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Minggu, 02 Agustus 2009

how to do what you love?

0 komentar Diposting oleh hretnowulan di 23.01

Efek samping sekolah yang membosankan di jaman dahulu kali = =a.

Duh, semoga saja sekolah jaman sekarang bisa menyenangkan yah. Dulu ortu saya pernah nawarin sekolah yang pake sistem Quantum Learning, atau apa gitu. Pokoknya yang suasana belajarnya fun. Cuman sistemnya asrama. Nyesal deh nggak saya ambil kesempatan itu. T_T

Dari http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html, simak yah. Semoga bermanfaat.

How To Do What You Love?

January 2006

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn't—for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun.

And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work.

The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didn't, but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of work meant to prepare us for the real thing. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy.

Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most of them. Why did we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing dodgeball? For the same reason they had to watch over a bunch of kids instead of lying on a beach. You couldn't just do what you wanted.

I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. They may have to be made to work on certain things. But if we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later. [1]

Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that precisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told to use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn't think he meant work couldliterally be fun—fun like playing. It took me years to grasp that.

Jobs

By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about their work, or we would go to see them at work. It was always understood that they enjoyed what they did. In retrospect I think one may have: the private jet pilot. But I don't think the bank manager really did.

The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to. It would not merely be bad for your career to say that you despised your job, but a social faux-pas.

Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The first sentence of this essay explains that. If you have to like something to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what they do. That's where the upper-middle class tradition comes from. Just as houses all over America are full of chairs that are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed 250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who've done great things.

What a recipe for alienation. By the time they reach an age to think about what they'd like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one's work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."

Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do.

The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring. [2] Maybe it would be better for kids in this one case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house. [3]

It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. Ideally these coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in the patent office) proved they weren't identical.

The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve. But after the habit of so many years my idea of work still included a large component of pain. Work still seemed to require discipline, because only hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn't literally be fun. Surely one had to force oneself to work on them.

If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.

Bounds

How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you'll tend to stop searching too early. You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige—or sheer inertia.

Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first.

It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked thatmuch. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.

But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.

Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.

As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else—even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it.

I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you'll have terrible problems with procrastination. You'll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.

To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.

So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is reading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive.

I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do things that would make your friends say wow. But it probably wouldn't start to work properly till about age 22, because most people haven't had a big enough sample to pick friends from before then.

Sirens

What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know? [4]

This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially when you're young. [5] Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.

That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.

Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.

Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what's admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.

The other big force leading people astray is money. Money by itself is not that dangerous. When something pays well but is regarded with contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personal injury litigation, ambitious people aren't tempted by it. That kind of work ends up being done by people who are "just trying to make a living." (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say this.) The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine. A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn't thought much about what they really like.

The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?

This test is especially helpful in deciding between different kinds of academic work, because fields vary greatly in this respect. Most good mathematicians would work on math even if there were no jobs as math professors, whereas in the departments at the other end of the spectrum, the availability of teaching jobs is the driver: people would rather be English professors than work in ad agencies, and publishing papers is the way you compete for such jobs. Math would happen without math departments, but it is the existence of English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity in the novels of Conrad. No one does that kind of thing for fun.

The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money. It seems safe to say there are more undergrads who want to be novelists and whose parents want them to be doctors than who want to be doctors and whose parents want them to be novelists. The kids think their parents are "materialistic." Not necessarily. All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won't get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you'll have to deal with the consequences.

Discipline

With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.

It's hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don't underestimate this task. And don't feel bad if you haven't succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented, you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If you're surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you find contemptible, odds are they're lying to themselves. Not necessarily, but probably.

Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think—because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it—finding work you love does usually require discipline. Some people are lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just glide along as if they were on railroad tracks. But this seems the exception. More often people who do great things have careers with the trajectory of a ping-pong ball. They go to school to study A, drop out and get a job doing B, and then become famous for C after taking it up on the side.

Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness. Are you dropping out, or boldly carving a new path? You often can't tell yourself. Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find their niche.

Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it. Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well.

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you're actually writing.

"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.

Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you get to work on it. That's a separate question. And if you're ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible. [6]

It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their expectations. For example, if you asked random people on the street if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like "Oh, I can't draw." This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."

Another related line you often hear is that not everyone can do work they love—that someone has to do the unpleasant jobs. Really? How do you make them? In the US the only mechanism for forcing people to do unpleasant jobs is the draft, and that hasn't been invoked for over 30 years. All we can do is encourage people to do unpleasant work, with money and prestige.

If there's something people still won't do, it seems as if society just has to make do without. That's what happened with domestic servants. For millennia that was the canonical example of a job "someone had to do." And yet in the mid twentieth century servants practically disappeared in rich countries, and the rich have just had to do without.

So while there may be some things someone has to do, there's a good chance anyone saying that about any particular job is mistaken. Most unpleasant jobs would either get automated or go undone if no one were willing to do them.

Two Routes

There's another sense of "not everyone can do work they love" that's all too true, however. One has to make a living, and it's hard to get paid for doing work you love. There are two routes to that destination:

The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don't.

The two-job route: to work at things you don't like to get money to work on things you do.

The organic route is more common. It happens naturally to anyone who does good work. A young architect has to take whatever work he can get, but if he does well he'll gradually be in a position to pick and choose among projects. The disadvantage of this route is that it's slow and uncertain. Even tenure is not real freedom.

The two-job route has several variants depending on how long you work for money at a time. At one extreme is the "day job," where you work regular hours at one job to make money, and work on what you love in your spare time. At the other extreme you work at something till you make enoughnot to have to work for money again.

The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because it requires a deliberate choice. It's also more dangerous. Life tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job. Worse still, anything you work on changes you. If you work too long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain. And the best paying jobs are most dangerous, because they require your full attention.

The advantage of the two-job route is that it lets you jump over obstacles. The landscape of possible jobs isn't flat; there are walls of varying heights between different kinds of work. [7] The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you from architecture to product design, but not, probably, to music. If you make money doing one thing and then work on another, you have more freedom of choice.

Which route should you take? That depends on how sure you are of what you want to do, how good you are at taking orders, how much risk you can stand, and the odds that anyone will pay (in your lifetime) for what you want to do. If you're sure of the general area you want to work in and it's something people are likely to pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route. But if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand the risk.

Don't decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it's wrong.

A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell "Don't do it!" (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way—including, unfortunately, not liking it.

Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.

When you're young, you're given the impression that you'll get enough information to make each choice before you need to make it. But this is certainly not so with work. When you're deciding what to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information. Even in college you get little idea what various types of work are like. At best you may have a couple internships, but not all jobs offer internships, and those that do don't teach you much more about the work than being a batboy teaches you about playing baseball.

In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you get better results if you use flexible media. So unless you're fairly sure what you want to do, your best bet may be to choose a type of work that could turn into either an organic or two-job career. That was probably part of the reason I chose computers. You can be a professor, or make a lot of money, or morph it into any number of other kinds of work.

It's also wise, early on, to seek jobs that let you do many different things, so you can learn faster what various kinds of work are like. Conversely, the extreme version of the two-job route is dangerous because it teaches you so little about what you like. If you work hard at being a bond trader for ten years, thinking that you'll quit and write novels when you have enough money, what happens when you quit and then discover that you don't actually like writing novels?

Most people would say, I'd take that problem. Give me a million dollars and I'll figure out what to do. But it's harder than it looks. Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.

Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're practically there.

Notes

[1] Currently we do the opposite: when we make kids do boring work, like arithmetic drills, instead of admitting frankly that it's boring, we try to disguise it with superficial decorations.

[2] One father told me about a related phenomenon: he found himself concealing from his family how much he liked his work. When he wanted to go to work on a saturday, he found it easier to say that it was because he "had to" for some reason, rather than admitting he preferred to work than stay home with them.

