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SERTOD #2

Sun, 19 May 2013 15:52:00 -0400

Seven random things of the day, part 2.

1. The Epicurean Dealmaker’s latest post on Jamie Dimon and why he needs to be stripped of his chairmanship

“Finally, the current Chairman has done a lousy job selecting his other Board members, particularly in the all-important area of audit and risk management. The risk oversight and monitoring function at a gigantic, staggeringly complex lending and trading bank like J.P. Morgan is arguably the most important one—after CEO succession—a Board has. Yet Jamie stacked his risk committee with a former lawyer and professional board member previously on the risk committee at AIG who currently heads a natural history museum, a rich kid whose life experience consists of managing grandad’s money, and the CEO of a a flight controls company. I will wander way out on a limb here and bet these people couldn’t evaluate the financial risks of a childrens’ lemonade stand, much less one of the largest banks on the planet.”

2. The Scientific 7-Minute Workout

“Work by scientists at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and other institutions shows, for instance, that even a few minutes of training at an intensity approaching your maximum capacity produces molecular changes within muscles comparable to those of several hours of running or bike riding.”

So naturally I’m really skeptical about this, but going to give it a try.

3. According to John Kemp and the IEA, if we’re all really committed to limiting the rise in temperatures to 2 degrees, “two-thirds of the currently known oil, coal and gas reserves would have to be left in the ground”. Wow.

2 degrees C is supposedly the global warming threshold since any temperature increase to more than two indicates that we’ll be quite screwed but 2/3 is a very large amount of energy to ignore away isnt it

4. here’s epic: astronaut singing Bowie’s Space Oddity in space

(with lyrics changed of course cause that is actually one scary song to sing in space to)

5. Immanuel was in Hong Kong when its’ giant rubber ducky deflates.

before

after

Sadly I cant really ask him if he’d noticed but that’s another story

6. True:

“Dinner parties are mere formalities; but you invite a man to breakfast because you want to see him.”

(Thomas Babington Macaulay)

via here

7. and finally: sweet potato and black bean veggie burgers - whats not to love?

On Writing

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:53:37 -0400

Yet from the perspective of your own life it must nevertheless have been a fairly decisive element …

Does that mean I’m going to have to say something about things that I never wished to talk about?

Then why did you write about it?

Perhaps precisely so I would not have to talk about it.

via New Yorker

commovente: Leonard Cohen

Sun, 05 May 2013 05:45:37 -0400

commovente:

Leonard Cohen

Fragments, April 2013

Sat, 04 May 2013 20:03:00 -0400

Came in late because that’s how I roll these days. I don’t complain of the consecutive late nights, but some sleep are just mine to have I suppose. Ended up fucking up a bit but I need some sanity back.

Or just some kind of pretense that I am still king of my castle etc etc etc and not entirely a slave to an otherwise anonymous system.

Anto goes around the office in white running shoes and his trademark disaster of a chunky pullover. Imelda walked around barefoot. This lawfirm is half hippie compound.

*
Is it pointless to waste time on pleasures that brings no glory?

Being high and working is a new thing.

I should have done it a lot sooner, and a lot more often.

Music session with Sandi Yudha. When I came in he was blasting Alice in Chains. Then I said please change it because it is giving me headache so he put on Maxwell instead, after countless pestering from my side. Then he said “do you like notorious BIG?” What kind of question was that. I said of course I do, so he played Juicy and as I mouthed the lyrics to it he was flailing around, acting like a rapper and I had to laugh. You don’t fit, I said, and he said at least I look like Tom Hardy. I said how many times do I have to tell you that you don’t but he still looked smug about it and it was late at night and he had the most perfect looking light stubble on his face so I let that pass.

*

DS got engaged this Sunday. She looked gorgeous. Fantastic set of diamond earrings and a light gray tenun. Small little jealous urges but maybe not. I still have a little bit of New York in me, so maybe that had to wait. Stephanie said go to school, LLM, do it. Probably the best days of my life, no regrets whatsoever, she said, and I decided to take her words for it.

goddam-i-am: “The concept is simple. Take a blank sheet with...

Sat, 04 May 2013 17:33:05 -0400

goddam-i-am:

“The concept is simple. Take a blank sheet with nothing but the basic outline of a pinup girl and illustrate a unique scene around her.”

Art by David Jablow. For more, click the link.

SERTOD #1

Sat, 04 May 2013 17:27:58 -0400

I present to myself SeRToD - or Seven Random Things of the Day. 7 things randomly collected based on the number 7 being the cognitive numerical limit for our short term working memory etc etc etc.

