This is probably a morose note to end this on but just a few minutes ago I changed my mind about how interesting my takes or my life stories were. Now I think they’re simply…not. This thought had been percolating in my head for a while now and doing this interview simply laid concrete on it.

I mean I didn’t make any of these answers up, but when I was answering some of these Qs I was like, hmm should I share that? Would people around me mind if I said that? What are the chances that some of my friends will see this and go, hey bud you probably shouldn’t have said that?

Also maybe this has something to do with the way I perceive most things nowadays? This answer probably does not make a ton of sense, but most things don’t nowadays. I don’t know. I could’ve sworn I was more certain about most things before.

The Debrief is the Monday installation of this newsletter. Visit past Debriefs with Tari who likes her meetings labeled, Ula who is not a sapiosexual, Rocky who thinks about the Byzantine Empire daily, Erin who nerded out about Asean , Avi who talked about gatekeeping and Vero who hates ambient music. On Wednesdays, I tend to publish essays. On Fridays, I send out a brief pleasure list.

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Welcome to The Debrief, the Monday edition of this newsletter where I ask people to share their burning thoughts and interests. If you’re wondering whether I skipped writing all of last week, you’re not wrong. I had to take a sick week after, I don’t know, having too much coffee and drinking too much spicy food? My two kryptonite. But I’m back.

This week, I catch up with an old colleague, Tari. We first met at my old workplace’s creative marketing department, where she was researcher and I was editor. Since then, both our paths have sort of taken parallel turns as we both eventually “pivoted” into the product design side of things, where she became interaction designer and I product copywriter. I’m using terms the company uses to label these roles internally, although it seems both “interaction design” and “product copywriting” are called so many different things these days as both practices continue to evolve.

Working in tech can be so full of intense routines sometimes that, in my experience, I’d always crave for spaces where I could feel most human within its systems. Meetings with Tari were always be that: a nice little exhale, a place to not know, even (and perhaps especially) when the ~user problems~ at hand required heavy thinking. While I write this from my little non-tech bubble over a year since I was last in a “sprint meeting”, I wanted to talk to Tari to peek into her world, both within and away from the many design projects I’m sure currently demands her attention.

Tari is a digital product designer for one of Indonesia’s leading online travel booking platforms and a fan.

What’s an unpopular opinion that you feel strongly about?

I can’t relate with people who actually believe in astrology. I did read about it to see what it’s all about but the more I learn, the more it seems like cocoklogi (sorry 🙏). I talk about astrology from time to time for fun, but I can’t understand when people seriously believe that there’s a connection between what’s happening in their life with the position of planets and stars. I just don’t get it.

What’s something you’re currently obsessed with?

• I’m currently watching this Korean TV show called “The Dictionary of Useless Human Knowledge”. It’s kind of a talkshow featuring six fixed casts of varying backgrounds — two hosts (a film director and a musician) and four panelists (a physicist, a novelist, a forensic scientist and professor, and an astronomer) — who would discuss their way through a range of topics.

  

  Each episode starts with a simple prompt. For example, the prompt would ask “Who’s someone you’d like to give an award to?” and the cast would each contribute an answer, discussing who their candidate would be, what they did, interesting facts about their life. Now that I’m writing this, the show might seem pretty boring, LOL, but because the cast all come from different backgrounds, and they are all so smart, eloquent, and funny, any trivial prompt could turn into a long winded discussion, sometimes straying from the initial prompt. And since they’re experts across different areas, they naturally add unique perspectives to a range of topics.

  Fun fact, the show itself runs around 90 mins per episode, but each episode supposedly takes 12 hours on average to film. It first aired in December 2022 and I started watching git then, but they only have eight episodes and I’m trying my best to savor them.

• The other day a friend introduced me to the idea she read from a blog that there are different types of meetings that serve different purposes, and that each of these meetings have different names. For example, there are cadence meetings (the goal of which is to keep people in the same team accountable to the plan), catalyst meetings (to unblock teams and make decisions), and context meetings (oriented towards increasing shared perspective and/or connection).

  

  The fact that there are different kinds of meetings should be obvious but I never really thought of the significance of giving them names, or even creating a sort of template to make the meeting-planning easier and more efficient. Having to sit through many meetings in my day job (which can give you existential crises), I’m really intrigued to learn more about this and to see if I can add more structure to the meetings at work.

• I recently stumbled upon this website called Monobility while looking up a painting by Korean abstract artist Kim Whanki, “Where, and in What Form, Shall We Meet Again?”. I’m not sure how to describe the site, but it has articles about pretty random topics, mostly on the topic of culture, accompanied by beautiful pictures, which I assume are taken by the writer, who is Korean. What hooked me is that while it’s predominantly English, the writer often talks about the Korean language ands sometimes includes Korean phrases and words in their writing. They’d also sometimes have explanations or even fun trivia about the language, and since I’m currently learning Korean I find the website really fun!

Who’s someone you think more people should know about?

There’s this YouTube account called Bread Story (@pan.monogatari), which uploads videos of various bakeries and bakers in Japan. If you’re someone like me who likes bread and enjoys watching people working on their craft, I highly recommend this channel.

What’s a life hack or advice that recently changed your life?

• Since I live alone, sometimes I don’t bother with doing my dishes right after using them. But a friend who also lives alone once mentioned that if you don’t do your dishes right away, chances are you won’t do it until much later and they will have accumulated by the time you finally do it. Since then I’ve made a diligent effort to always wash my dishes right after I use them, and it turns out seeing the sink empty, especially in the morning, puts me in such a good mood.

• In order to keep your broccoli fresh longer, you can cut the stems from the stalk, wash and rinse them thoroughly, then keep them in a container lined with tissue paper.

What are you most excited about in the coming weeks?

Taking a (online) voice acting course!

This idea was brought to me by a friend who recently started taking voice acting lessons. I didn’t know such a thing existed, but now I’m intrigued. I have this habit of reading books out loud when I’m alone, complete with intonations, which triggered a distant desire to read for audiobooks. But I’m not looking into trying to do this professionally or anything; just wanted to try something new.

The Debrief is the Monday installation of this newsletter. Visit past Debriefs with Ula who is not a sapiosexual, Rocky who thinks about the Byzantine Empire daily, Erin who nerded out about Asean , Avi who talked about gatekeeping and Vero who hates ambient music. On Wednesdays, I tend to publish essays. On Fridays, I send out a brief pleasure list.

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The case for >1L water bottles

I may be a water bottle enthusiast (i.e. I love looking at water bottles and think about buying them all the time, and the ones I get given I can never seem to let go of, even if they’re just one of those free McDonald’s bottles), but it wasn’t until last year that I started regularly carrying a water bottle with me on a daily basis. What changed, you asked? It’s simply that I stopped carrying around 600ml bottles and pushed myself to carry double. 600ml bottles are a liability! You spend more time carrying them empty in your bag than filled, and they just end up sitting in your bag and weighing you down. My 1.2L bottle, on the other hand, sustains me all day long. Is it heavy? Yes absolutely. But there’s also the fact that it contains enough water for me to feel like I’d never run out! My days may take unexpected turns, I may suddenly find myself in places that make me nervous, but I can breathe easy knowing my bottle is most likely not empty.

This is all the more important as someone who likes her water ice cold at all times. My 1.2L bottle gives me the security of having cold water whenever. Sure you can refill your 600ml once you’ve emptied it, but you can’t always guarantee finding water at your preferred temperature wherever you go. I make sure to fill mine whenever I leave the house, with cold water — sometimes ice — straight from my fridge, and I’m good for most of the day. I’m truly a better person for it.

Spooky Lake Month

I’m not a big Halloween person. Most years, I’m oblivious to its arrival until the question “what are you going to be for Halloween?” starts getting thrown around left and right. It’s always too late for good ideas, and always feels too hot in Jakarta to be anything but my cropped-top-and-jeans-wearing self. I honestly want to be a Halloween girlie so bad my laziness always gets the best of me.

These past three years though, I finally found my Halloween-related fixation, which, while it doesn’t require dressing up, gets me in the mood. It’s this thing called Spooky Lake Month on TikTok, specifically on this account run by a lovely woman named Geo Rutherford, who, per her bio, is an artist and a teacher. Every day throughout the month of October, she publishes what she calls “haunted hydrology” a.k.a. eerie trivia about different bodies of water around the world. So far this year, she’s covered the Alaskan mud flats, Mexico’s Cenotes, spent fuel pools at nuclear reactors… all of which I didn’t know are things that exist out there in the world.

As someone who is always thinking of sharks and dead bodies when swimming in pools, following these stories doesn’t really help with these irrational thoughts, but they’re fascinating nonetheless — and you get to indulge on 31 of them all month. A fantastic way of getting in the Halloween spirit. Maybe this will motivate me enough to dress up this year?

Birthday wishlists

Birthday surprise gifts are great, but have you ever told your friends what you wanted and have them come together to get you exactly that? For Avi’s birthday, Rara suggested she come up with a document that lists things in her wishlist, complete with the Tokopedia links if she wanted to, and share it with friends to use as a reference for gift giving.

“You shouldn’t just be treating yourself for your birthday. Your friends should be treating you too,” was her rationale.

Avi did come up with one, and in the weeks leading up to her birthday we started putting down our name to tag stuff on that list, “wedding inventory”-style. I love that this list didn’t just make it easy for friends to peep what it is that the birthday celebrant wants — a sort of shortcut to getting the perfect gift — but it also works as a kind of “prompt” for ideas.

Avi’s list particularly has columns for gift categories (“Cute stuff'“, “body care”, “beverage station”, to name a few"), and short notes on why she wants each item. One note says she’s been decorating her home, another notes her love for teas.

We asked Rara to do the same thing for her birthday — which is in a few minutes as I write this! October 8! Libra queen! Rara’s categories include “Books”, “Productivity”, “Appliances”. During her birthday dinner earlier this evening, it was delightful to watch Rara unbox her gifts. Some a surprise, others coming straight from her list/brief.

Perhaps sharing this list is a sign of trust, too. Trusting that friends will not judge you for your desires, and, most of all, trusting that they’ll come through once you’ve taken the vulnerable path of expressing them.

10/10 would recommend. :-)

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My last paycheck as a full-time employee was … delicious. When the transfer notice came in by text, instead of ignoring it like I usually do, I read and savored every word and every digit.

Getting that paycheck felt cozy. Crisp new sheets cozy. Pulling the covers at 10pm on a weeknight and turning on the TV to “Princess Diaries” cozy. Empty streets on the first day of Lebaran cozy, when going anywhere takes just 10 minutes and for a minute you forget Jakarta was ever hard on you. That paycheck felt like problems were going to be solved, and good things were going to keep on happening. So tasty; a Michelin-starred meal. Girl dinner of the year.

In the month that followed, I lived peacefully, happy in the knowledge that I had fresh money. One would think money is money. It wasn’t until my last paycheck that I realized fresh money was superior. Fresh money feels good to spend. Something about it makes you feel like you will always have it. Like abundance was the natural state of your life; the default factory settings. You’re convinced you’d easily make that money again, except in the case of final paychecks, you won’t — not in the same way anyway — and actually… maybe… I should worry?

Spending old money (i.e. money that came from your savings) on the other hand, feels like a punch to the gut. Almost illegal, even though it’s your money, saved for the very purpose of being used on days when you have none. Like when you stop getting monthly paychecks.

I’m not put together enough to be leaving jobs without the guarantee of another one lined up. I’m probably the last person who should be doing that, to be honest, but that’s the kind of turn things took last July.