[3] Something similar happens with suburbs. Parents move to suburbs to raise their kids in a safe environment, but suburbs are so dull and artificial that by the time they're fifteen the kids are convinced the whole world is boring.

[4] I'm not saying friends should be the only audience for your work. The more people you can help, the better. But friends should be your compass.

[5] Donald Hall said young would-be poets were mistaken to be so obsessed with being published. But you can imagine what it would do for a 24 year old to get a poem published inThe New Yorker. Now to people he meets at parties he's a real poet. Actually he's no better or worse than he was before, but to a clueless audience like that, the approval of an official authority makes all the difference. So it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. The reason the young care so much about prestige is that the people they want to impress are not very discerning.

[6] This is isomorphic to the principle that you should prevent your beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by how you wish they were. Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously. The continuing popularity of religion is the most visible index of that.

[7] A more accurate metaphor would be to say that the graph of jobs is not very well connected.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Dan Friedman, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, David Sloo, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this.

Jumat, 31 Juli 2009

ngisi weekend

0 komentar Diposting oleh hretnowulan di 17.36

Tadinya mau nyoba main Desperado, tapi nggak ah. Langsung kuhapus dari dari daftar lagu yang ingin gw pelajari/mainkan. No No No.... Say No To Sad Song!! Hahaha.... Eh tapi gw masi excited main musik, tandanya gw masih oke nih... Cuman emang gw suka males dalam beberapa hal aja kok.

Oiya, mau sharing sesuatu juga nih. Bagi pribadi yang memiliki karakter melankolis kaya gw. Jauh-jauh deh sama lagu-lagu bergenre atau berlirik sedih. Emang sih kalo lagi sedih, rasanya emang cocok dan klop banget dengerin lagu-lagu kaya gitu. Tapi NO... jangan yah...

Btw, mau tau nggak kenapa gw suka banget sama ST12?! Karna lagu itu menyelamatkan gw pas gw nyetir trus spion gw nyenggol bapak-bapak di pinggir jalan. Gw dengerin lagu itu di Hokben MKG, pas lagi lemes-lemesnya karna inget harus nyetir pulang karna nggak ada yang bisa gantiin gw nyetir pulang karna gw pergi sama adik gw. Padahal waktu itu gw baru makan lho. Lemes tih kaitannya sama sugesti, sama pikiran lo. Mau lo makan segambreng juga, tapi kalo pikiran lo muram, yah masih lemes lah dikit2. Nah untung aja Hokben tempat gw makan itu muter lagu2nya ST12.... "Cari Pacar Lagi" beneran membangkitkan semangat gw... Percaya deh sama gw.... Oke... udahan dulu yah. Have a nice day. Have a nice weekend.. Enjoy happy song :D

Rabu, 29 Juli 2009

what's your passion?

0 komentar Diposting oleh hretnowulan di 12.23

Blog ini udah kaya tempat sampah. Tapi gw lebih milih ngetik ketimbang nulis. Huff... Bener-bener lagi males & nggak semangat nih akhir-akhir ini. Gimana ya caranya supaya semangatku terdongkrak lagi? Soalnya saya suka sih menjalani hidup dengan kebahagiaan, tawa, canda... Sounds weird, tapi yah, itulah aku. Aku seneng punya temen2 yang bisa diajak bercanda. Tapi akhir2 ini aku lagi butuh banget temen bercanda. No, not online friends... males ah becanda lewat internet. Kesannya nggak real aja. Kalo bercanda tatap muka langsung, beda lho rasanya. Lebih happy pas lihat ekspresi muka lawan bicaramu. Hufff.... so so lonely. Kalo lagi gini, saya suka menghayal bisa kerja di Google X). Kejauhan ah melarikan dirinya. Tapi emang bener sih, kayanya kerja di tempat itu bakalan bisa fun banget. Full main2 tapi serius. Lots of creativity aura.... Dan nggak tau kenapa, menghayal kaya gitu aja, bisa bikin saya happy dan mood saya langsung baik deh :), hihihi...