This was originally written sometime around August 2012 and was something I’d planned to do on a daily basis but work and other things got in the way so it rotted on in the drafts section. I shall now publish this and hopefully do it again sometime.

Here they are: ,

1. 95% of rare earths market is controlled by China, according to a U.S. Geological Survey. What are rare earths? Seventeen hard-to-find chemical elements with unique physical and chemical properties, used from stealth choppers to lasers, night vision goggles, smartphones and hybrid cars. Upon protests from US, EU and Japan, the WTO is to conduct an investigation on China’s policies regarding rare earths.

2. on another China news: Golden Elephants are not new zodiac signs, they are actually subprime mortgages.

The 14-page prospectus for “Wealth Management Plan No. 350”, sold by China Merchants Bank, says it aims to raise 200 million yuan ($35 million). Not until page 5 is it revealed that the product is linked to the Railway Ministry - whose 2.2 trillion yuan debt ($346 billion) exceeds the combined worth of all major U.S. banks.

A crisis waiting to happen?

3. A fantastic article on ‘honour’ killings at the LRB: “A Piece of White Silk”. Here are some quotable passages:

I recommend you read the entire thing.

4. A wonderful gif on the use of High Frequency Trading in the US stock market from January 2007 to January 2012, via Felix Salmon

5. So I’m not quite sure who Ryan Lochte is but this article is cute: The Rise of the Himbo- Why Playing Dumb Is Working for Ryan Lochte. Here are the gems:

On New York magazine’s Cut blog, the ladies have gleefully compiled a slideshow of cheesecake shots of Lochte, accompanied by his “deep thoughts” from Twitter. “Always reach for the moon cuz if u slip up u will still be a star!! #Jeah.” … “Jeah,” by the way, is Lochte’s personal catchphrase, stolen from Young Jeezy.

and

There’s a world of economic difference between endorsement-rich Lochte … and a struggling exotic dancer in Ybor City with a tricked-out truck and $13,000 in a safe … but both reminded me of what Susan Faludi, writing in the 1990s, labelled “ornamental masculinity”—“objectification, passivity, infantilization, pedestal-perching, and mirror-gazing” in the face of the disappearance of opportunities for “real” expressions of manly manliness.

6. A graphic on how Edgar Allan Poe kills off people on his books.

7. And finally, how to make onigiri.

blyve: Glenn Gould, photographed by Gordon Parks for LIFE...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 09:49:13 -0400

blyve:

Glenn Gould, photographed by Gordon Parks for LIFE magazine, 1955-1956.

"Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool."

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 09:43:29 -0400

““Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool.””

- Robert Brault (via creatingaquietmind)

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 01:43:24 -0400

Unless you’ve been wrong for so long there’s no one...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 07:09:00 -0400

Unless you’ve been wrong for so long there’s no one left forgiving.

Raining all day in my hometown - sleeping naked in bed with this track on. Feeling marvelous and a bit lonely.

fifteen ways to stay alive by daphne gottlieb

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 05:11:00 -0400

yankeemagicrealism

1. Offer the wolves your arm only from the elbow down. Leave tourniquet space. Do not offer them your calves. Do not offer them your side. Do not let them near your femoral artery, your jugular. Give them only your arm

2. Wear chapstick when kissing the bomb.

3. Pretend you don’t know English.

4. Pretend you never met her.

5. Offer the bomb to the wolves. Offer the wolves to the zombies.

6. Only insert a clean knife into your chest. Rusty ones will cause tetanus. Or infection.

7. Don’t inhale.

8. Realize that this love was not your trainwreck, was not the truck that flattened you, was not your Waterloo, did not cause massive hemorrhaging from a rusty knife. That love is still to come.

9. Use a rusty knife to cut through most of the noose in a strategic place so that it breaks when your weight is on it.

10. Practice desperate pleas for attention, louder calls for help. Learn them in English, French, Spanish: May Day, Aidez-Moi, AyÃºdeme.

11. Don’t kiss trainwrecks. Don’t kiss knives. Don’t kiss.

12. Pretend you made up the zombies, and only superheroes exist.

13. Pretend there is no kryptonite.

14. Pretend there was no love so sweet that you would have died for it, pretend that it does not belong to someone else now, pretend like your heart depends on it because it does. Pretend there is no wreck — you watched the train go by and felt the air brush your face and that was it. Another train passing. You do not need trains. You can fly. You are a superhero. And there is no kryptonite.

15. Forget her name.

Fragments, Sunday 24 February 2013

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 04:49:00 -0400

I am in hermit mode. Shut-in. Isolated. Have not been answering telephone calls for the past 3 days. locked in the bedroom.