You are either the type who thinks having money to survive without work for three months is luxury, or the type to whom having only enough to survive three months is insane. The Tiktok financial gurus, online life coaches, and some friends would suggest I save more. But, not used to having much money in the first place, not enough anyway to ever register the idea of not working as a possible choice in life however briefly, I couldn’t help but see the glass as half full. Perhaps even a luxury. I felt the sudden need to do this now because somewhere in my mind I thought I’d never find myself in this position again.

There are days I look at my bank account and the idea of not having a full-time job would sound completely unhinged. But there are more days where I wake up and the whole thing would feel like a gift. I knew I’d eventually panic about not having money, but for once I wanted time more than a paycheck. I chose the lens through which all of this was privilege, even if only for a few months, and trusted the universe and my gut feeling that the rest will work itself out somehow.

There is nothing sexy about my full-time-to-self-employed arc. No LinkedIn-worthy epiphanies, or anything like that. The easiest way to put it is that my anxiety had gotten the best of me these past three years, and I needed distance from other people’s ideas — of the world, of myself — to once again believe in mine.

I don’t know when it started, really, but by the end of 2021, what was initially just whispers of “maybe I’m not cut out for this” had grown into a massive tumor of a false truth than I’d fully embraced: “I am incompetent”.

The thought haunted my every waking hour. At work, I was purposely shrinking myself to avoid having to perform competence in front of an audience, thinking I’d fail and embarrass myself. The collaborative working environment meant to nurture open communication instead amplified my anxiety. I’d delegate decisions out of a distrust towards my own understanding of complex problems (“others understand better”). I’d withhold opinions because others surely had better ones (“I don’t know enough to have a say”). When quarterly planning season came around, I tried being as invisible as I possibly could to avoid being assigned to lead projects (“I can’t fuck up if I don’t take any responsibilities”). And as for the projects that inevitably ended up on my lap, I’d have panic attacks before meetings, shaking and hyperventilating, then join calls, speak in my work voice, act like my internal walls weren’t collapsing. When people spoke highly of me, I’d smile a nervous smile and a timer would go off in my mind, counting down the day “the truth” will reveal itself and I would disappoint them (this is who you are).

I’d especially flinch when anyone at work would bring up the idea of “self-advocacy”, which used to come up a lot. The idea is that if you aren’t advocating for yourself, others aren’t going to see your work, and your work will not be recognized, let alone appreciated. All of this, of course, was especially relevant if you wanted to “advance”. I’m not entirely opposed to the idea, but my main gripe with it is that it’s hard advocating for yourself from a place of self-hatred and self-doubt. I’d look around and feel crazy. Everyone else seemed to be doing just fine, many even seemed to thrive, so I volunteered to take the blame for my own failures, feeling like a weak little loser for not being strong enough to get my shit together.

I write this now from a place of self compassion, which I am only able to develop years after the fact. Of course, to one one’s surprise, a big part of it was the pandemic, which was inevitably followed by a series of unfortunate events that in so, so many direct and indirect ways amplified my cynicism and eroded my enthusiasm towards towards the path that I was on. I struggled a lot with working from home, mainly with how extremely transactional and devoid of humanness the culture that came out of that ended up being. Constant organizational changes made me question my purpose, which at the time I heavily attached with my livelihood. The pandemic changed my mind about a lot of things, including and especially work. And while I get to easily say that now, processing the weight of that shift while continuing to perform myself like I wasn’t affected was tough.

Towards the end of 2021, my manager suggested I extend my end-of-year time-off to get proper rest. I took a whole month off. It didn’t do much. It would be another 1.5 year, a whole new workplace, and months of therapy before I finally decided to properly give myself this gift of time.

When I decided to leave my last job, I told myself that for at least three months I was going to live my life as a Jaksel nepobaby, despite having neither the financial cushion nor the social currency.

What I had was an open mind, an experimental spirit, and a vague outline of a plan.

On the finances front, I had some work coming my way and I swore (to myself) to actively chase potential projects. I wasn’t going to “not work”, this wasn’t going to be “unemployment”. It’s work, reframed, for my benefit.

But what I really wanted to do with this time was write. Or more like, reset my relationship with writing.

Initially, I wanted to write because my boss, who I deeply respect and look up to, seemed to believe that I had it in me to write. Eventually — encouraged by that endorsement — I wanted to write because the idea that I wasn’t going to take my writing seriously was becoming silly.

I don’t even mean “take my writing seriously” as in “write a book”. I mean “take my writing seriously” as in… just fucking write, bro??? It was becoming ridiculous that I had no problems being a writer on my resume (where writing meant speaking on behalf of other people about their corner of the world), but actively denied myself the possible joy of writing from my own corner of the world, torturous a process as it may be.

Hmmm… Maybe I like self-advocacy more than I let on? After all, what is writing, what is this newsletter if not an experiment on telling my side of the story (what story that is remains to be explored).

This TikTok, basically:

“I don’t like that there’s such a negative connotation towards oversharing because I don’t overshare because I like to talk about myself. I overshare because I think I’m more tolerable with context.”

I love this take on the idea of putting yourself out there through whatever means you feel works best for you (“oversharing” on TikTok for this creator) because really the stakes aren’t that high? Some of us aren’t trying to be an intellectual and just want to be seen; be as close to being understood as possible.

All this time I’d been so afraid of writing badly that I’d settled for writing occasionally, getting high on the “approval” of people whose social media likes probably meant more “happy to see you alive” than “cool work with the words and the thoughts and stuff!” (I can never tell, and honestly there is nothing wrong with the former other than my own inclination to depend on it for validation).

I had approached writing with a sort of “cool girl” mentality, where I pretended not to care and believed it was cringe to try so hard. I wanted to be an effortless queen who produced magic on little to no planning at all. I had the audacity to think writing had to be easy flowing to be worth it. In my cool girl bubble, not practicing my craft was self-preservation and mystery, two essentials in the cool girl starter pack. Everything has to be chill and no big deal.

It should be no surprise that, like anyone stuck in this cool girl mentality, the fear of being caught caring is really just (gasp!) insecurity. In my mind I wasn’t good enough. Not funny enough. Not informed enough. Not original enough. My vocabulary not vast enough. My diction not fucking “English” enough. Everything I have to say has been said better. I wanted to buy myself some time to “magically” develop all of the wisdom and live all of the lives that I thought would make me the perfect writer before I surrendered myself to the page. Lately I’m accepting that who I am right now is pretty much all I am ever going to be, at least for the foreseeable future. And really none of this should be that deep anyway.

I know now that the only prerequisite to being whatever writer I wanted to be was to keep writing in the direction that my gut feeling compelled me to. Writing didn’t have to be this big lofty dream that died with the collapse of the media industry as we know it. It could just be a thing that I do, however imperfectly. I just need to stop being too cool for bad sentences and cringe takes. I also need to stop seeing intentionality as something that takes away from the work and acknowledge all of the ways it adds to it.

By the end of October, it will be three months since my last full-time paycheck.

Things were weird at first, I’m not going to lie. I slept a lot. Pretty sure I was asleep more than I was awake in all of August. Some days I slept 16 hours on-and-off. I’d eat lunch and sleep again. Have coffee and go back to sleep. I “listened to my body” and my body said “no thank you”. Part of me knew I needed the rest, part of me was overwhelmed with options of things to do. I also wondered if I was maybe teetering on the edge of depression but took my self-awareness as a sign that I was probably not. Rest felt good until it didn’t. While I like being ruler of my own time, I didn’t like it when weekends would arrive without a sense of relief. When friends ask me out, I’d stay in feeling like I didn’t deserve to have fun.

You know how people say if you don’t know what you want, flip a coin, and you’ll know when that coin is up in the air? I like to think of August as that coin, flipping in the air, full of possibilities, some obvious, others less so. As I watched, I was hoping it would land on the obvious. Not because I was scared of the unknown, but because I know sometimes it’s easier to say I’ve walked boldly into the unknown rather than to say I’ve walked boldly to do the thing I know I have to do but am too scared of for totally made up reasons.

I was supposed to publish this piece last week, on my 4th week of publishing 3x a week, but my self-consciousness got the better of me. Talking about workplace anxieties makes me feel like a walking cliche. I also still feel a tinge of embarrassment from so boldly wanting to be a person who writes. I wish I could be cooler about it. But I’m also trying to be more forgiving about all of these feelings, and the resulting failure to send this out last week.

Earlier in therapy for (what turned out to be) perfectionism OCD, my therapist advised me against committing to treatments that required daily commitment (e.g. daily journaling). Her concern was that it wouldn’t be sustainable, as any minor failure to commit to the routine would triggering my compulsions and I would end up falling off the routine completely. Later on, she would introduce me to what they call ERP — Exposure and Response Prevention — where, with guidance, facing some of those failures would save me from myself.

Well, at least we know now that therapy works, because even though this voice in my head won’t shut up about how I missed publishing last week, telling me this is all just a phase, questioning if I’ll even show up to the page next week, telling me I probably wont, I’m determined not to let it win.

“Writing 3x a week for a free self-published newsletter” doesn’t make monetary nor career sense to my parents, obviously. When ex-colleagues or acquaintances ask me what I’ve been up to lately, I compulsively tell them I’m on a “sabbatical”, which feels kind of reductive but it’s also easy. I mean, I’m not saying I’ll never go back to a 9-to-5, — maybe I will? Who knows. I sometimes wonder what recruiters looking at my LinkedIn profile thinks, though I have some ideas on where I might be lacking appeal. My friends get it though, and that’s already more than enough for me.

My three months is about to be up and I’ll need to start worrying about sustaining myself beyond it soon. I’m less aimless these days. I even feel good? Excited about the path I’m on, the way I haven’t in a long time. This peace I find from reclaiming my time feels so unoriginal and that’s ok. I’m so tired of fighting against the current of cliches, I might as well swim in it.

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Welcome to The Debrief, the Monday edition of this newsletter where I ask people to share their burning thoughts and interests.

This week I talk to Ula. In the spirit of full-disclosure, Ula to me is one of those people who, when I bump into her, I’m always too scared to initiate a “hello” even though we’ve been introduced by a mutual a few years ago. She just… oozes cool, plain and simple. A cool that is particularly striking to me in a sea of Jaksel party attendees. She always just seems so at ease, like someone who was meant to be there all along and never had to question her “cultural fitness”. But catch a glimpse of her gaze under a different light and you’d wonder if that “ease” was actually annoyance masquerading as indifference. Like maybe something in her immediate surroundings was bothering her just a little bit? (Catch me wishing it wasn’t me).

Avi, the mutual who introduced us, put it best: “Ula is the original It Girl”. Ichi, one of Ula’s very good friend, added: “She’s a washed-up It Girl — in a non-derogatory way, because fuck It Girls, right? They exist for the male gaze. She is way past that.” I talked to the both of them over the phone to get their thoughts about Ula, to make sure my more distanced impressions aren’t misguided. In our conversations, the two seem to agree that while she may be a walking Jaksel prototype, she’s far from a Jaksel cliche.

“I appreciate her for her discourses. The world may know her best as an illustrator, as an artist, but when you talk to her, you realize here’s a person with curiosity and depth,” Avi said. “She’s not just some fake artsy girl. She’s a true artist. Genuine and real.”

“She lives outside the state, outside the norms, she’s definitely more punk and radical than most queer people I know,” Ichi said.

This male gaze-defying, norm-bending spirit is apparent in her art, where the beauty of the women she depicts is in their mess and foulness, in the stray thoughts they mutter under their breath when they think no one’s listening.

“The reason why her work is interesting and appealing to me is because she’s naturally funny and raw,” said Avi, who has also been working with Ula to publish her upcoming comic under Cahyati Press. “Her work always explores the disgusting parts of being a woman.”