Selasa, 28 Juli 2009

simplify

0 komentar Diposting oleh hretnowulan di 22.55

Baru aja baca status YM temen gw : "masih bertanya-tanya, apa benar manusia pernah menginjakkan kakinya di bulan." Jadi ingat pada kejahatan kelas kere (??) yang pernah gw lakukan waktu SMP. Masuk account e-mail seseorang dimana passwordnya adalah nama belakangnya sendiri. Gimana caranya gw masuk? Dengan manfaatin fasilitas "forgot your password" dan password e-mailnya gw dapetin dengan mudah. Dengan cara serupa, gw dapetin juga password-password e-mail temen gw yang lainnya dan gw jadikan sarana pelampiasan kenakalan anak SMP. Nggak sengaja suatu hari gw kelepasan chatting sama korban gw tentang isi e-mailnya yang berisikan gosip bahwa Neil Amstrong ke bulan tuh cuman rekayasa belaka. Yah gitulah, akhirnya gw bahas tuh masalah sama tuh cowok yang anak kuliahan dan ujung-ujungnya dia tahu dia suka baca-baca e-mailnya dia. Yah begitu deh. Sebenernya cara itu orisinal gw temuin sendiri setelah gw nggak dapet ijin baca e-mailnya temen gw, Meta, pas kita berdua patungan ke warnet. So pulang dari warnet, gw pulang ke rumah dan memutar otak gimana caranya gw tetap bisa menjalankan misi gw. Dan ditemukanlah cara sederhana yang waktu itu belum banyak dipikirkan orang. Beberapa hari kemudian, cara itu ada di Koran Tempo, dan beberapa waktu sesudahnya, cara itu jadi nggak terlalu efektif lagi untuk dilakukan.

Yah pokoknya begitulah. Kita tuh sering mikir solusi dari suatu masalah dengan cara yang ribet. Padahal bisa jadi ada cara yang sederhana yang dapat memperbaiki keadaan. Gitu aja sih yang gw maksud. "Simplify but not simpler" (kata Albert Einstein kalo nggak salah). Lagian punya masalah juga ada bagusnya sih, bisa merangsang daya pikir dan kreativitas kita. Ya nggak? Fokus pada solusi aja deh. Konsentrasi. Ya sudah, begitu saja. *kaya orang sinting nih, nasehatin diri sendiri*. Oke deh.

beginilah

0 komentar Diposting oleh hretnowulan di 01.37

Kaya-kayanya, postingan berikut bakalan jadi yang paling gelap daripada yang sudah pernah ada maupun belum (kaya Harry Potter #6 di antara Harry Potter Harry Potter edisi lainnya). Sok dramatis ah, tapi gw merasa bakal menuliskan pengakuan gw yang terdalam setelah selama ini hanya membahas hal-hal sehari-hari. Gw tahu yah kalo gw tuh kadang-kadang agak sotoy, tapi beneran lho, kadang-kadang gw bisa ngerti apa yang dirasakan atau dipikirkan orang lain. Bukan.... bukan membaca pikiran. Gw nggak bisa membaca pikiran, occlumency, legilimency, ato sejenis itu. Tapi gw merasa gw punya semacam firasat yang kuat pada berbagai hal. Hal itu hanya berlaku, jika dan hanya jika, gw bener-bener niat untuk mengetahuinya. Nih, misalnya ya, misalnya, gw bisa nebak apa yang bakal dosen gw lakukan, waktu jaman kuliah dulu. Ato kalo dosen gw ngasi tebakan jayus, gw bakal tau tuh joke bakalan kemana arahnya, makanya gw suka ketawa duluan. Atau banyak hal lain deh. Nggak cuman kelakuan dosen aja sih, orang lain juga, bahkan scene di film padahal gw belum nonton. Makanya gw terkenal sebagai tukang protes ato tukang komentar karna nggak tahu kenapa, gw sekadar tahu saja tentang bagaimana seharusnya film itu bergulir dan kadang-kadang, memang itu yang terjadi. Ato pas tingkat 4, gw pernah stress karna temen-temen sekelompok pemodelan gw maksa-maksa gw presentasi di depan umum. Fyi, gw lemah public speaking lho (yang merupakan alasan terkuat kenapa gw ikut les desain,, agar gw bisa menggambarkan pemikiran gw dalam bahasa visual tanpa harus banyak menceritakannya secara mendetail... eh beneran lho.... aku dapat A di les desainku, aku bener-bener serius lho..).

