How Random

Property of Allie Brosh.

Fluff

Fluff coming down from Union Court. Stolen from the RiotACT.

I allowed myself a good chuckle everytime a university student here claims to be depressed citing, 'it is just that time of the year'.

"Exams?"

"Fluff. And it signifies exam time as well. But primarily, it's high time for being depressed"

Two months ago I did not even know that fluff was an actual noun. Fluffy was the adjective associated with that feeling of comfort on the bed, on a lazy morning when you actually had to wake up to determine your worth as a person. Not one of depression.

What kind of nexus does this thing I have yet to know of with being down? A university student proposed that "If you're still indoors when the fluff season is around, you have a reason for being depressed as you are yet to be locked up in your room, studying when it arrived"

So instead of loathing the arrival of the season, I was actually looking forward to it.

It was so inconspicuous. Until one day when I was running through the Union Court whilst wearing what was incidentally a baju kurung with less run-worthy tolerance rate to a class I could not afford to arrive late to (again), did I get a sudden encounter with the fluff itself. 

From the outside it looked cool, kind of the way snow looks good falling down on people. But where the fluff spared us of the coldness, it overcompensated in causing breathing and sighting on the journey from one building to another an endurance test. Add that in to actually trying to ride the bicycle in a narrow avenue full of dillydallying people - one of the hands covering the face while the other making a faithful maneuver lest someone get hit and ended up bitching on Stalkerspace - thus mandating a label of notoriety to the proprietor.

My reasons are yet to be that delicate. Spring is here. Exam is lurking around in two week's time. And I have managed to drag my battered ego across classes where it was evident that my classmates had been journeying way farther into the book than I did. Ever the excluded wound-licking 'I've got nothing to contribute, sorry" loser that I was, I mentally transcribed the joyful abandon that my groupmates in particular threw to discussing their enviable progress. 

I actually realised that I was fast becoming exactly the person I would poke fun at. I came to terms with their intelligence with the most pitiful manner there was - quiet disdain. And after making that thankful exit from the last class dragging my way back for dinner. Dastan! Got a mark, which, as always, was lower than expected. Dastan! Another rejection on the application front. Screw that, I'd like to pity myself for a while.

Ish. The fluff in itself is not a cause - it is a trigger. A trigger to the realisation that I probably was not supposed to be where I was. I know I should be feeling thankful - I am not being shortchanged for anything less than one of the better-regarded law schools in the world (not exactly Harvard material, but hey, 15th - bragging right, right?). I know I should be thankful for being in groups I found hard to fit in with - so I can finally work on my self-insecurity issues. I should be really, really grateful, for being in the company of these people - people who I would be staring and ogling at had they gone to another institution. 

Why the sadness, then? Why the constant attempt at running away from problems? Why this increasing insistence to not trust Allah with everything?

On the rare occasions when people actually found me a person worthy of sharing their problems with, oh how easy was it to regurgitate what Kak M said of her experience of failing a semester by 5 marks, "Kita belum meletak sepenuh pengharapan pada Allah. Kalau kita pentingkan sangat result kita tu sampai kita bertuhankan ia, instead of bertuhankan Allah, bersyukurlah kalau Allah bagi kita result yang tak best. Bersyukurlah kalau Allah takdirkan kita malu, ketinggalan. At least Allah nak ingatkan kita yang priorities kita tersangatlah salah"

And then I couldn't help but grit my teeth, "Why this ego?"

"Why this feeling of having a right to infallibility? Why this feeling of pride in what and where it is this petty studies you are doing? Who are you trying to impress? Why this aversion to people who make you realise that you're nothing much, by the end of the day? Why this constant attempt at running away from your problems, wanting hours and hours of blissful ignorance of it, when what you've done is actually very little? Why, this lack of faith and surrender?"

It would be all way too easy to blame it on the fluff, and life in general. It takes a worthy person to take the reality in check, and perhaps, I'm not worthy enough. And then, dastan! 

We have certainly created man into hardship. Does he think that never will anyone overcome him?  He says, "I have spent wealth in abundance." Does he think that no one has seen him? Have We not made for him two eyes? And a tongue and two lips? And have shown him the two ways? But he has not broken through the difficult pass.

