have you ever lost your faith in anything?

if this question is asked to me, i won’t sure what to say.

i’ve always been a person with so much obsession and ambition. i want to do this, i want to do that. i want to achieve this, i have to achieve that. so many things. i thought i would always have strength to keep moving forward to reach all of them. i thought i was that strong. but i don’t know why,,,suddenly, just suddenly, at some point, i just feel so tired.

maybe it’s because i’ve always been a person with so lack of self confidence. and being a Perfect Melancholy character always leads me to pessimistic.  that lately some disturbing questions just keep popping up in me:

“can i make it there?” “is this what i really want in life?” “what if when you get there, it’s not as beautiful as you’ve expected?” “do i have to sacrifice so many things for this?” “what if it doesn’t work?”

i’m not sure of what i’m doing now. well, i keep moving forward because i know that the world never waits for me. but i just don’t know whether i’m doing the right thing or not

it reminds me of lines in Father and Son song:

I was once like you are now
And I know that it’s not easy
To become when you’ve found
Something going on
But take your time–think a lot
Think of everthing you’ve got
For you will still be here tomorrow
But your dreams may not…

as many people know, i love veggies. this morning i decided to bring fresh salad for my lunch. but we don’t have many choices in the fridge, so i just took red tomato, lettuce, and cucumber. carrots and beans were also there, but i thought they would just ruin the taste.

so i cut the 3 veggies into small cuts. mix them.
then pour a little salt, less sugar, pepper (these three must be balance with the proportion of the veggie) and have a quarter of lime, get the juice and pour it into the veggie mix.
mix them once more

and my salad is ready!

it’s so fresh. the salt and sugar give the salad a taste, you know veggies are tasteless and you won’t taste the salt and sugar in each its own taste. the lime juice doesn’t come out very sour, it’s balanced by the sweet taste of tomato. and the pepper will leave a warm feeling on your throat.
this salad is gonna be watery, so if you want to add other veggies, make sure they fit it.

i forgot to make a review about this movie “21″ that i watched a few weeks ago. so here i begin.

my friend recommended me to watch this movie and gave me the copy (in divx file if i’m not mistaken) on my birthday, last january 21st. but i had not watched it until a few days later.

(picture taken from here)

21 is about a bright young man, an engineering student of MIT who was accepted in Harvard Medical school, the dream of his life. with gpa of 4 and many achievements, his only problem was the money of $300,000 to make it all checked. so he needed this Robinson scholarship but he got to impress the board with his essay. during his struggle, his professor, Mickey Rossa, offering him a business deal: counting cards in blackjack game in vegas. at first Ben Campbell refused it. but since one of the 4 people in the team was the girl he had been crushed for along time into, Jill, and that girl persuaded him to join the team, he then finally did it. this counting cards, though is not illegal, is a system that can break the vegas system so the team had to work carefully and smoothly under the radar. how cool it is to watch a gambling game played with and beaten by simple math theories.

the movie is entertaining and full of trick, though nothing’s really special. i didn’t see kevin spacey’s best act here, while jim sturgess is so cute (hahaha) that it distracted me from giving an objective review. and also, unfortunately, the movie didn’t really show how bright Ben’s brain is. i mean, except his “told” gpa of 4 and a bit impressive argument at class, we mostly see him as a person with strong memory. well, for me strong memory does not always mean hand in hand with brilliance. i mean, the movie even didn’t really show how he counted cards on the blackjack tables.

(picture taken from here)

i borrowed this movie from a friend last week, but could not manage to watch it until last night. the title was “Julie&Julia”. i heard it from the golden globe event a few days ago, about meryl streep was nominated (or won?) for her act in this movie. so i bet it’s a movie worth watching.

the movie is taken from two true stories about two women lived in the two different times. what makes them connected? the answer is cooking.

julia child was famous for her cooking book titled “Mastering the art of french cooking”. the movie tells us about julia’s time in paris in 1949 when her husband and she had to live there because paul, he husband was assigned by the US embassy to work in paris. julia who loved food and fell in love in french menu, finally decided to take a cooking lesson in Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. she went through ups and downs together with her loving husband…until destiny brought her to meet two cooking book writers. julia who never at first thought to teach a cooking a lesson or even write a cooking book, finally realized what she really wanted to do in life after being a good wife for paul.

the most interesting thing about julia’s character was her high pitch voice and her “almost-giant-but-charming” figure.

