Monday, May 29, 2006 Suscribe to this blog


A world full of contrasts sanny @ 9:38 PM


Just yesterday my brother went back to Jakarta and purportedly got stuck on the PS2 for hours on end (as expected). He got to play Kingdom Hearts 2 and FFXII (blasted). On that same island (I mean Java) hours before James went to the Airport chaperoned by his friend (and misplacing my as-yet-to-be-found phone charger!), as all of us who happened to see the news know, a 6.2 Richter-Scale Earthquake ravaged its nearby environs, most notably, imo, Yogyakarta, hailed as the City of Scholars. Somehow the terms and jargons spread out on the newspapers reminded me of my secondary school days while I was studying about tectonic plates et al for my Physical Geography exams for reasons beyond me. I felt kind of detached, in a way. It's a real concern to me because it happened in my home country but as humans do, probably because I'm many miles away, it is, starkly, albeit more significant and poignant, just another piece of news.

And I thought, here's a real tragedy of a natural disaster at hand, and what are people fussing about? That totally idiotic anti-pornoaction (who coined this ambiguous term I know not) Bill. Maybe, this time round, people has become somewhat jaded since the Tsunami, and help, though still pouring in, would come in at a more calculated rather than emotional rate. There are honest altruistic people, I'm sure, now dealing with serious anguish and pain and goodness knows what. And yet, I think again, as my sis mentioned, evil people still swarm around like locusts. There's a boy facing real issues of survival, and there's a boy happily pressing the hours away on a console. Such mockery, no?

Somewhere now, Germans are preparing for World Cup festivities, and somewhere now, people are struggling to save lives. I feel guilty sometimes having all my selfishness about me and all and yet all the same I feel miffed that you should repress your selfishness because you're obliged to feel 'grateful' and not be greedy. Like, you shouldn't be happy (because there's so much unhappiness somewhere else) and you cannot feel sad for your predicament(whatever tragedy there is you must pull yourself - much sadder things are happening). Sigh. It's just hard to be a happy soul unless you're a bad meanie.