Ichi describes this upcoming comic as “a manifesto for cegiltopia — except that the citizens of cegiltopia are all her in various shades. Everyone is a main character in her world-making.”

“The comic is like her in real life.”

Ula Zuhra is a visual artist based in Jakarta. Her latest comic, “Aca & Ica in Pesta Keramat”, is coming out in late October, published by Cahyati Press.

What’s an unpopular opinion that you feel strongly about?

• Being contrarian is lame. It’s okay to agree with the masses. Being Sigma is passe!!

• Tiktok lives are actually dark and unsettling. I sleep really late and on some nights, I’ll scroll through Tiktok lives. Now, this is uncharted grounds, it’s No Man’s Land. A man in full clown get up juggling balls while a small child lies on a mattress in front of him, a woman literally soaking in a deep puddle full of dirty water asking viewers to give her points before dousing herself with more dirty water, a horror show where a person dressed in ghost costume (complete with corpse paint) stands in the corner of the room for hours, people acting as TB ridden NPCs! What the actual fuck! I don’t know what kind of algorithm I’m entangled in, it’s like Dante’s nine circles of hell but it’s just endless scrolling.

• I think fandom culture is strange. Having a para-social relationship with another human being that just happens to be famous is an odd thing for me. I don’t get it. I mean, I love Fiona Apple but I wouldn’t take a bullet for her.

What’s something you’re currently obsessed with?

• I recently found out that Hans Bellmer made illustrations for Georges Bataille’s “Story of The Eye”. I love a good joint slay, like, are you serious? “The Story of The Eye” was one of the first transgressive erotica I’ve read, and I was always been attracted to the taboo ever since I was a child (I’m not sure if it was because of my father’s extensive R-rated DVD collection or the fact that I watched a queer-coded Atom Egoyan film too early in my pre-teen years).

  

  It also seems like Bellmer was born to do these illustration, I read in an academic paper about the collaboration that Bellmer was the “predestined illustrator” to this novel.  Bataille and Bellmer has clear philosophical and aesthetic affinities that most people would call crass and pornographic. Sometimes I’m afraid that I’m too much of an edgelord being obsessed with transgressive things, but then I realize it’s probably because I’ve glamorized filth so much in my life that I feel like I’ve marinated in it and grown insensitive to it. My therapist tells me I should watch more rom-coms, obviously I haven’t gotten around to it.

• Watching a movie on mute (with subtitles) and putting a great album on. Last great combination I did was Toshio Matsumoto’s film “Demons” and “Love Means Taking Action” by Croatian Amor. You can’t exactly concentrate on the film, seeing that the audio would obviously overwhelm the visuals, but I think it’s like a little head massage. I have a few bookmarked pages on old Japanese films and 70s anti-drug propaganda films  on Youtube and it truly never fails. One time, I put on “Funky Forest” to Bruce Haack’s “Electric Lucifer” and that was like, mind blowing.

• Talking to my cat. I was unemployed for a while, so I couldn’t afford therapy for a few months. I hated talking to my friends about my problems so sometimes I talk to my cat. My cat lives with my mum, so it really does feel like a therapy appointment because I only see her on Wednesdays and Thursdays (she’s so busy destroying the sofa and overeating on other days). My cat’s name is Zaza and I’m convinced she understands me, she’d blink both her eyes to signify her empathy and I blink back, she’d rest her head on my leg when I can’t sleep and I swear her purrs work like Antimo to me. Cats are heaven sent and I’ll be obsessed with Zaza until I die.

Who’s someone you think more people should know about?

• Mire Lee. She’s a Korean artist who I first stumbled upon when I saw her joint exhibition with H.R. Giger in Berlin online. Lee makes kinetic sculptures where motors, tubes, and pumps paired with silicone and liquids become messy, surreal entities.

  

  As a lover of body horror, her work reminds me a lot of Cronenberg and Brian Yuzna’s “Society”. These sculptures pulsate and ooze liquids, almost like a self-sufficient digestive system. Ultimately, I find her work really sensual and erotic, and one day I hope to see her work in person.

• My friend @ashtraygrrl or Diedra or Nyon. They are my favourite illustrator. We go together like Ilana and Abby. Listening to their stories made me laugh and gag. They made 50% of the tattoos I have on my body and I love them all.

• Cookie Mueller, who is an actress, artist, writer and all around it-girl. My friend once told me that I remind her of a filthy bathroom in the middle of the desert in a Rob Zombie film and that’s how I feel about Cookie Mueller (trust me, this is not an insult. A dingy bar bathroom in the middle of nowhere is exactly how I want to be described by my best friend).

  

  Mueller was a regular in John Waters’ cinematic universe and her book “Walking In Clear Water in A Pool Painted Black” is a dark comedy masterpiece. It’s like Joan Didion if she dabbled in crack and occasionally went to punk shows. A collection of short stories taken from her real life situations, sometimes dark and unsettling but always served with humor. Burning her friend’s house down, being NEARLY SACRIFICED by Anton Lavey (work!), or fleeing a serial murdered in a G-string (serve!). Here is something that she said that stuck with me :

  “Fortunately I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die. You simply lose your body. You will be the same except you won't have to worry about rent or mortgages or fashionable clothes. You will be released from sexual obsessions. You will not have drug addictions. You will not need alcohol. You will not have to worry about cellulite or cigarettes or cancer or AIDS or venereal disease. You will be free.”

  And that’s so real. RIP to a real wild one!

What’s a life hack or advice that recently changed your life?

Nothing is ever that serious.

What’s something you recently changed your mind about?

Dating for discourse, lol. Sapiosexualism is a disease and I was cured! My god, what a revelation. When a relationship is made up of 70% discussion and 30% actual “dating”, you slowly realize that this kind of relationship is better when it’s among friends.

What are you most excited about in the coming weeks?

• My comic “Aca and Ica” is coming out this October with Cahyati Press. I’m mostly excited about that. Shout out to Avi and Kat!

  

• It has been a tough year, so I’m looking forward to anything that comes at me right now. I’m raw-dogging life as we speak.

The Debrief is the Monday installation of this newsletter. Visit past Debriefs with Rocky who thinks about the Byzantine Empire daily, Erin who nerded out about Asean , Avi who talked about gatekeeping and Vero who hates ambient music. On Wednesdays, I tend to publish essays. On Fridays, I send out a brief pleasure list.

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I missed the Wednesday essay again this week, which means you can expect one coming your way over the weekend. :D

1. How many layers of crunch do you need?

In life, there are products that are great, and then there are products that push the boundary of what you know is great. Products that make you think: “I didn’t know you could make it like that?” or “why isn’t the rest made like this? or “why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?” These products don’t just deliver on a basic functional level. They take your experience up a notch, and manage to do so with just the tiniest tweaks.

Anyway.

I’ve developed an addiction for GuriBee Layers, which is one such product. It’s chips, but instead of a single piece of chip, it sticks four pieces together in such a way that every bite you take is one layer collapsing on top of another layer, and another, and another. It’s crunch you didn’t know you needed. Crunch that is completely unnecessary, to be honest, but once you’ve tried it, you’d wish other chips had had it in them to deliver an experience so delightful. I’m obsessed!

2. Two-person group chats

At some point earlier this year, Avi and I whined about our days, trauma dumped, discussed potential projects, brainstormed ideas for other projects, all within a single WhatsApp chat. Whenever Avi needed input on a project she was working on, she’d reach out on the chat. Whenever I wanted to talk about ideas for this newsletter, for which Avi is often a go-to brainstorm partner, I’d look up her name and dump it on the chat too. Which means all of that would often overlap with stray rants about our days, sometimes literal mental breakdowns, lol. A regular day on the chat looked something like this:

Avi: Here’s my moodboard for the visuals!
Avi: I saw this cool thing and thought I’d try it out
Me: Ugh brooo I’m so lonely
Me: Lol I’m mellow
Me: But yes thanks I’ll check this out!
Avi: Oh noo that sucks, did something happen?
Me: This looks great I love the colorsss
Me: Nah I think I’m about to be on my period
Avi: Sameee I’m literally on Day 1
Me: Btw I have new content ideas

At least until one day I decided to create a separate chat dedicated to discussing projects. It’s a basic group chat, but with the same two people who also still talk to each other about other stuff on their regular “general” chat. Like Slack but for two. You get the idea.

As with other things I bring up in my Friday letters, this one may not necessarily be new or original. But, hey, consider this a reminder that you do not have to be a group to have a group chat! Normalize group chats for two! It can just be a dedicated space for you and a friend, or maybe even a significant other, to discuss a specific topic without having it get in the way of your day-to-day conversation.

If I was living with a roommate, for example, I can see myself having a two-person group chat dedicated to housekeeping, so as to separate that stuff from our friendship. Or, idk, if you and a friend are trying to keep each other accountable on a common goal, having a two-person group chat could be a way of making sure that common goal was constantly being followed-up and discussed without having to cut back on important life gossip (I can totally see two-person groups dedicated to scholarship applications, for example).

Compartmentalization is great, and all the more so between two people who happen to be entangled in more ways than one. I now have several ongoing two-person group chats and my life has changed for the better.

3. “Skip and Loafer” and Netflix parties!

Aidil, a good friend of mine who is based in Bali, sold this anime to me with a few keywords: friendships! crushing! friendship crushing! And we ended up watching five episodes in two days using Netflix Party (now called Teleparty) — which I did for the first time in 2020 during the pandemic and am happy to discover still works great today!

“Skip and Loafer” follows Mitsumi Iwakura, a top-of-her-class student from Japan’s most remote prefecture who moves to Tokyo to attend one of the city’s top prep schools. The show follows her days as she navigates big feelings in the big city where she has set big ambitious goals for herself. It’s about long distance friendships, navigating social anxiety, being used to exceeding expectations and discovering yourself a pretty average kid in a sea of excellent peers… each episode is a short 20-minutes packed with warmth and humor. 10/10 would recommend if you’re looking for a quick watch to savor with your nasi padang over lunch.

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Welcome to The Debrief, the Monday edition of this newsletter where I ask people to share their burning thoughts and interest in hopes of expanding my own. It is, in fact, a Tuesday by the time you get this in Jakarta. But, hey, it’s still Monday somewhere. It is especially still Monday in Albany, New York, which is where today’s interviewee is based.

This week I have Rocky, who is one of those friends who features so prominently in my life that any attempt to describe him sounds meh, because how do I tell you he is literally EVERYTHING? 

I guess the shortcut to talking about Rocky would be to say that he is one of the biggest nerds you will ever know — and that wouldn’t be wrong. He doom scrolls Wikipedia. He inserts Byzantine empire trivia into any conversation. A random text from him sounds like “this wind turbine at this power plant is so sexy” or something like that. The following interview will be filled with proof of his big brain energy. Yet even all that would be selling him short.

It is perhaps more accurate to say that it wasn’t until I met Rocky that I realized it is possible for one to know a lot about the world and not be an asshole. It is possible to be informed and not demand the world congratulate you. You can love knowledge without making “knowing” your entire personality. He showed me a way of learning that would forever redefine “smart” for me.

Maybe it’s undiagnosed ADHD, maybe it’s something else, but Rocky is one of those people whose brain is simply wired to hyperfixate, and so whether that’s the rise and fall of empires or old details of a story you told him years ago, you can count on him to pay attention and remember like no other.

Rocky is a PhD student at University at Albany majoring in political science with an interest in international politics and global economy. Prior to pursuing his PhD, he was a researcher at the Jakarta-based Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS).

1. What’s an unpopular opinion that you feel strongly about?

• Indomie is overrated.