3 old rolling stones album, 3 scorsese movies, one trailer of california split, hilary mantel talking of royal bodies, 1 kinks greatest hits and a wall street journal newspaper two weeks late, showers at 12 am, wakes up at 6, large breakfasts, no dinners, half a bottle of cough syrup, sleeping naked, smell of vanilla, face masks, yogurts, not acknowledging work, not smoking.

friday saturday and sunday alarmingly similar.

I still have these bouts. Less often, less mercurial, but mandatory to a functioning soul. Have never been an introvert, never quite made it as an extrovert, but these moments of isolation are vital. It’s really just plenty of reading, plenty of watching, and plenty of writing but they can only be considered unleashed somewhat if perfectly alone. Wont stand another day of this, will most definitely gets depressed. But on occasion, a very needed tonic.

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama - who has notably lived in a...

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 06:14:19 -0500

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama - who has notably lived in a psychiatric institution for the last four decades - has been obsessed with dots and infinity for her entire career, an inspiration she attributes directly to her hallucinations. In an attempt to share her experiences, she creates installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessive vision of dots or infinitely mirrored space.

Went in to a similar room while in Brisbane. Scared shitless.

Random Musings #14: 14 February 2013

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 04:05:00 -0500

Down with a bad case of the flu since Friday. Skipped work, bed rest, Scorsese movie marathon. Not so bad actually.

L called in for a late night wine drinking session on Friday but that had to wait. B is about to leave for Sydney on the 26th, I haven’t seen her in months and I have turned into that lousy friend who cant be reached for two straight days right when she’s calling in for her farewell.

I do this. I know I do. I feel terrible. On Monday I’ll call and make amends.

Meanwhile, will bask in this solitude.

And I’ve quit smoking again. Only been three days. It’s the usual haunts. Gnawing feeling in the throat, anxious about confrontations with other smokers, restless fingers, constant munching, etc. Must buy a pack of gums on Monday. I can’t believe I had to go through this again. There’s a pack of Reds on the locked drawer, and I am always just about to… never mind.

Took a late night shower yesterday which is a huge huge favourite thing of mine accompanied by Joni Mitchell’s A Case of You then started cleaning up my room which is a sure sign that I’m better.

My birthday was spent entirely on office hour. It wasn’t entirely spend at the office, if it makes it any less pitiful, but it was completely on office time.

11 something the night before me and MBA went to the nearest convenience store, where I thought I’d bought a plastic bag worth of ice cream and he insisted on a slof of cigarettes but the place didn’t have any. So he insisted on any other cartons, but they still didn’t have any. I was standing by the entire time and laughing because I know what it’s for. Eventually exasperated by the sheer ineptness of the convenience store dudes MBA gave up and brought home 10 packs of cigarette in an ugly looking plastic bag. He shrugged about it.

Worked and worked and was feeling a bit lonely because at 12 BT was the only one that came up to me to say happy birthday. Everybody had went missing but by this time I’ve figured out they’re scheming because the office was practically empty. At 12 20 or something the lot showed up, with a bowl of melted cake and ice cream, and a single candle that wouldn’t put off. They walked in chanting happy birthday. Grisha and Ramshenka was there too, and that was a bit of a surprise to me. We took cute pictures, I distributed the ice cream, MBA handed over the ugly looking plastic bag filled with Reds which is my birthday gift and we smoked it together. Anto talked about how far the firm grew, of his own times like the ones we’re having now. 30 minutes in and Ramshenka and Grisha went back home and the rest of us went back to work.

Work, slept a bit on the table, work, then sleeps again at the storage room but that got too cold and I gave up so I went back to the table looking horrendous. Then people started coming in, with me still looking horrendous then VT arrived, took a good look at me and said have you been here all night? and I said yeah and he tsked and said oh dear well its not a very good time to do that is it and I thought thanks for the fucking sympathy.

Others started showing up. Yogabear too. And greets me happy birthday in a bellowing voice and remarked jokingly and half-pityingly how sad my life IS that I had to spend the morning of my birthday with very little sleep while being perched at my desk at the office. Other people started pilfering in, I complained to MBA through e-mail that I needed a shower and at some point Sandi Yudha locked my head in his arm, placed his chin atop of me, hugged me from behind, and kissed me sideways on both cheek while murmuring happy birthday - happily scratching the short hairs of his beard on my sides and I thought well I can wake up to that shit everyday. The whole episode made me get up, brush my teeth and took a shower because I can’t risk getting another hug in that sorry state with my mouth tasting like sewage.