Oke ganti paragraf walaupun belum ganti topik, balik ke stress pra presentasi. Sore sebelumnya di departemen gw mati lampu, padahal harus bikin slide. Karna kosan gw juga mati, so akhirnya gw nongkrong di himpunan. Temen gw, Rantoni, ngajakin main catur dan gw menang (nggak tau dia ngalah ato gimana, pokoknya gw menang). Rasanya seneng deh menang, walaupun mungkin aja dia ngalah sama gw. Nah besoknya, jam 9 pagi, gw udah nongkrong di himpunan lagi (presentasinya jam 4). Buat ngelupain fakta bahwa gw harus presentasi di sore harinya, gw ngajak anak-anak himp yang ada buat main catur. Dari 6 permainan, gw menang 5 kali. Gw menang lawan Ghif, Dinabo, Ferry, nggak kenal, nggak kenal (alias lupa). Gw dikalahin dengan amat sangat mudah oleh temen gw Fahri. Oiya, gw mengalahkan Ghif dengan beda-beda tipis. Wah, itu langkah besar. Gw SAMA SEKALI NGGAK PERNAH sengaja-sengaja main catur lawan siapapun. So gw seneng banget karna (1) bisa ngelupain masalah (2) menang tanpa disangka-sangka melawan beberapa orang. Padahal gw nggak pernah latihan catur. Gw cuman ngerti aturan-aturannya doang. Blagu banget yah gw????????? Tapi gw mau nyatain bahwa catur..... adalah permainan ”membaca”. “membaca” yang sama, yang gw praktekkan ketika “membaca” situasi, orang, atau apapun. Percaya deh sama gw, kadang-kadang, gw bisa segitu intensnya ngerti perasaan orang, walaupun gw paling anti nunjukkin perasaan sentimentil.

Nah cukup intronya, masuk ke bagian utamanya. Gw mau bilang kalo gw ngerti deh rasanya jadi kakak gw, the black sheep of the family (sorry lho bro, hiperbolis juga nih penggunaan kata-kata gw, hahah…). Dulu, waktu masih SMP, gw pernah nganter kakak gw ke psikolog. Yang ada gw malah diusir keluar karna ngetawain kakak gw pas disuruh ngelipet-lipet kertas dengan ridikulusnya oleh Ibu Psikolog (maaf lho Bu Psikolog dan semua yang tersinggung oleh kata-kata gw yang sarkastis barusan). Namanya juga pemikiran anak SMP. Oke, nah pokoknya kakak gw pernah terlibat urusan per-psikolog-an cuma gara-gara dia pernah kena kasus.

Nah yang ini patut banget dibaca oleh SELURUH ORANG TUA DI DUNIA, bahwa kena kasus pas jaman sekolah tuh biasa lagi. Jangan hiperbolis ah. Kadang-kadang manusia tuh emang suka bertingkah eksentrik. Itu tandanya kita KREATIF. Yang patut orang tua lakukan adalah MULAI MENCOBA MEMAHAMI DAN BUKANNYA MALAH MENGHAKIMI BAHWA ada yang salah sama mereka. Gw ngerti karna GW JUGA DISURUH BERKONSULTASI DENGAN PSIKOLOG OLEH AYAH GW di umur gw yang ke-23...... Hahaha... akhirnya anak kedua ayahku juga ikut-ikutan aneh dan disuruh berkonsultasi dengan psikolog.