  

  Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great and I genuinely love Indomie. It’s just that in the pantheon of instant noodles, it’s not that special. I swear to god. Other brands like Mama, Nissin, Maruchan, Jjapaguri, all of those are great, and in certain moments or situations when you need them, they do taste better than Indomie. Again, my point isn’t that one is better than the other. They’re all great, especially the ones from Asia, because I think our taste buds are similar. But there isn’t anything inherently superior about Indomie, I think what we love about Indomie is more sentimental.

• People blaming capitalism as a meme. It annoys me when people blame capitalism for everything, which is very vogue in the rise of the online left. “Omg I can’t believe I have to wake up and work 9-to-5 today, I hate capitalism.” That’s the modern economy. That’s industrialization. That’s the modern world. I’m pretty sure you’d have to work under communism too.

  The things people are complaining about are often the fault of the government; the lack of healthcare, insurance being expensive, there are specific government policies that enabled that. When taxes are high but our infrastructure remains appalling, that’s not capitalism, that’s failure on the government’s part. When you’re complaining about your landlord, that’s your government not having good renter’s protection policies. There are capitalist societies that do not have those problems. Those problems are specific to countries who have a laissez-faire approach. Social democratic capitalist societies deal with those problems.

  Another thing that annoys me is when some people complain this way, what some of them are implicitly arguing for is what people call “pastoralism”, a degrowth to a world with less industrialization and a return to nature, to subsistence living. But they won’t say this out loud because advocating for everyone to be poorer isn’t popular. And most people do understand there is a trade-off between subsistence farming and the modern industrial economy and the negatives are outweighed by the positives, for example: specialization, less dependence on the whims of nature, and rise in living standards.

  So we end up with either reflexive complaints or dishonest critiques on capitalism that are misplaced. I get that we all need to vent and posture, but a solution-oriented complaint would be nice once in a while.

2. What’s something you’re currently obsessed with?

• I listen to a lot of history podcasts. The ones that I have in heavy rotation are “History of Byzantium”, “History of Rome”, and “Revolutions”, which covers a bunch of revolutions in the western world.

  My favorite seasons from the “Revolutions” podcast are the Haitian Revolution and the French Revolution. While the French Revolution is perhaps socio-economically and politically the most influential revolution in the western world at the time, the Haitian Revolution was a total blindspot for me.

  

  We could arguably say all the other revolutions are middle-class people revolting against their monarch, meanwhile the Haitian Revolution is about slaves revolting against their masters and trying to control their own destiny with all the bumps along the way. It’s very interesting and also very terrifying, to be honest.

• This is not current, but I’m obsessed with the Byzantine Empire.

  

  The Byzantine Empire is the name historians use to call the eastern half of the Roman Empire that survived. It was based in Constantinople; its core territories roughly covered modern-day Greece, Turkey, and south Balkans. The empire’s period spanned roughly more than a millennium. It experienced periods of revival and decline before being conquered for good by the Ottoman Empire and I am obsessed with how it refused to die.

  Let me quote Robin from the History of Byzantium podcast on this:

  There’s a difference between the history of Rome and the history of Byzantium. Although that story ended with the fall of the West, I think the main narrative is about the brilliance of Rome’s expansion. The heart of that story is about the principles and the work ethic of one city, coming to define an entire continent and civilization.

  I think the Byzantine story is going to be more Sisyphian. You know the story of Sisyphus, right? From Greek mythology. He was a man forever forced to roll a boulder to the top of the hill, only to watch it fall back down again and start all over. That, in a way, is what defines the Byzantine story. Emperor Justinian recovers western provinces against expectations and the Black Death wipes out a third of his people. Emperor Heraclius uses all his strength to get that boulder to the top of the hill and the followers of Muhammad appear almost instantly to shove it back down again. The Byzantines would spend centuries pushing the boulder painfully towards the summit, only to run into the Turks soon after. And when the Crusaders look like they would put their weight behind the effort, they turn out to be just as capable of shoving it back into a roll. 

  You could look at that story and their efforts as a great tragedy, a futile effort to see that boulder just tumble back past you. Or you could admire the effort… Maybe the gods wanted that boulder to crush the Romans long ago, but they just kept pushing it back up the damn hill.

  (Editor’s Note: Rocky promises to take on a date any guy who can tell him which episode of the “History of Byzantium” podcast the above quote came from.)

• I’m fascinated by how countries name themselves and how these names often differ from how other countries see them. For example, Germany is “Deutschland”, China is “Zhōngguó”. This fascination was re-triggered due to India insisting on it being called “Bharat” during the G20. It’s always interesting when certain countries insist on being called by their “own name” (the way the Turkish government insists that they can only be called “Turkiye”), because while I guess it’s great for them, there are usually domestic political agendas behind them.
  Most of the time, the way people refer to certain countries also has to do with their linguistic roots. “Greece”, for example, is English, and the English got that from the Romans, from Latin, “Grecia”, because that’s the first Greek tribe that the Romans met. Meanwhile in the east, like Indians and Persians, their first encounter was with the Ionian tribe of Greece. This Ionian tribe, I think maybe it’s the Arabs who first called them “Yunan”, which is where our Indonesian word for the country “Yunani” comes from. I just love that.

• I’m obsessed with watching videos at 1.25x speed, which seems to be the exact speed on which my brain runs. I really can’t stream movies, Netflix, HBO, YouTube, or even Twitter videos at normal speed anymore.

  

  It’s been liberating to discover this about myself, to be honest, because for years I was told that I either have bad public speaking skills, or I’d be laughed at for not having a clear train of thought? I realized now that my brain just runs too fast, not in a good way.

3. Who’s someone you think more people should know about?

• Rangga Dachlan, a law lecturer at Universitas Gadjah Mada currently doing his PhD at Oxford. Someone on Twitter who is smart, genuinely funny, and not mean, with just the right amount of neuroses? He’s your guy. When I’m just looking for a good laugh, there are days I’d just go over to his Twitter. Bonus points if you also like Prometheus and Dune.

  

• Another person that I think more people should know about is Paul Poast, who is an international relations professor. At least three out of five of his threads are in my bookmarks. They’re always so well-narrated and well-sourced. 

• Bonus round: there are two journalists I follow religiously on Twitter, and those are Alan Beatie, who tweets about international trade, and Shashank Joshi, who tweets about defense and is especially relevant in relation to the Ukraine war. They’re concise in their writing and from their tweets, you can tell their writing on their respective publications is basically 1/4th of their research, which is a good rule of thumb they’re doing their homework right.

4. What’s a life hack or advice that recently changed your life?

Better to say “oh well” rather than wallow in “what ifs” later on. When choosing between doing and not doing something, I’d rather do and embrace the possibility of not getting what I want despite having tried, rather than not try at all. Of course you’d still have to thoroughly think things through, but when it comes down to it, just go for it.

A good friend once told me that if you don’t try then you have a 0% chance of getting what you want. But if you try, you might have a 10% chance of getting it. It’s so basic, but I feel like it particularly helps me weigh the course of action I’d regret the most, because apparently regret is a pretty powerful motivating thing to me.

This is all a very PG-13 way of saying “just fuck around and find out”.

5. What are you most excited about in the next week?

If you had asked me last week, I’d tell you I was excited about going to New York City, a two-hour bus ride away from where I am. But this week? I’m just studying, doing my classes, and my readings…

The Debrief is the Monday installation of this newsletter. Visit past Debriefs with Erin who nerded out about Asean , Avi who talked about gatekeeping and Vero who hates ambient music. On Wednesdays, I tend to publish essays. On Fridays, I send out a brief pleasure list.

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Every once in a while, my mind would glitch and I'd wonder if maybe I should save up for a car. Oh the places I could go. Out-of-town trips I don’t have to wait until the weekend to take. Long solo drives I could go on when my body tells me to leave the house without a particular destination in mind. I was never one of those kids who had a car to drive to school in high school or college, which is why I think I still have it in me to romanticize the idea of a car in a city where cars can barely move. Most of my friends who spent their teens and/or 20s driving no longer do so these days, opting for the backseat of cabs or Grab/Gocars instead. Too tired. Too stressful. Too much time precious time wasted driving. If I had a car, though, I think I’d be free. There’s this idea that I could just go at any given moment, without the hassle of ordering on an app, or having strangers know my address. And with my current working hours — which is non-existent — I imagine being able to easily beat inconveniences like ganjil-genap, rush hour, and the likes.

The saner part of my brain would argue against it. The taxes aren’t worth it. General maintenance just isn’t worth it. And plus I won’t get as much use out of it as I think, because eventually I’d just grow tired of it. And yet. I wish…

Some of my favorite memories of people have to do with cars. There was more to our family’s Mitsubishi Colt van than the long early morning commute from our Jatibening home in Bekasi to our school in Salemba, Central Jakarta. When I was a kid, we often took road trips, to Pangandaran, to Yogyakarta, even went on several trans-Sumatra trips. My dad would magically turn the back of our van into a flat bed convenient for us kids to sleep in and we would spend days on end on the road, listening to a Chrisye album on repeat. I had a pretty great childhood, for all those trips and several other reasons (maybe someday I’ll write about that too). But a big part of that childhood had to do with the fact that our family had a car to take us places.

It’s not always about some grand adventure either. Having a car in a city like Jakarta, where one would be hard pressed to entertain themselves other than going to the mall (which I admittedly love), gives you an opportunity to microdose on adventure. A late-night drive along Sudirman towards Mangga Besar. Weekend foodie trips to Kelapa Gading. People like to think they’re going out of their comfort zone when they do this, but when you have your car with you, the only comfort zone you’re getting out of is your usual parking spot at Plaza Senayan, which you frequent way too often. And that’s kind of the appeal to be honest? A car doesn’t just get you out of your comfort zone, it eases you out of it.

In some cases just being in the car, whether moving or parked, can be the whole point. There is nothing I love more than sharing car space with friends, listening to something we all love, whether songs or a podcast. This is how I remember falling in love with the Call Your Girlfriend podcast almost 10 years ago, in my friend Lisa’s car, driving to grab dinner after our Sunday shift at the newspaper we used to work for. I remember one night being particularly hooked on their conversation that we sat in the car at Setiabudi One’s parking lot for half an hour just laughing our heads off. Sharing car space affords you a slice of intimacy amidst the noise of the world. When you’re in a car, everything fades away; it’s just you in the privacy of your own new reality.

People who own cars in this city experience a romance that us mortals who can’t afford one or are too commitment-averse to be on a “cicilan mobil” plan simply do not have access to. When you drive in the city, you hold the ultimate rizz card. You get to say “gue anterin aja” and be the absolute man. I recently rewatched “Catatan Harian Si Boy” (2011) — where the characters speak Indonesian like actual normal people, a cinematic feat few Indonesian films have achieved — Ario Bayu’s character pulled a “gue anterin aja” and just like that, Tasya, the girl he met at the local police station one serendipitous night after being arrested for street racing, found a whole new friend group she would go on to love.

I love driving friends home and try to do it in the rare occasion that I have a car with me. Love knowing we have another 30 minutes to continue — or debrief from — a dinner conversation.

All of this, of course, is a rose-tinted view of car ownership, and it’s really more of a symptom for something else. Maybe I miss my friends? At least 80% of my friendships take place over Facetime and Whatsapp these days and I miss actually spending time with them, making new memories and stuff. I recently drove to Bandung for a quick one-night trip and had a super lovely time. I want more of that. Maybe I’m dire need of getting out of my element? Now that I’m not working full-time and have more time to myself, I’m suddenly aware of all the ways I could be more adventurous. I imagine a car would give me more control over that part of my life (control is often what most of my material desires boils down to, tbh). I’d love to “live” the life I want with minimal third-party coordination.