Sweet darling DC greeted happy birthday in the morning and I returned it with a grunt and a grumpy ass face only for her to return with two pieces of chocolate cake. She sang me happy birthday with two lighters as candle and I thought that’s so sweet and unexpected I wanted to bring a whole jazz band next time it was her turn for a birthday.

Then the day whizzed by cause I can’t seem to actually remember them. Recalled spending some hour at ESDM printing maps of mining license area, probably slept in the car a bit, some hour at Oil and Gas, etc. Remembers returning at the office to find MBA slumped on his table, though. It was late in the afternoon, I hadn’t eaten, so I suggested we shared one block of the chocolate cake DC bought me. He was all moany and grumpy but then I mentioned chocolate cake and he went lighting up like a bulb it was ridiculous. We were being funny with AR his roommate and munching along when Sandi Yudha enters the room and wrapped one arm around me, cheek firmly against mine, started pulling me up and into his hold. I wish we were alone but we weren’t so it got pretty awkward by this time. MBA turned his head away and AR who was just conversing and remarking at our zombie stupidity suddenly went back to typing. I sighed and softly dragged SY into the kitchen in promise of more cakes.

Cant remember the evening, passes by like usual perhaps. The fourteenth came and went with me still perched on the same exact seat. I was so elated that the day was over when it did. I went home at 4am on the fifteenth. Its all so inhumane.

The sad thing was I had arrived really early too on the 13th. So it was what? 36 hours of fucking office time?

Cant remember what happened on the 13th either too. Just the bit in the morning where I went to the bathroom for a bit and returned to my desk to find Sandi Yudha looking absolutely devastating in a light blue-gray checkered shirt sitting like a little slut that he is on the opposite table. I gave him a hug because it was his birthday and because I bloody could I mean everybody else can have the measly hand shake but not me this morning thank you very much.

But it was my funeral though because said hug was returned in amplified form later in the morning right smack in the middle of the office to everyone’s ogling view, which left me flabbergasted and a bit uneasy, hoping to hell that there were no witnesses to that. Plenty awkward. Didn’t say I hadn’t enjoy every bits of it though. I was in my usual joking mode and I remarked it’s your birthday and you still give me a shitload of work and he suddenly apologized and within seconds I was swallowed by two large arms and a wide chest. It was nothing compared to the cheek to cheek and hug that I gave him the morning I mean please I was just being French and I do that with every close dude friend of mine anyway it is a total non issue but then he went on and did that. Really. The boy can’t be trusted. What a game.

Anyway.

No mad parties for me afterwards. Another set of work for the weekend. A rather abrupt karaoke session after dinner at Demeter Ala’s house on Saturday. Slept the whole Sunday. Etc etc.

I haven’t aged as far as I was concerned.

☮ ☮ ☮ ☮ ☮ ☮ ☮ ☮ ☮ ☮ ☮ ☮

Photo

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 05:21:00 -0500

Fragments, 20 January 2013

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 13:51:00 -0500

Turning twenty-four in a few days.

Cant even begin to explain the mental nervous pacing that I have been doing for the past week.

L doesn’t understand. He basically has no understanding to pre-birthday anxieties or why birthdays should in any way cause any kind of anxiety. I can’t understand why he can’t understand it. But we’ve agreed to disagree. I told him that maybe its a half-empty/half-full kind of thing and leave it at that.

Third week in 2013 and I have never returned from work before 12AM.

Now I have turned into those people who complains that there should be more hours in a day because 24 hours is simply not enough and I still can’t believe I said that.

Sleeping naked.

Jakarta has been flooding for three straight days. Many colleagues have had to be evacuated out of their respective places of residences and is forced to stay in some place like another office even, or other apartments, and I truly sympathise. I’m talking half of the city being flooded. Security on one office building died because he was on the basement which is a parking lot, and the water came flooding in, like a huge wave, and he cant get out in time.

On Thursday only less than half of the office managed to get to work because either their houses have flooded or the streets are. The sky at 11 in the morning looks like its four in the afternoon and the only person perhaps almost entirely unfazed by the matter is the sole Singaporean at the firm. He toils away like any other day, in his crisp white shirt and glasses. “So you’re survivors of the flood!” He said to me and Sandi Yudha as we were sitting side by side one time and we said yeah and I thought, but what are you?

The thing that irks me the most about the whole flooding disaster is the sight of the president and the bleeding foreign minister, one in a black suit and a tie, pants all scrunched up to their knees because the fucking State Palace has been flooded.

May this city rot in hell I tell you. Or the president and his minions. Better him, though.

