Au Revoir 2011! Bonjour 2012!

Hello readers

2011 is finally saying farewell to us. 2012 will enter in few hours time.

How has 2011 been to you?

What have you learned?
What will you leave behind?
And what will you bring with you to 2012?

I have learned that not until you love yourself, the world won't love you the way you think. I have learned that those that really matters tend to be the simple intangible things in life such as relationships. I have learned that what you feed your mind affects how you view the world.

I will leave behind the thought that the elements outside me need to change before I can be happy and contented. I will leave behind that I have no control and not responsible for all aspects of my life. I will leave behind the naive concept that there are somethings can be forever.

I will bring with me into 2012 the "me" that is slowly evolving and revealing to its truest expression of self. I will bring with me my intuition, my gut feel, to listen to them more after listening to kind advices from others. I will bring with me my blessings and feeling of constant gratitude to things / experiences I have already had and those that will come my way at their own time.

I am saying goodbye to 2011 with a great smile on my face knowing I have lived an awesome and colorful life and I am looking forward to 2012 for more awesome experiences that I believe will come. Good and bad are really relative. I wish everyone a life well lived, a lesson well learned and laughters well shared.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

11 Dec 2011 - With Models of Abercrombie & Fitch.
See! Told you my 2011 was awesome and "colorful"! *wink*

The 3 Letters that Live After Death

De-clutter: to simplify or get rid of mess, disorder, complications, etc
(Taken from www.dictionary.com).

Thanks to my "big forehead" bff, this time I welcome X'mas and New Year by de-cluttering my living space. I threw quite a bit of stuff and organized the others that I would like to keep. Though I am not a hoarder (Thank God), I can be a keeper of stuffs! It's a bad habit that I am slowly unlearning.

While embarking the journey of de-cluttering, as I squatted on my floor, opening boxes after boxes, I discovered 3 envelopes that I received from Tante Gunawan. Tante in Bahasa Indonesia means aunt - just like in French too.


Tante, that's how I love to call her, was my childhood friend's mom. My age gap with my friend is big. She was already in secondary school when I was still learning to read her magazines - Bobo. Some of her magazines were dated even before I was born. Tante and Om (her husband) doted on me. They were like another set of parents who stayed in a big classic house and spoke Dutch occasionally. In the early 90s, or so I think, we were separated. Tante and her entire family moved to Jakarta. I hardly met them since then. Almost never, even until Om passed away.

In 2006, I met Tante in Jakarta when I went back for Chinese New Year reunion with my entire big family. I insisted to meet her and I was so glad that I couldn't hold my tears and hugged her. I didn't know why. She teared too. I also didn't know why. There was just this raw emotion in us that we couldn't contain. We really didn't know why.

Then, as the busy-ness of life caught me again, I didn't keep in touch much until I received a packet of cards from MFPA (Mouth and Food Painting Artists), an organization that my parents and I have been supporting on regular basis. So I have bunch of cards but didn't know who to write them too. I thought of Tante. I wrote to her again in 2008.

I received my first reply on the 6th of August 2008. She expressed how delighted and surprised she was to receive a letter from me. I was equally delighted to receive a reply from her. Until the day she passed away in 2010, there were only 3 letters being exchanged. But these 3 precious letters, never fail to bring me to tears every time I re-read them.

What started out as a tradition of sending cards during festive seasons, turned out to be an avenue to reconnect with people from my past. What started out as cleaning out my space, turned out to to be a way to enrich my soul.

De-clutter, my new definition is to get rid of things that don't matter and to be connected to those that really do.

Wishing all of you an enriching festive season ahead. Try going back to a time in your life when someone or something has brought you joy and love. You will be surprised, they were there in our memories, just buried beneath all the recent noises of our lives. They are very much still alive.

The World of Scrubs

When someone gave me this link - http://www.blueskyscrubs.com/categories/Scrubs/Scrubs-for-Women/ I thought there exists a special type of low shrubs for women. Dang! I really need to improve my vocabularies. Once I clicked on the link, I realized it refers to a type of uniforms.

The word "scrub" always reminds me to the once popular song by TLC - No Scrubs, that up until this day I still don't know what it's all about; like most songs that passed through my ears. But the melody still lingers.

Then I heard this term very often in Grey's Anatomy when those surgeons yelled,"Scrub in!" and the next thing you will see all of them rushing to save a life on the operating table. Who knows from all these medical themed TV shows, the once just a uniform, can be a fashion item to the mass. That will make quite a handsome costume and you may call yourself McDreamy, McSteamy, Doctor Yang, etc. I feel like having one too but I guess it will just become my pajama.

Jakarta - Penang - Yogyakarta - Bali - Kuala Lumpur

WOW!

DD is mad! Or, was mad.
Listing those cities out as the title of this post made me realize I might have been out of my mind.

For those of you who don't know what I have been doing recently, well, those are the cities I visited in October and November! I flew so much in those 2 months than I have ever done in past 2 years!

Most of them were on impulse. I didn't use much of my brain when I decided them (hmm, I don't think I use it a lot anyway :p). Let's just say, I have been living at the safe and boring side of life that suddenly I needed to wiggle myself and do some mad travel stunts like that.

So what was I doing there? In summary (and more to come next time) I was:
- visiting my bestie and hunting for my favourite childhood food @ Jakarta
- accompanying my parents and learning about my ancestor who was an awesome man @ Penang
- learning about Buddha's teaching through artifacts and stories + made aware that my country is super awesome @ Yogyakarta
- spending my birthday with besties and finally visiting the island of non-smelling dead bodies (yup, you read it right) @ Bali
- reminding myself that I have great friends and forever grateful for such wonderful souls in my life @ Kuala Lumpur

I am not a travelling sort, normally. Very comfortable where I am. I do occasionally getaway by myself to reset my mind, thought my Bali trip is going to be that way.

But what I learn preciously on all my trips is that people (and not places and things) make travelling more meaningful. You may have seen the most beautiful thing and eaten the most delicious thing on earth, that is wonderful, but to have another living being witnesses or shares that experience with you, make it more exquisite.

I am really grateful that in all my trips, I have never once lacked of the people element. From great friends, to great tour guide. From the daughter of friend's friend to the mother of a friend. They all have made me feel enriched in a way that money can't buy.

Now I really understand fully when Suze Orman says,"People first, them money, then things." Without people, money and things will simply resemble a body without mind and soul.