- Al Balad 90: 4-11

It would be all too easy to put the blame in life itself - or, by extension, God. It would be all too easy to carry on, wallowing in self-pity, wahwahwah. But when had people not been in hardship? How often did people choose to do the right thing, which is to take it as a blessing and made it an opportunity to struggle, i.e., to perform the higher jihad? I can't speak for others. But I know that I often neglected to break through the difficult pass. Total surrender to whatever the fluff that circumstances wanted would be all too easy. Much too cowardly, much too irresponsible.

In conclusion, starting tomorrow, I should just screw the fluff as it is. Make my way through the STUVAC. Yay for remotivated self.

Oh wait.

Jane Eyre's Defining Moment

From Google.

"I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad - as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They will have a worth - so I always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane - quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than  could count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: therefore I plant my foot"


Here is a woman who spent her past longing for a sense of belonging, whose only claim to self-preservation is her deep respect for herself. Here is a woman who drifted across her life rejected, unloved, unaccounted for and unheard - never held as an equal. Here is a woman who held to her principles and standards of decency above all, even if it meant leaving the life where she finally found the acceptance she longed for.

May your story live on, Jane Eyre.

Random Find

Look what I found in the paper waste disposal today!

Made my day. :)

Maaf

Most of my aversions
Stem from my dislike of my own ways.

It's so easy to judge.
To look upon others' questionability.
And perceive them as thus thereafter.

But seldom have I stepped outside my shoes.
And I have been tested by tribulations different from theirs.

Only to find, that when faced with the same dillemma,
I either
Do the right thing, for the wrong reasons.
Do the wrong thing, because it feels right.
Or do something worse, which is to do exactly what I saw as reason enough
To demote people in my perception.

Maafkan.
Maafkan seorang yang tidak ikhlas.
Yang hipokrit.
Yang suka berbangga diri.
Yang suka berangan-angan.
Yang suka memberontak semata-mata.
Yang tidak melaksanakan amanahnya.
Yang banyak hak tidak ditunaikan.

Orang ini akan berazam untuk berubah sekali lagi. Dan semestinya akan tersungkur juga nanti.

To Sally

Why, Silly Sally? Just because.

You said that we first met in the bilik study, and I was eating something. You recalled being so hungry back then, and just when I was supposed to offer you the food, I finished it.That is a subject of contention. Because I don't remember eating the first time we met.

Anyway.

We had the 'budak baru' syndrome, oh how it feels funny now. It felt so cool back then, and it sparked dislike which is as unnecessary of its inception, in the first place. The miles we covered during riadah, bringing books unread, in favour of our incessant gossiping. The hours we studied with each other, to no avail, because I kept you talking.

Oh the times we used to have, just laughing. But you have to admit, we brought out the worst in each other - in the orthodox friendship kind of way. We bitched about other people, we formed exclusive alliances. We once laughed throughout our Isyak prayers. After the affair finished, we said, "Nothing good is going to come out of us being with each other"

In that respect, maybe. But I learned a lot from the two of you. About what, I am not so sure. But learned, I did.

During form five, it was the three of us. Bounded on what, I don't remember. But I'm grateful to have you two anyways. I was unbearably conceited and penyibuk, and you were in some ways, hypocritical- as we all were. I don't know how you tolerated me back then - probably because I was always around, always in your nose, that you reconciled the reality with any notion of life there without me as a fixture. Regardless of our perpetual fights, we ended up back in each other's pockets.

But I loved you, genuinely. I smile everytime I think of you and your childish squeak. Your walk which is at least nearly as violent as mine. Your self-deprecatory honesty - at least around the two of us. The way you make people feel at ease around you. Your innumerable idiosyncrasies.

That's why, browsing around your pictures nowadays, I can't help but feel so old. Because those youthful days - those stuck-up, clueless, petty days feel like a relic of the life I forgot when I left behind. Yet when I talk to you, those days no longer feels like a separate part of my life. It's a continuum. People grow up, that's what.

Well, at least I think so. We revert to our carefree, irresponsible selves every time we speak again, and here I am thinking that the only thing that has changed is the fact that we are now thousands of miles away.

Not that it matters.

Out Of Control

Floriade Nightfest lampcages. From Amal.

If I had any judgment and skill on my own,

my consideration and plans

would all be under my control.

At night my consciousness

would not leave against my will,

and the birds of my senses

would be secured within my own cage.

I would be aware of the stages journeyed by the soul

in unconsciousness, in sleep, in times of trouble.

But since my hand is made empty

by His sovereign power to loosen and to bind,

O, I wonder,

from whom comes this self-conceit of mine?

-Rumi, translated by Kabir Helminski.