I’m not actually going to ever get a car, I think. Maybe, more than anything, I want to be taken on a ride (???)

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In this week’s pleasure list, I talk about going out when you don’t feel like it, Twitter drama, and my latest food fixation. Hope you find something here for you.

Thank you for being here. I MEAN IT. <3

Going out and performing yourself

Yesterday Erin texted me to go out to a social event where there would be beers and a lot of people I didn’t know, and I told her I’d be there before I could fully make up my mind about actually going. It takes a lot for me to voluntarily place myself in the midst of dozens of new people, especially when there isn’t really an “event”, when you’re just expected to mingle and … *dun dun dunnnnn* … converse.

I showed up anyway, despite my mind telling me to not to go, and to no one’s surprise, I had a good time! While, sure, there ended up being more familiar faces than I had anticipated, which made navigating the unfamiliar easier, I’ll admit I enjoyed getting out of my element! Just a little bit. What I mean by going out of my element is I enjoyed not talking to myself in my head, in my room, and actually having to perform myself. Meeting people, introducing myself, telling them what I do, are all great exercise for actually being and I needed that.

For example, in my head I tell myself I’m a writer and that label is good enough for me. As long as I’m publishing this newsletter, it doesn’t really matter what writer I am. Just getting to write this is good enough for me. But this label alone isn’t enough when you’re meeting new people; people will want to know what I write, which forces me to practice describing my writing and describing myself, something I wouldn’t have to do in the comfort of my room or my favorite coffee shop with no one around.

The whole thing made me feel like someone. Like I wasn’t just an idea or an outline of a person. I still have trouble describing what writing it is that I do, but now I have something new to think about.

Lucy Dacus x Matty Healy drama

I woke up this morning pretty shaken by photos of Kylie Jenner’s phone circulating on Twitter, where her lock screen appears to show a photo of her and Timothee Chalamet set as wallpaper. But what I’m here to say is don’t let it distract you from another gem of a PopCrave-tweeted news: Matty Healy deactivating his Twitter account after getting @ by Lucy Dacus.

Matty Healy, had apparently tweeted saying:

I told Lucy Dacus that ‘Boygenius’ had inspired me and George to start a new band called ‘Girlretard’. I don’t really hear from her that often.

To which Lucy replied:

I love this interaction and love even more that it prompted him to deactivate because… weren’t they all at the same Era’s Tour just a few months ago? (They were!) I’m pretty sure Phoebe Bridgers' Eras opening gigs coincided with the four or five or so Eras shows that Matty Healy had made headlines for attending, and Lucy and Julien Baker had been there too. Did they not all share a VIP tent at some point?

It just makes me giggle, thinking of how the Boygenius literally got front row seats to the Taylor Swift x Matty Healy era (an era that I loved, btw, I have a draft somewhere on my Substack about how I think everyone should’ve just let the two date lol), and how they must be thinking the whole time: “canon event, canon event, canon event” or something like that. This Twitter interaction has me imagining backstage interactions in which Lucy, Julien, and Phoebe just had to make nice with this good-for-nothing man out of respect for their absolute queen of a friend. Ah, celebrities. They’re just like us indeed!!!

Anyways, I love Lucy. For her music, her cutting lyrics, her stage swagger, and her tweets. This one from when Obama had Boygenius on his summer playlist is pretty much my Roman Empire.

Food fixation

If you’re going to spend Rp95.000++ on a meal around Senopati, South Jakarta, consider Mister Sunday’s Pork Belly Sambal Matah. I’m not exactly pork crazy, but I occasionally make exceptions for the dish when it’s crispy, juicy, and comes paired with a good condiment. There aren’t that many options that tick those boxes in Jakarta outside of the North or West? I’m not sure. But Mister Sunday’s feels special in that no cut is too chunky to embody both crispiness and juiciness! Texture and taste! One may argue their sambal matah isn’t “authentic”, more of a marriage of matah and dabu-dabu if you ask me, given the amount of tiny diced tomatoes in it, but that’s exactly what makes it work. Just when things feel like they’re about to get too spicy, the tomatoes balance it out.

I’ve been so fixated on this dish for a month that I’m really starting to limit my visit to this place. It’s getting to a point where the staff know my order before I can even decide where to sit — which is cute if it’s a coffee order at a coffee shop, but somehow less cute when it’s a whole meal? Can someone tell me what brand of shame this is? Lol.

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During the pandemic, I feel like everyone has that one person, event, or thing that they looked to as a sign that things were truly going back to normal. Sure people may have started going back to the office, but on a personal level, things weren’t really “back” until whatever it personal marker they had for themselves took place.

Now everyone, meet Erin, who was that personal marker of normalcy for me.

We first met 10 years ago, when we both worked at the Jakarta Globe newsroom, and I think we just never stopped going out for the occasional beer night since? Except for when COVID-19 happened and she went back to Australia. In my world, nature wasn’t truly healing until I was once again face-to-face with Erin over a few Bintangs somewhere in South Jakarta last year.

Like any big nerd in my life — and if you look at her Goodreads, you’ll understand that she’s a major one — I sometimes wonder how or why we’re friends. Sure we can chalk that up to the books we like to read, but Erin goes through her read list at a speed that seriously renders anyone, myself included, a poser, so that wouldn’t make sense. Some days, though, I’d remember we both share the same problematic soft spot for the show Girls, or we’d (unironically?) jam along to Oasis’ “Wonderwall” at the top of our lungs in spin class, or we’d spend the night drinking and I’d wake up to her excellent newsletter in my inbox, and it would all make sense. She’s low-key for someone with big thoughts, and whether at a bar next to you or in her writing, she takes the right things seriously and hates on everything else with cautious self-aware humor, haha.

Erin is the writer of Dari Mulut Ke Mulut newsletter, the publication she’s been running for almost eight years, where she writes biweekly debriefs about current affairs in Southeast Asia. Not to toot my own horn but in 2019, Erin was also co-host of the podcast “Indonesia, dll.”, produced by yours truly and another ex-JG colleague.

OK this intro is getting too long. Here’s Erin nerding out… :)

1. What’s an unpopular opinion or hot take you feel strongly about?

• I’m still in Asean-mode so please indulge me in being super nerdy. Every year, the Asean Summit around September/October is time for handwringing about what the “point” of Asean is, can Asean survive? I definitely understand that. There’s been no movement on the South China Sea and the response to Myanmar’s military crackdown is more than disappointing. BUT, and this is where the hot take comes in, Asean in its least credible form — and we are nowhere near that — will always be better than no Asean at all.
  I’ve covered Asean now for almost 10 years (which I only really noticed when Jokowi handed over the chair to Laos the other day and I thought “but they only just had it!”) and it’s fascinating to see how deeply engrained it has become. I’ve noticed people using “Asean” as a geographical locale instead of ‘Southeast Asia’ which I know winds a lot of people up, but I think that’s kinda cool! Usually in life I’m an enormous hater, but on this I’m a lover. It feels like we’re watching something big and important build in real time.
  Plus I love the (sorry for the buzzword) diversity in the bloc. I don't know much about Europe, and I’ve never been, but I feel like there can’t be as much difference between Germany and France as there is between Laos and Indonesia or between Spain and Portugal and Vietnam and the Philippines. Once Timor-Leste is formally in, it’ll be a new day!

• Another quick one: Olivia Rodrigo’s gals need to pull her aside and tell her it’s time to get over it.

  

   

2. What’s something you’re currently obsessed with?

• Ride in SCBD and Gen’s in Blok M. That’s where, as you know, Christabelle, we go for spin class and beers, respectively. There are cheaper places in town for spin class and beers but I’ve made peace with it. Sometimes, in an enormous city where you don’t have familial roots or old high school friends it’s nice to go places where you’ve become a local. 

• I simply cannot stop talking about language. I’m doing a course at the moment in Indonesian grammar and it’s popping my brain, but alongside that I’m doing a course through an Australian university about the history of Bahasa Indonesia. Add to that so many of our friends being from all over the country, I can’t hear enough. I’m psyching myself up to begin using “gue”/”lo” and even that is complex! A friend who moved to Jakarta from Sumatra for uni won’t use it because it’s not his, a Betawi friends claims her people invented it and a friend from Jakarta Utara is outraged at that and says it’s all from his people and the Chinese community.

  

  In Australia, the linguists are moving away from the accent model I grew up learning — broad accent (which is what some of our Queenslander friends sound like), general accent (which is me, unless I’ve had a few beers and someone makes a joke about dingoes eating babies and then I go deep broad), and the cultivated accent (this used to be super common for newsreaders and the like but now Cate Blanchett is the only example). This was all formed back in the day when a whole lot of British people and Irish people were mixed up and regional accents that rarely met in the old countries were all on the same street (or penal colony, lol). Now they reckon with generations of immigration since the old days changing to Mediterranean and pan-Asia everyone sounds different. And it’s so true! I love watching a Reel from a gal in Western Sydney flooded with comments from people overseas “what accent is THIS?” Well, that’s for sure Lebanese-Australian. I don’t know what they’ll decide on calling these new levels, but isn’t it fascinating! Language!

3. Who’s someone you think more people should know about?

Darathtey Din! She’s a Khmer writer and researcher based in Phnom Penh who I became chatty with online during the pandemic when she was trapped in New Zealand. She’s one of those people that when you finally meet face-to-face, in a beautiful bar near Phnom Penh’s Russian Market naturally, nerves immediately dissipate and you’re like, yep this gal’s a proper friend. She writes Campuccino, a fantastic Substack that covers Cambodia with beautiful humour and tact. Cambodia is having an awful time at the moment with press freedoms (and a lot of other freedoms) and she goes out of her way to highlight the work of other writers and reporters producing in these conditions.

She has really interesting things to say about contemporary culture in Cambodia. She’s just written a book, Youth Culture and the Music Industry in Contemporary Cambodia, that I’m so excited to crack into shortly. I’ve also been struck by something she said recently about how the rest of the world is still stuck in seeing Cambodia through the Khmer Rouge/civil war lens. And while it’s a nation-defining event still felt today, for her generation of Cambodians it’s not the only story.

I can’t wait to see what she does next. 

4. What’s a life hack or advice that recently changed your life?

I was on bed rest for four weeks a month or so ago and spent that entire time watching 22-year-old YouTube girlies try out the Andrew Huberman morning routine. He’s an American neuroscientist whose whole thing is using science to inform productivity goals. Usually that stuff sounds like garbage, but he’s got some great ideas. He reckons wake up at 6.30 am, get some natural light straight into the eyes, drink some water, do some exercise and then mediate a bit. The content creators stick to his plan solidly for a week and all seem to like it a lot, although most of it doesn’t really work for me (wake up at 6.30 to what? Get an early start on scrolling Twitter and whining about how much it sucks?)

BUT! That waking up with some natural light and a lot of water has been a gamechanger for me, even if it’s at 8am. My kost has a beautiful huge window that only gets direct light between 7.30 and 8am and he’s right! That shit feels nice! Stand there chugging 500ml of water and I feel like Gwyneth Paltrow.

Hold on — is my life hack get out of bed and drink water?  

5. What are you looking forward to the most in the coming week?

I’m about to have one of those hellish weeks that are simply unavoidable. I’m trying to drag myself through uni again, so I’ve set aside this week to cram in all the assessment I’ve ignored in favor of hanging out.

I’m going to treat myself to time in Panglima Polim’s most beautiful cafes to write an essay about Buddhism in contemporary Australia in the first half of the week and then sit myself down at my desk on Thursday-Friday and bash out 1500 words on Balai Pustaka. I say that, but I just read your newsletter this morning about a new Netflix doco on the Coffee Murder and that might ruin all plans.