about almost 40 years later, julie powell, a common wife who works full time in a government service and finds cooking as her entertainment, started to publish a blog titled “julie/julia project”. this project is for her to cook 524 of recipes taken from julia’s child phenomenal book in 365 days. she went through hard times in friendship, carrier and even marriage life within her project. until she finally realized what it all meant for her.

i rise my two thumbs up for this movie. i really like every aspect of this movie. the main idea, scenes, characters, massages, and many other things. but above all, this movie is very inspiring. i think i have a lot of things in common with julie powell character, except that she is married. she really wants to be a writer, and so do i. she finds cooking as relaxation and entertainment, i do too. she put her ideas into a blog and struggle to maintain her writing, voilla…i don’t have to tell.

the interesting thing about julie powell character was that she is just as common woman as we are, but she knows her value and has a clear thought about what she wants to do then perseveres on what she does. that is very inspirational for me.

i never call my self as a vegetarian. whenever people ask me, i always tell them that i don’t eat red meat. no beef, no goat, no ox, let alone pork or bacon. some of them will respond with a question of “why” and some others will just say “Ohh.”
for the “why” question is a bit hard for me, because i myself never know exactly why i don’t eat red meat. so far as i can remember, i never like red meat since i was little. well i did eat, but never preferable. growing up into my teenage life, i stop eating red meat but still have a desire to eat meatballs, beef burgers, sausages, and still tolerate some soups (though i don’t eat the meat).
as time went by, reaching my late teenage life, my olfactory sensor seemed to be more sensitive. for me all kind of red meats smell like the animal themselves and their smell are a lot similar like human smell. just so disgusting for me. so it’s been years i’ve never been tasting any red meat and cannot even stand for smelling and seeing it.

within the vegetarian types, i found out that i’m a pollo-vegetarian, because i still eat poultry like chicken or duck, even though they’re not preferable for me.

so, there are many types of vegetarians:
1. vegans: avoid any product of animal, for food and sometimes even for other things as well.
2. lacto-vegatrians: still tolerate milk, but not eggs. sometimes even avoid other dairies.
3. lacto-ovo-vegetarians: tolerate both eggs and dairies.
4. pesce-vegetarians: eat fish
5. pollo-vegetarians: do not eat red meat, but tolerate eggs, fish, dairies.
6. flexitarians: mainly eat vegetarian food but occasionally make exceptions.

the last movie i watched was Sandra Bullock’s “All About Steve” on dvd. well, i laughed here and there but generally there’s nothing special about the movie. i don’t even think it was sandra bullock’s best performance. she played as a freak girl who works as a crossword consultant for a newspaper. the whole movie tells about how the sexy steve (bradley cooper) has made bullock got really obsess of him after their lame blind date.

(picture taken from here)

before watching this one, i watched another bullock’s movie (which later brought her to win the Golden Globe award) “Blind Side”. different from the movie above, this one is a very good movie. taken from a true story of Michael Oher whose life had altered from a homeless boy to one of US NFL’s greatest player since he was adopted by the Tuohy family.

(picture taken from here)

and last night while i was watching a korean channel on tv, i saw a movie trailer where Robert Pattionson (the edward cullen) played as Salvador Dali, the famous Spanish painter. i found it a bit strange seeing Pattionson played as Dali, especially when he got the Dali’s funny whiskers. the movie title is “Little Ashes”. so i searched for more info on Google and Youtube about this movie. well, despite my disapproval of Pattinson playing Dali, my desire to watch this movie is so big. my friend said it’s a good movie.

(picture taken from here)

two othe movies i really like to watch are the musical “Nine” and the Paris-J’taime-like “New York, I love You”. different from “Little Ashes” which is not yet on theaters here in jakarta, both movies are already played and the reviews are mostly good.

(picture taken from here)

(picture taken from here)

ahh, there’s another movie i’m curious to watch. it’s a Bollywood movie played by Rani Mukherjee and the legend Amitabh Bachan. the title is “Black”. the movie is partly taken from a true life story of Hellen Keller, a blind-deaf-mute woman. i saw the trailer on (again) a Korean tv shannel.

(picture taken from here)

well “Legion” actually interests me, but i still have to think several times before watching it, since it’s a horror movie.