I dare complained on our way from the meeting about this to IH and he said nevermind us because we’re all actually at fault for this so we shouldn’t be complaining and maybe he’s right. Either way its a sad, sad day for my beloved city. Shoving it right at our pompous ass.

Jun Takahashi prefers to run counter-clockwise in Tokyo, in contrast to the majority of the city’s runners. What if one have a go doing that in Jakarta? But this city has no sense of direction and a different set of clockwork.

Hold Me To It

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 12:17:00 -0500

So here are my new year resolutions.

Attitude Change: Courage. Take more chances, actively avoid regret.

Work Principle: “You have to fall in rlove with your job. You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill.” - Jiro Ono. // Only do the job you fall in love with, but give your self time to fall in love with it.

Goal: 7 kgs in the span of 7 months

Photo

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 12:18:46 -0500

"We all know what it is like to be insufficiently ravished by a masterpiece of world culture—to stare..."

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 12:15:00 -0500

“We all know what it is like to be insufficiently ravished by a masterpiece of world culture—to stare at a canvas by Poussin and find ourselves wondering what we’re going to make for dinner, or whether there wasn’t something ever so slightly double-edged in that e-mail our colleague sent us this morning. Even if we are arrested and moved by what we see, there always eventually comes a moment when, “The balloon pops, the attention / Turns dully away.””

- Source

Random Musings #13: Who Else Here Wants The Boss

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 05:57:00 -0500

Tomorrow is monday.

That means I would have been working for basically a month and ten days.

On the first few weeks I still manage to wake up at 5 and do a 4K before going to work but now I leave from the office at 2 am and sleep until 7 only to be garotted by Ditjen Migas from 10-12 but never mind that cause this Friday I actually left the office at 6am in the morning only to stay at home to work during the weekend. So it dawns on me that this really has gotten nasty. I might need to get shits sorted.

That aside, new play thing at the office though.

One lush son of a bitch really. One pair of arms that could swallow you whole. One endless trail of facial hair starting from the sideburns down to the beard and faintly trails up to the moustache that is just on the right side of a good Gosling at Cannes day as opposed to Shia LaBeouf getting his coffee while wearing a fair isle sweater kind of day. One pair of sad eyes and by the grace of god he knows World War II and the difference between Nixon and Kissinger. It’s a low threshold I know but I breathed a sigh of relief. It feels so, so nice to fancy someone with a brain again. Safe to say my time in purgatory is finished and I am back home.

After further notice, I realised the boy struts around like one lush son of a bitch that knows his worth too. Oh well. Can’t have it all. So apparently he’s famously handsome judging by office talk and one night during my first office outing weekend he was high enough to show his actual self and it was deliciously the kind that puts on a pair of large headphones, retreats away, and space out into oblivion. He was basically passing out in a pair of polo shirt and one perfectly fitted dark jeans, limbs all sprawled on the bed absent-mindedly, as I entered the room while lighting a joint. Golden.

Pretty sure his taste in music is atrocious however. Sat in front of him once while he was playing his ipod so loudly that it filtered out. In my humble opinion it was the sound of screeching Lucifer, the kind of metal slash rock slash whatever genre of music that you’re supposed to headbang with or get angry to but you know, I couldn’t really be bothered to care. Safe to say this one’s probably only good for the fucking and that is ALL thank you very much. I really couldn’t care less if he listens to Taylor Swift’s we are never getting back together on repeat on a regular basis or have ten racks worth of CD on his shelf for K-Pop. The moment he sat on my chair with legs splayed out and smirked as I swatted him with a paper, I was resolved that whatever he pisses on really doesn’t fucking matter if I could just sit on those thighs as I carefully, slowly, and diligently bone him. Whoops.

Sorry about the NC-17 folks but le garcon is one hot stud so I refuse to feel guilty.

meandering about the boy with transcendental facial hair aside, there are more serious issues I need to care about like the state of my skin and the lack of reading I have endured. With more days at work the lousier my skin gets and I don’t know why or how to cope with it. There is apparently a pending US intervention in Syria or some kind and I know nothing of it until an hour ago and that is really disappointing me. At some point I manage to stuck in two Ayu Utami books and read it during the hours where I don’t have any work to do but there are no longer any of those hours these days I’m afraid and I’m deprived of a good book or a good and proper reading of something, anything. So annoyed and worried.

How do people at work manage their time and not lose the essence of their selves?

I can’t only be defined by the work I do. I mean that too, but its everything else too. There just needs more hours in a day. Or the world needs to have a bigger appreciation for idle time.

but first, my general opinion of the boss;