The Debrief is the Monday installation of the Pages Not Found newsletter. Visit past Debriefs with Avi who talked about gatekeeping and Vero who hates ambient music. On Wednesdays, I tend to publish essays. On Fridays, I send out a short pleasure list.

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This week I have just three things to gush about. I think, moving forward, this will be the bare minimum for my Friday newsletter. Three items minimum, five items max sounds nice and doable, amen.

I hope you have a nice weekend!

Moka pot coffee

Ah, there’s nothing like an “aesthetic” version of an old, pretty ubiquitous object to stop you on your tracks and give it proper attention. In my case, it took this cow print Bialetti moka pot for me to finally consider making this brewing technique a part of my daily coffee routine and I’m so happy I did! I didn’t end up buying the cow print version — it’s still in my Tokopedia cart but my no0b qualifications simply does not justify the price. Earlier this year, when a friend offered a classic metal Bialetti he had gotten for free at an event, I jumped at it. I’ve been obsessed. So obsessed, in fact, that just two weeks into using it, I had to admit myself to the ER from the worst case of gastric acid in my life. I was putting the moka pot to use 3x a day to try to get the hang of it, which I should have known was too much coffee than my stomach could handle. We love to learn things the hard way over here.

After a five-month break from it (and a far stricter coffee intake), I’m finally back! Limited to one moka pot serving per day, but I’m back.

While some say the moka pot isn’t exactly the perfect espresso, it really is great to have a simple tool that can produce something close enough to it. Homemade coffee I can add cream/milk to that tastes great and packs a punch. But what I enjoy the most about the moka pot is the process; every cup of coffee is a lab experiment and I get to play scientist. The idea that it brews directly over fire (or heat), the idea that your coffee is brewing upwards? UGHH SO FUN. Watching coffee gush out of the pipe and into the upper chamber of the pot is the highlight of my day. I pour the coffee into my cup while looking forward to the next time I get to do it all over again.

It takes everything in me to not make moka pot coffee three times a day. I’m really trying to be a better person. :-S

A Netflix docu to watch! with! friends!

Speaking of coffee… The Netflix documentary on the Olivier Vietnamese coffee death is about to come out this month and I’ve just been reminded of just how mind-boggling and honestly terrifying the whole case was. This period of domestic news cycle feels so far away now (and not to mention so visually foreign!!! — which is a whole other train of thought I’ll probably explore in a future write-up), but I happened to watch a preview of it and for 1.5 hour I was sucked right back to 2016, which feels like the last time TV had something truly compelling to offer.

I thought the docu would be worth mentioning here not just because it feels bound to be widely discussed and is worth mentally bookmarking, but also because I find my viewing experience perhaps worth recommending, which is to watch it with friends! Being a spectator among a divided crowd is exactly what it was like to follow the case at the time, so watching it as a group feels like an immersive way of revisiting the story. So much has happened ~in the world~ that I’ve simply forgotten all memory of the case. Not even the names of the girls rang a bell when a friend first mentioned the docu. But watching it with others, feeling the vibe shift when new facts were presented, seeing everyone — myself included — wobble their way to a firm opinion put me right back there.

If you’re looking to fit a movie night with friends two weeks-ish from now, here’s a title worth considering. I promise I’m not just saying this because I’m a wimp. :’)

The tube girl

There’s this game I play with myself where I listen to Beyonce’s “Partition” on my MRT trips and try to stay cool. The most I let myself get away with is a hard head bop to the beat, and even then I’d feel like the whole car was staring.

These past two weeks I’ve been obsessed with the “Tube Girl”, as TikTok has named her, who films herself dancing in a London tube car on her commute. Watching her feels cathartic. Like entertaining that tiny part of my brain that says I could probably get away with dropping it low to “Partition” in the MRT if I wanted to. Like the only thing getting in the way was my obsession with other people’s perception of me. That and actual dance skills.

What’s that thing people say? That nobody cares as much as you think, because everyone’s just thinking of themselves? I’ve always suspected that is true, and Tube Girl is that whole concept personified. (Of course it helps that she’s beautiful, young, and thin, and there’s nothing the world loves to see than a conventionally beautiful woman take up space in unconventional ways… but that’s not fun to think about).

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Just know that I edit these pieces all the time post-publishing! Haha. The edits are never reflected on the newsletter you get in your inbox, but they’re there on the website/Substack app. Most of the time the story doesn’t change — I just feel like I get to tell it better and then I get to feel better about my decision to write these things. :’)

Thank you so much for reading!

The most impressive thing about N’s new house is its location. It’s a short 20-minute cab ride from where I’m currently renting, and I rent pretty central in Jakarta Selatan. On the top floor of his house, a door opens to a rooftop terrace, where several identifiable buildings come into view in the distance, signaling to me I wasn’t anywhere unfamiliar.

Unfamiliar is what I feel driving around my sister’s BSD neighborhood, in her a car, which is constantly blasting baby songs. I once tried to change the playlist on the basis of “gantian” but was promptly advised against it; apparently taking turns, or the sheer concept of fairness, was not a thing in baby-adult relationships. I swear I’m not selfless enough to have babies. I don’t see how I can ever drive the kind of distance people who live in BSD and work in the city do without being able to blast my Carly Rae Jepsen the whole trip.

Mom’s place is even farther away, about 45 minutes to an hour from my sister’s — which in my book is far enough in the first place. When I look around from the roof of mom’s work-in-progress home, I don’t know where I am. I pride myself for being pretty well-oriented with this city. Not just Jakarta, but to some extent, Jabodetabek. When Grab fails to locate the destination I’m typing onto its search bar, I can open its map and manually locate where I want to go, expertly telling one street from another without much clue. Give me a map of Jakarta and there are roads, coffee shops, homes I’d be able to accurately point out. But I couldn’t point out the road to my mom’s if my life depended on it.

A brief history of the places I’ve lived

I grew up in my grandparents house in Central Jakarta. It’s the place I refer to when I say “home”, the place my bills still gets sent to occasionally.

Friends have attempted to discount just how “Central” it actually is, and I love to entertain them as a bit. Frankly, it’s Central in the sense that my government-issued ID labels my address Central, with a Central Jakarta zip code and everything. But I understand the doubts. You can’t be this close to the North and East and claim to be Central. You can’t take 40 minutes to get to Senayan, maybe even an hour by TransJakarta, and claim to be Central. You can’t make a habit out of jogging in Kelapa Gading — which I did, at one point — and claim to live somewhere Central.

Home was also once Jatibening, which isn’t really Bekasi but is too Kalimalang-adjacent not to feel like it. We would wake up at 4.30 a.m. and leave at 5.30 a.m. in hopes of beating the traffic on our way to school in Salemba, Central Jakarta. We ate breakfast on the way, and by the time we made it back home, usually at night after spending after-school hours at my grandparents while waiting for my parents to finish work, the car would sometimes stink of leftovers that had been sitting in the there all day.

On days when my parents couldn’t pick me up from school, I’d take the angkot home. The M01 which passes by Salemba on its way from Senen to Kampung Melayu, and then M26 from Kampung Melayu to Kalimalang. During a recent conversation, I brought up this fact to my dad and he responded with surprise. “Did you really?” He has no memory of me taking public transportation in fifth grade. Mind you this was pre-smartphone era! I don’t know which is wilder, being 10 and navigating Jakarta’s public transport system in the year 2000 or having your dad completely forget he let you do that. Lmao.

There was also that time I kind of partially lived in BSD. I was in college by then, living my best life as the daughter of parents who were on their way to finalizing their divorce. I would lug clothes between Central Jakarta – Depok (where I was studying) – Tangerang. I could tell one parent that I was spending the night at the other parent’s place and get away with actually going back to neither. I never did it! But the idea that I could if I ever wanted to was comforting. It was around this time that Teras Kota opened. When it opened, I thought finally a nice enough mall in this part of town. I can only assume that these days Teras Kota lives under the shadows of Aeon, which marks a whole different era for BSD. Back when I kind of lived there, the area where Aeon now stands was a swamp. The city is so sterile these days it’s hard to imagine a time when it was anything but tree-lined residential areas, though drive far enough and you might just see it.

Where do adults live anyway

For the past six years, I’ve lived alone in the city. Central central. I am 10 to 20 minutes away from whatever mall or bar I would be meeting up with friends for dinner at all times. Yet while I’ve enjoyed experiencing the city without the exhaustion of a one-hour commute, lately I find myself feeling increasingly opposed to my current living situation. Well maybe not opposed, necessarily, but the thought of it no longer gives me the sense of excitement and freedom as it once did. Without going into details, I’m currently at a place in my life where the kind of changes that are happening requires me to also consider making changes to my living situation — and this has been a major source of anxiety for me. Maybe this is why I felt compelled to write about this today? All of my writings are really just ways for me to process or defend myself against things I’m extremely anxious about.

When I still lived with family, in the Central Jakarta home, the ideal life that I wanted for myself was simply one where I would get to make up my own rules, be surrounded by the things that reflected who I am. I also wanted to live closer to the city center, I wanted to look at the city from up close. And so when a job came along that required going to an office far enough from home (in West Jakarta), I took that as a chance to tap out and start renting. It wasn’t out of necessity as much as the desire to feel like I could finally get my life started.

These days, I look around and things don’t feel right. My place is at once too big and too small for the life that I want. In some ways it’s perfect: the right location, the the right size, and price for what I get. I also like the serendipitous way with which I found it two years ago. But it’s also not idea: I want a cheaper rent now that I’m self-employed, but I’ve also been hating living alone; feeling too lonely too much of the time, feeling like I need the presence of others to push me out of bed, like I need to feel “being perceived” — just the right amount — to function as myself.

Other than the obvious fact that changes suck and general problem solving can be hard and also essentially suck, I hate having this problem because it seems to highlight all the ways in which I am failing as an adult. I can hear echoes of the “rent vs buying” argument in my head, one of those “adult conversations” I never wanted to be a part of because making the best investment was never a priority in my life — freedom and my own personhood is. I hate how little I have it together at a time when I feel like I should be performing my best adult self. Or at least I’ve been led to believe that I should. I swear if I think about my ideal living situation long enough, these thoughts grow into a tornado that eventually eat on my sense of self.

Many of my peers seem to have taken the BSD or Bintaro route. All that space, all that greenery, with a train connection for “easy access” to the city. Are you even a proper adult if you haven’t considered putting a downpayment on a Sinarmas Land apartment? When my West Jakarta workplace eventually moved its offices to BSD, I went to look for apartments to rent in the area and was immediately put off by the silence.

N’s home, which is in Jakarta and is central central, an easy 20-minute from many of our go-to neighborhoods, with actually beautiful finishings and a Dyson fan we like to tease him about, made me think of an alternate life where maybe I had more to offer this world other than some essay about the perils of adulthood and moving.

This week I talk to Vero, who is a TikTok crush first above everything else. I forgot when he first appeared on my FYP but when he did, I immediately started forwarding his videos to friends, who eventually became equally obsessed. And then I guess the algorithm kind of did its magic because not long after I started training it to show me more of Vero’s stuff, I bumped into him at a party and we ended up sitting across from each other at the 02.00am dim sum meal that followed. Awkward pleasantries were exchanged. Instagram accounts followed. Mutuals identified, etc.

It’s tough describing your online faves because no one wants to be “perceived” these days and you don’t want to offend! But my attempt would be to say that Vero is one of those people for whom the combination of having attended high school in Tangerang (instead of Jakarta) Selatan, being chronically online, smoking too much Relx, and having daddy issues have worked like a charm to create a concoction of good taste, impeccable humor, and top-tier vibes in a person.

