On Dreams

It's not
What you thought
When you first began it
You got
What you want
Now you can hardly stand it though,
By now you know
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
'Til you wise up
…
So just give up

Wise Up, Aimee Mann (Magnolia, 1999)

More than five years ago, when I decided to return to Indonesia and focus my work in the field of education, I read a book that inspired and captured the essence of what I thought I would love doing. The book, “One Day, All Children …”, was written by Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America.

Teach for America is a teacher corps inspired by the Peace Corps. It recruits the best of recent college graduates in the United States and places them as teachers for two years in some of the worst public schools in inner urban and rural America to help improve the quality of education in these schools.

Over these past few days, I reread the book, and went over the sentences that I underlined five years ago which, in retrospect, still rang true at present. As I was reading it, I could still feel a fire burning inside me – mixed with a regretful pang that I am nowhere near where I envisioned myself to be. What went wrong?

Kopp started out the organization at 21. Like most recent college graduates, she was idealistic, ambitious, and full of energy. And she started big: her aim was to raise USD 2.5 million, recruited 500 graduates from top universities, and placed them in several parts of America within a year. She poured her life to realize her vision. The reality of realizing a dream, like most of us know through experience, is far from easy. But she persisted, found the supports she needed, and made it.

Starting big was the one thing I didn’t do. I don’t mean to say that I didn’t get anything. On the contrary, I learnt and experienced a lot. Most of the time, I had been happy and content with my small dreams. But now I am drained of any energy to even continue my small dreams. So I have decided to wise up, and give up my small dreams. I will start plunging and paddling myself to realize my bigger dream. I hope the course of life would not stray me into the comforts of small dreams again.

Reality wears down small dreams.

ADDED:
What's your dream? And where are you in respect to that dream? What do you think is the biggest hurdle in realizing your dream?

The Miseries and Pleasures of Toilets

Fear the Chinese, declared my sister upon the conclusion of our recent trip to Western China. Not because they are the growing, massive, hard working nation to watch out for, but because of their ability to endure harsh, unsanitary lives on a daily basis.

As I do a quick run over the internet on Chinese toilets, it becomes apparent that many people have written about their experiences in China specifically because toilets seem to make a visit to China most memorable. And memorable it is. As I am flipping through the images I found online, the inner of my stomach squirm, and the vision and stench of the last few public toilets I forced myself into spring up unrepressed, regardless of the fact that I did stuff tissues on my face and tried to intake as little air as possible.

Against my initial inkling to publish some pictures along with this entry, I have decided to spare us the more explicit visions and my own verbal but very graphic description of my experience. Instead, here is a highly sarcastic, hilarious entry – albeit the fact that the writer should consider himself lucky not to have encountered some of the much more horrible ones these.

I can’t help wondering why so little attention is given by the Chinese to the hygiene of their toilets, although I should note that the government seems to be making some efforts by giving stars to cleanliness of public toilets, and contrasting it to the very memorable passages from Junichiro Tanizaki on the same subject:

Every time I am shown to an old, dimly lit, and, I would add, impeccably clean toilet in a Nara or Kyoto temple, I am impressed with the singular virtues of Japanese architecture. The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in mediation or gazing out at the garden. The novelist Natsume Soseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, ‘a physiological delight’ he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where, surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and green leaves.

As I have said there are certain prerequisites: a degree of dimness, absolute cleanliness, and quite so complete one can hear the hum of a mosquito. I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain, especially if it is a toilet of the Kanto region, with its long, narrow windows at floor level; there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones. And the toilet is the perfect place to listen to the chirping of insects or the song of the birds, to view the moon, or to enjoy any of those poignant moments that mark the change of the seasons.

Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, 1977, Harper T.J. & Seidensticker, E.G., Trans., 1991: 13-14.

Now I have never been to Japan to check whether or not its public toilets are as sanitary as Tanizaki mentioned, but his passages, which I first read while studying architecture and laboriously attempted to achieve in my designs, impressed upon the importance of cleanliness to create such a pleasurable, sensual, and phenomenal toilet experience twice.

Why such difference in appreciation towards the act of exerting our bodily waste?

The Will of the Mind

Happy New Year everyone! I have been away these past few weeks, reading Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works”, and came across this following passage, which only confirms my previous posting on “The Fittest of Human”:

Nature does not dictate what we should accept or how we should live our lives. Some feminists and gay activists react with fury to the banal observations that natural selection designed women in part for growing and nursing children and that it designed both men and women for heterosexual sex. They see in those observations the sexist and homophobic message that only traditional sexual roles are “natural” and that alternative lifestyles are to be condemned. For example, the novelist Mary Gordon, mocking a historian’s remark that what all women have in common is the ability to bear children, wrote: “If the defining quality of being a woman is the ability to bear children, then not bearing children (as, for instance, Florence Nightingale and Greta Garbo did not) is somehow a failure to fulfill our destiny.” I’m not sure what “the defining quality of being a woman” and “fulfilling your destiny” even mean, but I do know that happiness and virtue have nothing to do with what natural selection designed us to accomplish in the ancestral environment. They are for us to determine. In saying this I am no hypocrite, even though I am a conventional straight white male. Well into my procreating years I am, so far, voluntarily childless, having squandered my biological resources reading and writing, doing research, helping out friends and students, and jogging in circles, ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes. By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic loser, not one iota less than if I were a card-carrying member of Queer Nation. But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don’t like it, they can go jump in the lake” (Pinker, 1997: 52).