(picture taken from here)

grage mall is located on jalan tentara pejuang pelajar, cirebon, jawa barat. it’s a 4,5 hour journey by car from jakarta.

this mall is gonna have its facade renovated so we went there for a small inspection.

the mall itself is not very big for jakarta standard, but i think for the scale of small city like cirebon, it’s enough. only 3 storeys and the mass of the building is generally tubes, curves and cone. well, what inside it (stores, parlors, and restaurants) are just the same as ones you can find in any malls, nothing’s very special.

one thing i don’t like about this mall is its design. the plan drawing is dominated by circles and curves, make the metric a bit difficult because the measurement use circle and curve formula (radius, degree bla bla bla). the plan drawing shows that the shape of the building may be taken from the shape of a bird, with two wings and a circle at the center as the head and a curve shaped as the tail at the back. i gotta tell you this shape is a bit complicated to be redraw, especially to generate it into 3D image.

further more is the design of the facade. it’s obviously a copy of pondok indah mall in jakarta. i really hate it. i mean what an architect designed it by copying another design?

that’s why i straightly refused when my engineer asked me to design the new facade just like fx sudirman. God…i won’t do such a thing ever!

(the picture taken from here)

my first comment for the movie was “Coool!” The visual effect was so crazy good. however, the idea of the story was quite simple: human race as “the alien” to a planet called Pandora somewhere out there beyond our galaxy.

the conflict is about a human corporate that mining the earth-like planet for its very valuable mineral called unobtanium. they bring along military for physical force, while Dr.Grace was a biologist studying the life and organism in that planet and also building a good relationship with the indigenous people called the Na’vi.

the Avatar is what the Na’vi called as the “dream-walker” because the human transfer his conciousness into and use a Na’vi body in full control to dwell on that planet and study the Na’vi right from the core. well, it’s quite hard for me to explain about it in detail.

so there’s this corporal jake sully, a diffable marine, with his avatar as the main character in the movie. he was involved in the project because his twin brother who was suppose to be in that project was killed. so they summoned him instead. and dr. grace thought of this idea as a mistake, which she thought the other way at the end.

so jake met neytiri, the daughter of the Na’vi leader. and she was instructed to his personal trainer. they trained jake to be the real na’vi….and of course, as you can guess, jake finally fall in love with the forest, the people, and …ahh, i’m not giving a spoiler here.

finally, i can say that this movie is very worth watching…and will be more exciting to watch it in 3D format.

(picture taken from here)

Frankly i am not a big fan of this character, i can say this movie is a good one. i think the casts represent the characters from the books suitably.the casts are Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. John Watson. well however, i think mr. Downey Jr. is a bit too masculine for Holmes while mr. Law is too sexy for Watson. but of course these extraordinary best friends cannot be played by an average actors. so they’re quite acceptable.

the setting fit the imagination of the readers i guess. but what i love the most from this movie is the score music. it’s…mmm, how to describe it the best way ya?….cheerful, energetic, classic in the same time. it’s good.

what surprised me the most was the presentation of the relationship between Holmes and Watson. it’s so rich of humor in the movie while in the books things seem always to be more serious. i didn’t know that it suppose to be  that way, the interpretation of their relationship. so, that’s very interesting for me.

Singapore day 4 and end of our holiday

Since we were so tired from the previous night, we started our activity a bit late. At around 10 am we were off to experience Little India, La Salle building, Bugis area and Arab Street. Since it’s raining and we had a flight to catch at 7.25 pm, we just went back home after that. Mussa and i got some souvenirs from those places.

What upset  us was there’s no Halal restaurant we could find in around Bugis area, either Bugis junction or nearby. Only 1 restaurant we found, and it’s indonesian. So we just went back home instead.

It was actually my mistake that we were late for check in. The bus number 36 stopped at Terminal 3 at Changi. We finally found out that Jetstar airways was at Terminal 1. So we needed to take skytrain to take us there. The problem was, i didn’t put on my belt and i lost my weight a lot, and had a very heavy backpack on my back, so i couldn’t run fast. I just let Mussa ran ahead of me to get to the check in counter. Hufff, we made it anyway. Thankfully we didn’t take Tigerair, otherwise we were left behind.

We arrived at Soekarno-Hatta safe and sound but very exhausted at around 8.30 pm. It was raining. Our plane got into the storm right before landing. And it was terrifying for me.

I arrived at home at 11 pm.

Thank God for everything…

that’s my friend, mussa, taking picture at La Salle building