He currently goes by @kikokostadinaur on TikTok, although he has a habit of changing it from time to time. Some months ago, he went by “cancelled_adjacent”, which always makes me laugh (((nervously))) to think about. Offline, Vero is a professional nepo baby — that is all he will let the record say.

What’s an unpopular opinion you feel strongly about?

• I hate ambient music. I think I saw a TikTok once that says Aphex Twin makes you feel like you’re doing groceries in a video game and I feel strongly about that. Bjork is so much worse. Ambient music with terrible vocal and harmony? Hard pass. Don’t get me wrong, she got some great hits— some tracks in “Vespertine” and “Volta”. The rest of her discography are just her smacking metal trashcan while screaming nonsense. She would love this opinion by the way.

• The cinephiles are gonna get me for this, but I think that corny sitcoms are amazing and I think everyone who hate it don’t know how to have fun. I hate conflicts, drama, or any problem of sort so sitcoms provide the sort of safe space that I truly crave. To me sitcoms are very nurturing and wholesome, like obviously you don’t watch it for the plot. My favorites are “Modern Family” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” but if you want a more niche or a more intelligent one, I recommend “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” written by Tina Fey, the greatest comedian/woman on Earth. The show is I think the closest rendition of Twitter humor.

What’s something you’re currently obsessed with?

• The revival of Fred Perry polo shirts. It’s very versatile — you can hang out with literally any type of person and you would still look cool to them.

  

  They offer various fits and colors so you can decide whether you want to look like a hot f*ckable piece of sh*t, a preppy corporate motherf*cker, or just a complete f*cking loser. I got one years ago (back when everyone would button their polo all the way up) and now they fit me like a charm. Thrifted some more pairs too.

• I have also been obsessed with mechanical keyboards.

  Something about it is so unnecessary, fun, and somehow queer. Fun colors, textures, tactile, and different sensory options? That’s so drag, baby. Like tell me why this switch (a thing that connects the keypads to the body) is called banana cream pie? You can clearly tell that I am not a writer, but mechanical keyboards drive me to type — it makes me excited work (?).

  

Who’s someone you think more people should know about?

• Rachel Sennott. Pretty sure a lot of people know her already after her Hollywood breakthrough, but I feel like if she became mainstream, people would understand my brand more.

  

  You can always catch someone saying “you make all white girls from Connecticut feel so special” in her comment section, and that’s exactly it. I always have this urge to be the most banal, NPC-looking, and effortlessly funny and sexy person in the room but sometimes people would just take me as a natural bimbo. Like, no sir, this is pre-meditated and much deeper than you think.

• Another one I’d like to mention is Chris Black, one half of the “How Long Gone” podcast. I can say he would beat me up in real life if he ever saw me write this, but I trust that man’s recommendations with everything.

  

  Every stuff he approves of always makes sense and is just simply the best. I also find his opinion on literally anything that he shares on the podcast to be solid and hilarious. My ex used to make fun of me for basing my entire taste and style off him — he would question my recent purchase and then come to the understanding that Chris Black has just posted a pic with the same exact shoes I purchased.

What’s a life hack or advice that recently changed your life?

It’s not disgusting to take your morning coffee to your morning dump. I used to think that the fecal-infused air would get into my beverage, but you know what, that is not a thing. My coffee still tastes amazing and now I get to go back and forth between my coffee and my dump.

What are you looking forward to the most in the coming week?

• I’m going to the countryside next week so any chance to not breathe the rotten air of this city is pretty exciting to me. Other than that, I’m kind of looking forward to blasting “American Teenager” by Ethel Cain, romanticize my business trip, and experience the record like she intended. Thanks to her, everyone understands that the countryside is not always like “The Sound Of Music” and more like “Paris, Texas”, if you know what I mean.

• Generally, though, I’m always looking forward to whatever is going on Friday night. It could be me sitting in a dark room by myself or throwing up on the curb. the vibe would still be much better than the rest of the weekend. No responsibility, no rules, just vibes. I know i sound like a freshman, but I am sure that I would still feel this strongly about Fridays in years and years to come.

Ahhh, my first Friday post. This completes my first week of publishing three times a week. I WELCOME CLAPS AND COMPLIMENTS. I am having that quintessential writer-committed-to-a-schedule experience in which I write the thing from the depths of a hangover. It is not fun, but I also haven’t gone out in a while (uhhh… two weeks) and might have been a little too successful on my mission to finally let loose last night.

Anyway. Fridays are for suggestions. Or more like brief elaborations on things I’ve genuinely enjoyed, that maybe you might too — if not literally then at least conceptually.

Have a great weekend and see you at The Debrief on Monday!

1. I really enjoyed reading this Ask Polly answer to the question “how do you know when your art is bad?”

As someone who has been actively trying to fix her incredibly troubled relationship with her craft, this article is perhaps the single most important piece of writing I can ever read on the fear of making something. I am scared a lot when it comes to writing. So chronically scared I could never commit to it in any real way (somehow committing to writing professionally, in the context of a job, only feels like I’m running away from it). I’m sure there are other great articles out there that address the same ideas, but having read this, I’m also pretty sure I won’t have to read another one. I genuinely would like to bathe in these words, have them tattooed in my brain, rub it on my skin, engage with it in whatever way will heal all of the wounds this fear has brought into my life.

I don’t know, I guess I really needed to hear this:

If you’re pushing yourself to grow and expand and learn and experiment, you sometimes don’t know where you are. This can be true emotionally, creatively, physically, and intellectually.

And this:

So to return to your question HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOUR ART IS GOOD? You don’t know. Even if the world says YES IT’S GOOD HERE TAKE THIS MACARTHUR GENIUS GRANT! Or YES YOU ARE ONE OF THE BEST, HERE TAKE THIS NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE!, you should still pity those prize-winning motherfuckers. Because nothing makes art more difficult than the suspicion that the people around you expect great art from you.

The article is a very long answer to a question so obvious and universal you would think nothing new can be said about it, and yet… it’s brilliant.

2. I love doing focus hours with a long-distance friend

Catching up can sometimes be a drag (ooo hot take), and in the case of someone who’ve just had a really good friend move away, the idea is sometimes more painful/sad than fun because of how much it emphasizes absence. One thing I’ve enjoyed in the past month since Rocky left is doing a sort of “focus-hour” calls where… we’re both on Facetime but to each do our own thing. He’s usually doing a reading assignment for one of his classes, and I’m either writing or reading. One of those calls where you’re on it for the specific purpose of not talking. I guess it’s called “body doubling” in the world of ADHD?

It’s great, because first of all, the sheer presence of another person holds you accountable and pushes you to really get things done. But more than that, I like that doing this keeps our friendship running in realtime, instead of having it be suspended in between “catch-ups”. I like that Rocky gets to be a part of my “mundane” moments, the way he would be if we still lived in the same city, and in that sense he gets to be a part of my day-to-day, still, despite the distance. As someone who lives alone and spends most of her time without other people, these calls also offer a nice window for me to… “perform” myself, I think. Be something other than a slob for an hour or two. Or four.

3. I can’t believe I’m a regular at a spin studio

2023 is the year I got into spinning. I did a class years ago, courtesy of Audi, who is perhaps one of the sportiest of all my friends, and never did it again because I wanted to die. BUT a few months ago Basten, the only other sporty friend in my life other than Audi, notified me of an Ariana Grande-themed spin class and I’ve been a convert ever since. It’s wild how indoor cycling has been a thing for over a decade now and no one briefed me on the idea that it is (or can be) very much a music-driven experience; like you’re basically cycling and vibing to song selections, and these selections are very often excellent! Paired with the right movements, you might just trick your brain into thinking you’re out livin’ it up at Lola (RIP) on a Friday night.

4. I’m on the hunt for the cheapest tequila rack in town

I don’t know how we got here but I’m in my tequila era, sort of. Not that I’ve become a connoisseur, in fact quite the opposite. My standards for a drink have never been lower. I’m just out here to have a good time and to do that, I prefer not to be holding on to a glass like if I’d ordered a gin and tonic. It just gets in the way. Shots are quick, often cheap, and tequila just takes you there with minimal damage the next day — for me anyway. I do still enjoy a glass of beer. In fact, it’s almost like my nights run exclusively in two modes: beer mode, which is the easy and chill sit-down kind over a fun conversation, and tequila mode, which is the part of the night where I prefer being on my feet. I do enjoy a good cocktail, I just don’t currently harbor as much enthusiasm for it. And as for wine…? I guess my life is just the kind that doesn’t call for much wine moments. Not right now anyway. Wine and cocktails are for those in-between moments, when things are about to be a party but not quite there yet. Or when things aren’t meant to be a party at all but they’re fun and probably wholesome. I rarely find myself in between these days. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, it just is.

Anyway. About my hunt. 404 at Wijaya has Rp404k racks (6 shots, which I suppose is the standard?). Ding Dong Disko in Kemang has Rp350k racks. I think The Moon at Monopoli had Rp300k racks the last time I was there??? Wondering what else is out there… Do send tips!!!

5. I’m actively trying to not gatekeep nice thoughts about others

I can’t find the TikTok, but the other day while mindlessly scrolling through the app, I came across a video where this girl basically said she’s been trying compliment strangers more. Not as some creepy or weird exercise, but rather as a practice of voicing out good thoughts (paraphrasing here). Something about this framing of compliments struck me. Like yes, absolutely, why the fuck do we not share genuinely nice thoughts more often? With strangers or not. Why have a good thought and bury it when it may just benefit the other person to hear? Sorry if this all sounds so woowoo, lol, but the suggestion has made me want to investigate my own thought process, especially of the nicer stuff. Where do they go? Why do I let them go at all?

The other day I went out to get coffee and the cafe had a waitlist. The host asked to take my name and when she looked up she had such big, beautiful eyes. So I told her. To see how that would feel. My specific words were: “Mbak, matanya bagus banget deh” in a tone as matter-of-fact as I could muster, hahahh. Her reply: “Omg makasih mbak, I LOVE your hair!”

Past the shock of actually having the courage to blurt out the words, the whole thing actually felt cute! Definitely less traumatizing than I thought it would be.

Today, I wanted to write about crushes. I find this emotion, or this condition, so deeply fascinating that I doubt this will be my last piece on the matter. So much happens during a crush, almost like a rewiring of the brain, that makes them so fun to observe (though less fun to experience, that’s for sure). I hope this makes sense.

Thank you so much for reading!

Have you ever had a text message change your life? One second you’re calm and confident, the next you’re ball of nervous energy stripped of any sense of self? I was out at a party with a friend when one of those texts landed on my phone. It came out of nowhere, catching me at a tipping point I didn’t even realize I was standing on. The muscles on my face contorted into a smile so freakishly wide that, when Audi asked what the fuck was going on, there was no believable way to lie.

The truth is that — idk, maybe it’s not even that interesting, but — I suddenly found myself with a big fat crush on my lap and in that moment, everything I have ever known about myself dissolved into thin air.

Months before this text, during one of those dusty 3pm Jakarta lulls, I had the feeling that life had gotten a little too plain for my liking. Things weren’t necessarily going so well with my life, they were just… predictable. Just a little too flat. And so in that moment, bored and unserious, I whispered a wish to the universe… that I would please like to be shown the way to a crush. I’d missed being occupied by something intense. I wanted to feel. I’d missed the out-of-body experience that comes with having a crush. I wanted to go on a ride, baby!

And so that ride arrived.