Tapi ya ampun.... apa susahnya sih memahami gw? Gw tuh otak kiri (ato kanan yah?) minded since gw alumni matematik. Gw biasanya punya alesan atas segala tindak tanduk gw. Tapi since gw juga main musik, jadi ya kadang-kadang gw suka improvisasi. Tapi emang kaya ortu-ortu kebanyakan, ortu-ortu kita tuh KONSERVATIF.

Wah kebanyakan pake caps lock yah? (Pertanda gw sedang agak kesal)…… Tapi nih ya, tapi…. Gw nggak akan terpengaruh oleh saran ayah gw itu. Yah oke lah terserah. Tapi gw akan terus menjadi gw. Menjadi diri gw sendiri yang alumni matematik sekaligus suka main piano sekaligus eksentrik. Orang kan beda-beda dong yah? Masa mau dicap sama semua? Selama gw masih menghormati orang lain, nggak ada salahnya gw melakukan hal-hal yang ingin gw lakukan....... dan gw juga akan membebaskan jiwa adik gw agar dia nggak terkungkung dalam tradisi keluarga yang membelenggu dirinya (*lebay ah has*...... hahahha).... Pokoknya yah.... nggak tau deh, apa emang firasat gw yang terlalu tajem ato emang gw orangnya beneran complicated...... don’t judge the book by its cover (*tapi by its price* hahahah…)…. Jangan nilai orang dari luarnya aja….. khususnya buat para orang tua nih..... jangan terlalu serius deh Pak, Bu.... Jangan terlalu banyak ngerjain akuntasi..... pergi karokelah sekali-kali agar Anda lihat sisi lain dunia....... ngerti sih gw, kebanyakan orang tua tuh yaaaaa agak nggak bisa melintasi masa...... ngerti-ngerti deh...... Nah baiklah.... sekian curhatan panjang lebar gw. Lain kali sambung lagi. Au revoir :D

Sabtu, 25 Juli 2009

haduh

0 komentar Diposting oleh hretnowulan di 10.10

Wah, sudah lama nggak ngupdate blog ini (emang siapa juga yang mau baca?). Ahaha... baiklah. Gw nulis ini sebagai bahan dokumentasi dan evaluasi perjalanan hidup gw aja kok (halah halah T_T). Oke, cukup ngelanturnya. Hmmm, keluhan hari ini adalah gw belum ngambil kartu ATM dari bank, sementara gw mau beli suatu alat elektronik tertentu. Sebenernya gw punya uang tunai tapi nggak terlalu cukup dan kurangnya hanya sedikit yang membuat gw berpikir untuk menjual beberapa barang pribadi gw (kaya garage sale gitu lho). Tapi setelah mikir lagi, sayang deh gw ama barang-barang gw walopun gw udah nggak suka dengerin kaset lagi dan beralih ke CD audio tapi kaset tetap punya kenangannya sendiri.

Apalagi kaset Britney Spears, C. Aguilera, AFI (Akademi Fantasi Indosiar).... hahahah...:D. Sampe jaman SMA, gw masih beli kaset dan ke sekolah suka bawa walkman dan kadang kalo abis tes BTA gw suka nyanyi-nyanyi stress gitu (gw nggak bener-bener sadar lho nyanyi-nyanyinya, ampe-ampe mbak-mbak BTA yang dateng buat ngumpulin kertas jawaban jadi senyum-senyum maklum gitu liat gw nggak waras) :D Ihhh.. masa-masa SMA yang kacau dan nggak jelas dan agak sinting ituuu...... hihihi.... T_T