Know that as I write this very paragraph, Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” is blasting from the speakers. If there was a song that could perfectly soundtrack the arrival of this feeling in my life and my departure from sanity land, it was this. Make no mistake, I’m not Taylor singing about having a long list of lovers. I’m the person Taylor is singing to. I am who she’s referring to when she says “I know you love the game”, or when she says “boys only want love when it’s torture”. I am “you”. I am “boys”. Eagerly waiting to be left breathless, to see if the high was going to be worth the pain, my name imprinted on that blank space.

In a recent piece, Heather Havrilesky of the famous advice column Ask Polly beckoned on readers to “pay attention to how you feel” in the presence of a partner as a way of gauging whether or not things were truly good. “Love shouldn’t feel bad”, she says. While a crush is hardly a relationship, or even “love”, the suggestion is valid and applicable. I knew I was fucked the moment I became fully aware of this crush because I immediately felt defeated. So much so that when I called Avi the next day to report this new information I’d discovered about myself, I was crying so much that she thought I was about to inform her of some terminal illness.

“What is going on?? You’re making me scared,” she said, visibly concerned. Any attempt to collect myself was useless. The words wouldn’t come. I remember feeling too embarrassed. Not the cute “shy” kind, but the “shameful” kind. I was ashamed because the crush had made me feel so awful, so unworthy. The crush had triggered the worst of my thoughts about myself, and unlocked the kind of shame I knew better than to feel. I resisted verbalizing my crush out of fear that the admission would grant it too much power over me.

After a few minutes of fumbling, I forced it out of me and whispered “I have a crush”. The words tasted sour on my lips, like I might actually like the idea despite the ugly crying face I was making. I can’t recall what Avi’s specific response was, but I remember her laughing — relieved that I wasn’t dying — before telling me “you should write about this someday” (today is that day).

Most musings on crushes describe the experience as a temporary shift in focus, or a distraction, from the things that should otherwise be getting our attention (i.e. work, our hobbies, our life), to this person and this person alone. If my gaze were a camera, instead of documenting the details of my life, I was now constantly pointed on this other person, watching their every move, hyperfocused on their every detail… the marks on their face, the way their smile starts from left to right, the way their eyes twinkled when they laughed, or how awkwardly they wave their hands around when they speak.

In the case of my recent crush though, I realized that I hadn’t temporarily shifted focus to this other person as much as I was suddenly using him as a lens through which to look at myself. It wasn’t his eyes I was thinking about, but rather the right way to move, the perfect thing to do or say if he were to turn and look in my general direction.

When you live alone, with no one watching your every move, it’s easy to slip into a habit of performing your days on bare-minimum mode. I could sleep all day and no one would bat an eye. I could forget to do the laundry for two weeks and no one would tell me to do otherwise. Eat breakfast for dinner to no resistance. There is so much freedom from having no one witness how you live your days (so much so that, admittedly, it is easy to believe you’re living you’re best life when some days that may not be the case). Now, powered by this crush and the illusion of being constantly perceived, I often found myself striving to be on my best behavior. The idea of my crush watching would get me out of bed and make me put on an outfit I loved. I was suddenly living life at hardcore mode and crushing it. I was the best performance of myself — at least on good days.

On most other days, though, the more I entertained the fantasy of his gaze, the more critical I became of myself. All of a sudden it was less about being excited to start the day and more about how I wasn’t enough. When I tell a friend he’s cute, I was really wondering if I, too, was cute to him. Me saying “he’s hot” was really me telling myself (with rather unnecessary harshness) that I didn’t consider myself hot — I suddenly hated my body. Descriptions of his character was really about me wondering if my character would be good enough for him. The more I thought about this person, the more I thought about all the ways I was… not up to par? I held the both of us up under the light, to compare, and decided he was precious stone and I was whatever would be leagues below. The louder I sang him praises, the louder my self-doubt reverberated.

In the days before my crush, free from the gaze of this random man I had chosen to use to judge myself, I’d gotten very good at not just resisting but actively not believing these funky thoughts. I’d been on a journey to free myself from the chains of societal norms that told me look down on myself. I was learning a gentler, kinder language to process my existence. I was getting better at believing in myself. The messy corners of my life? I could chalk them up to… charm — or edge, I don’t know. Under my fantasy of his POV, though, they were questionable piles of stuff that would be a burden to eventually deal with.

I wouldn’t say I’ve sobered up from this delusion. It’s just I’ve had enough distance from that night I got the text that made me smile to now be more level headed when the thought of my crush lands on my mind on a random afternoon. Absolutely nothing has happened since, other than the occasional overanalyzing of completely neutral, completely uncoded moments. I still swing back and forth between enjoying the illusion of my independence and confidence and the idea of myself as an undeserving mess under the microscope of his (completely imagined) gaze. But! I’ve also sat long enough with this crush for it to stop holding so much power over me. While order hasn’t completely been restored, I think it’s getting there.

“You should make a move,” friends tell me. “Fuck around and find out!”

I resist, because I don’t know how to, but also because a part of me is afraid to find out he was never looking in the first place.

Welcome to the first installation of The Debrief, where I peek into what people around me are thinking about, what they’re consuming, and generally attempt to stay on top of what’s going on in their life in hopes of discovering clues for what to do with mine. For this first one, I talk to Avi, whose very cool full name is Syarafina Vidyadhana, a good friend I’ve mentioned endlessly in my posts over the years. I wanted to talk to her because I can, sure, but mainly because she’s truly one of my favorite debrief partners. Sharp, curious, and with a stamina for dissecting the details, debriefing with Avi is always full of revelations and breadcrumbs for further thinking.

Avi is based in Bali, where she works as a language interpreter and also runs this independent publishing and printing shop called Cahyati Press. They were recently selected as a recipient for the Extra Nice Fund by It’s Nice That. Read more about them here!

What’s an unpopular opinion you feel strongly about?

• I know the discourse around mental health right now is that it’s not the end all and be all solution, because the very thing that is causing our mental health to deteriorate is capitalism; these things tend to be a systemic, structural thing rather than an individual problem. My hot take is that a lot of people use that to avoid therapy at all cost. I am 100% in agreement with the view that you cannot solve capitalism with therapy. A lot of the time therapy only helps you adjust better in a capitalistic world, or gives you the tools to accept things that you know are unacceptable. We do need a revolution. But it doesn’t mean that therapy doesn’t work or that it cannot help, or that it’s not necessary. It shouldn’t be used as an excuse not to work on yourself.

  

• In relation to relationships, people often say communication is key, and that most problems in a relationship are rooted in communication. But sometimes we overlook non-communication as communication. I feel like as humans, we want so badly to pin all of our issues on communication alone, that even when something else is the problem, it’s still communication that’s faulty. But a world where I have to communicate everything all the fucking time… isn’t necessarily a world I want to live in. I don’t endorse being avoidant, but if you have to explain so much…? There is a limit to what communication can do anyway. Yes, your communication has to be good, but sometimes talking things out doesn’t solve the problem, doesn’t ease the pain, and I’m on a journey to find what the other things could be. Is it understanding? Is it empathy? I don’t know yet. But my hot take is that communication isn’t the one-size-fits-all solution.

• Another unpopular opinion I’m borrowing is that “we should gatekeep” — I read this article by Ann Friedman that talks about how sometimes gatekeeping is necessary, if only we have an alternative and more positive language for gatekeeping. Without gatekeeping, we risk having certain precious things co-opted by people with more capital, and people with less capital will be left with nothing. Also, people are allowed to keep things to themselves. We’re allowed to have internal lives. Some  gatekeeping is good! I might even argue that gatekeeping, to some extent, can be the antithesis to gentrification.

What’s something you’re currently obsessed with?

• I’m obsessed with people who can pull off mixing metals, like silver and gold at the same time.

• I’m currently obsessed with finance, but not in the sense that I want to be a billionaire. The funny story is that Cahyati Press, the publishing and printing experiment that I run with one of my best friends Kat, recently received a grant. And in order for us to receive this grant, we have to prove that we are not a for-profit organization. Meanwhile, we’re not a legal entity and we wish to remain as such, so I had to prove it in some way, which in our case was by showing them our ledger. I had to crunch a year’s worth of numbers, dealing with all that finance and accounting lingo — like oh this is “asset” and this is “liability”, “capital”, “income”. I’m also now in the process of sorting out my personal finances in the hopes of possibly having financial freedom maybe in the next 10 years? 20 years? So I’m currently obsessed with that. Just a healthy amount, not my usual hyperfixation.

• I’m obsessed with figuring out what would make my life beautiful in both tangible and intangible ways. One of my personal revelations is that in order for things to be beautiful you have to open yourself up not just to the conventionally beautiful feelings, like joy and happiness, but you also have to be okay with being a little mellow. I’m not saying we have to suffer or be miserable, but we have to be open to the mellowness of life, otherwise it’s just routine — and coming from someone autistic, for whom routine is absolutely crucial.

Who’s someone you think more people should know about?

Influenced by the algorithm but also Christabelle, I think more people should know about Victoria Paris, the influencer. 

I think she’s the young Leandra Medine, minus the nepobaby origin story. I like that she’s so chaotic. I’m in a time in my life where more and more I’m expected to have it together. I’m above 30, so it’s an age thing, but also in order for you to not be a burden to other people you have to have it together, be a well-adjusted adult, say the right things when you’re socializing. In my work I’m also expected to have a well-organized schedule to avoid overbookings. Socially, when I go back to Jakarta I plan out my visit because I want to see everyone. In my relationship, with my current partner, chaos isn’t fun for them. Not the way it can be for me. So seeing Victoria Paris repeatedly buy the wrong ticket across her euro travels this summer feels so liberating to me.  

I also love that she’s a maximalist when accessorizing, she has that “Man Repeller” energy. People think there’s only one way of being and being chic, and often it’s by way of minimalism. I love seeing Victoria Paris stack her accessories and still embody chicness. I’m so tired of the idea of stealth wealth and quiet luxury, and being exposed to beige clothing items constantly. Wearing that would be like wearing a costume for me, because I wasn’t born into wealth. None of my friends are billionaires either, so what would I even be wearing that for? What do I even want to signal? I love seeing Victoria Paris because she’s extra, and that gives me permission to be extra.

It’s also a sexuality thing, because at first I thought “oh she’s so man-repelling” and then I found out that she’s queer!

I also think more people should know my friends!

My friends are so precious. If you get a chance to get to know my friends and interact with them, consider yourself very lucky. See, on the one hand, I want to gatekeep my friends, because you have to be a certain kind of kind and smart and funny to have the privilege to hang out with my friends. But also… the whole world needs to know my friends! Not just individual friends, but also hang out with a bunch of us. Not to toot my own horn, but I think I won the friendship lottery. Because you get to see how kind and brilliant my friends are, and how we hold space for one another. I don’t know, it’s just rare. They gave me a roadmap for the kind of friendships I want from other people.

What’s a life hack or advice that recently changed your life?

If you cannot afford to buy art, frame things.

What are you looking forward to the most this week?

I’m looking forward to my birthday tomorrow! I’m going to wake up, make my matcha, play Maggie Rogers vinyl that you bought for me and I’m looking forward to receiving phone calls, just talk on the phone with the people that I love. I didn’t make plans and emptied my schedule because my friends aren’t here and that’s fine. I want my birthday to be just about connecting with them in whatever medium is possible. We can just talk virtually. I’ll maybe go to the beach, have a nice dinner. I want to allocate most of the day for introspection and phone calls, and receiving gifts from my friends. 

Also, I’m looking forward to Cahyati Zine Week, where we will be featuring alternative publishings from the UK. If you’re in Bali between 6 – 10 September, make sure to drop by our shop. We’ll be there from 4 to 8PM. Hope to see you there!