Pernah gw jual buku boring yang tebelnya ngalah-ngalahin kamus : Musashi, cuma gara-gara gw males bawa-bawa buku itu di dalam tas gw setelah temen gw, Qonita, balikin buku gw itu T_T. Gw sama sekali nggak mikir harganya. Gw kasih aja berapa (waktu itu gw jual ke temen gw, temen gw jual lewat rileks, forum di ITB gitu lah) terserah deh. Pokoknya waktu itu gw maless banget bawa-bawa buku itu di tas gw. Sekarang nyesel deh, karna buku itu gw beli dari uang les gw. Gw kan pernah jadi outstanding student (lagi hokiii,, hehehe :D) di tempat les bahasa inggris dan akibatnya gw les gratis tapi uangnya tetep gw tilep, buat beli bukuuu.... hahaha... Tuh buku mahal lho... ampe dua ratus ribuan gitu deh, apalagi waktu itu baru launching edisi jilid jadi 1 nya. Sebenernya bokap gw punya edisi kepisah-pisahnya (ada 6 buku). Cuman buku terakhirnya salah cetak, jadi kan endingnya ngegantung gitu. Gw kan penasaran, dan akhirnya, demi memuaskan hasrat gw, maka gw belilah tuh buku yang tebel gila... cuman buat tau endingnya doang.... tapi karna nggak mau rugi, gw baca ulang tuh buku dari awal dan gw bawa kemana-mana pas liburan. Trus orang-orang pada nyindir-nyindir gw kuliah kedokteran padahal waktu itu gw masih SMA....T_T.... hahaha! :D

Uhh.... uhhh..... so intinya, gw nggak mau ah jual barang-barang pribadi (males ah jualan, nggak bakat bisnis, gw orangnya nggak tegaan T_T). So gw ambil kartu ATM gw ajalah. Seneng sih, tabungan gw nggak keusik-usik. Tapi yaaa......

Btw... tadi gw baru buka email dan banyak banget email dari milis himpunan. Isinya debar kusir gitu. Pusing gw bacanya. T_T. Baru bangun udah baca email ribut-ribut. Salah satunya dari kakak kelas gw yang rajin ngajarin aljabar linier ke juniornya.... nggak nyangka gw, dia bisa segitu ofensifnya nyerang 1 orang tertentu T_T. Pusing gw bacanya. Mau nggak gw baca, penasaran... Mau gw baca, nggak enak banget dibaca.... T_T. Sialnya gw, kadang-kadang hipersensitif. Waktu itu gw dan teman-teman yang lain pernah makan bareng dia di daerah Gelap Nyawang. Ketemu nggak sengaja sebenarnya. So akhirnya kita duduk semeja. Dia mengeluarkan 1 pernyataaan tertentu : ”Alin (aljabar linier) tuh gampang lho sebenarnya”. Padahal di antara kita ada yang alinnya C dan mengutuk keras alin. Emang umum sih, alin dikutuk di setiap angkatan. Tuh pelajaran emang susah. Tapi dia dengan entengnya bilang begitu T_T. Walaupun gw nggak mengutuk alin (tapi mengutuk Struk Al, hahahah!!), tapi kata-katanya berasa menghujam lho *lebay mode*, dan yahhh....... nggak tahulah..... nggak tahu lagi..... males ngetiknya..... padahal dia tuh baik banget lho T_T.... trus ditambah debat kusir di milis tadi.... T_T..... Untung ada Lina.... dia ngirim iklan cupcakes towel gitu deh.... Brasa intremezzoo..... Halah.... apa coba nih, gw jadi sentimentil gini? Beberapa waktu lalu, gw ketemu temen les desain gw, Ratih. Yep gw pernah ikut les desain lhooo...... heheheh....:D. Walaupun jadi satu-satunya anak matematik di sana, gw mendapati diri gw cocok temenen sama Ratih. Kita sering ngalor ngidul ke Mc D Dago bareng. Trus pulang tengah malam. Alhamdulillah aman tuh (beberapa waktu lalu kakak gw dirampok di Siliwangi T_T). Udah gitu nonton bareng, ke FO bareng... dan dia jadi satu-satunya orang yang menyemangati gw untuk bertahan pada dosen dan topik TA gw (dosen gw tuh susah banget ditemuin) di saat anak-anak lain di jurusan gw malah berkata sebaliknya (ganti dosen). Beneran lho.... yakin sih gw dia nggak ngerti topik TA dan gimana dosen pembimbing gw saat itu. Dia cuma bilang gini : ”ah masa cuman gara-gara itu, lo udah nyerah? Come on! (sok gaya ngikutin film-film, hahahah :D)”. Tapi pas kemaren gw ketemu sama dia, gw dapati dia berderai air mata. Terharu kayanya. Salah satu penyebabnya adalah gw. Gw ceritain pengalaman hidup beberapa orang dan dia malah jadi terharu.... hehehe.... niatnya mau nyemangatin, eh dia malah jadi terharu.... anak (alumni) DKV emang melankolisnya kental kali yah? Gampang terharu gitu. Tapi dia emang tajam secara emosional dan memori. Jarang-jarang gw bisa nemuin temen dengan memori setajam dia. Dia nyaris menyimak setiap kata yang gw bilang dan bisa masih bisa mengingatnya beberapa waktu kemudian. Gw juga begitu sih (narsis, hahahah!). walaupun gw acuh tak acuh, kadang-kadang ingatan gw juga suka aneh. Giliran waktu ujian bisa lupa, tapi momen-momen atau kata-kata nggak bisa gw lupain. Mungkin itu karna kita sama-sama...... les desain??? Walaupun gw cuman bisa di actionscript dan sama sekali nggak artistik dalam membuat animasi (gw malah bikin game congklak untuk proyek flash gw. Dengan tambahan-tambahan gambar Albert Einstein yang jelek (gw jiplak, maklum, nggak bisa gambar.... hahahah :D) dan lagu Bad Day nya Daniel Powter.... (+karokenya) jadi yang mau nyanyi-nyanyi frustrasi kalo kalah habis main congklak (melawan AI bikinan gw, yang ngaco-ngaco gitu, hahaha....) bisa nyanyi-nyanyi lagu itu)..... Hahahah.... jelas dapat predikat ANEH dari kakak Comlabs yang dengan baik hatinya meneriakkan kata itu di seantro kelas ketika pertama kali liat proyek bikinan gw ^_^.... Tapi masa bodo ah :D.... udah biasa ini.....

Wah, jadi ngelantur...... udahan dulu deh ya kalo gitu.... mau ke gramedia nih... mau beli komik (udah lama nggak baca komik).... sama CD..... (katanya mau beli alat elektronik??).... wah kalo itu sih pake dana yang udah dilokalisir (???) untuk itu deh ya.... (jelas bukan dari orang tua lhooooo)....... Oke deh.... au revoir ^^,

Rabu, 01 Juli 2009

tadi malam sulit tidur, kepikiran sesuatu T_T

0 komentar Diposting oleh hretnowulan di 06.31

tadi malam susah tidur. kepikiran adik gw yang memilih untuk mendaftar sekolah unggulan. nemnya tinggi sih jadi dia nggak salah apa-apa. masalahnya gw agak khawatir aja karna biasanya dia kan males-malesan kalo harus ngerjain pr T_T. ogah-ogahan kalo mau berangkat sekolah. mau uan aja main play station, komputer, game online melulu kerjaannya. kalo ngobrol juga ngobrolin game ato cheat game. kalo nonton tv juga nontonin acara game. so intinya, dia bukan pecinta sekolah. eh ini tiba-tiba mau masuk sekolah unggulan. amat sangat aneh. katanya dia mau masuk sekolah unggulan untuk membahagiakan orang tua. tambah aneh lagi deh. beneran deh. apa karna gw terlalu sarkastis yah? untung deh has, adik lo masih berani ngungkapin hal-hal aneh model gitu dan nggak merasa aneh karnanya. gw kira sih ini sedikit banyak karna dia habis nonton Garuda Di Dadaku. -_-

yasud, toh hari ini kan bukan keputusan final dia harus nentuin pilihannya. hari ini dia masih memilih 5 sekolah.

sebenernya gw sih oke aja dia mau masuk smp manapun, masalahnya, gw nggak mau dia kehilangan masa-masa bermainnya. yah tapi bukannya nggak mungkin juga dia bakalan kehilangan 100% masa-masa bermainnya kan? hihi. kayanya kekhawatiran gw agak nggak beralasan. :)

;;