Could’ve been a more productive geek
Would’ve been less broke

Could’ve been learning to play music
Would’ve been making songs more than jokes

Could’ve smoked less
Would’ve been having nicer breath

Could’ve been braver to confess
Would’ve felt less afraid about death

Could’ve been walking more instead of driving
Would’ve been feeling less shitty about myself

Could’ve been wiser
Would’ve had less regrets

Could’ve been smarter
Would’ve had less heartbreaks

Could’ve watch more good movies
Would’ve saved many hours of boredom

Could’ve saved more than spending
Would’ve had a place of my own

Could’ve read more
Would’ve talked more

Could’ve slept more
Would’ve been less sleepy

Could’ve called my father
Would’ve made him talk more than three words a day

Could’ve been less jealous
Would’ve been less restless

Could’ve exercised more
Would’ve been less fat

Could’ve been braver
Would’ve saved the electricity

Could’ve convinced you that I could make you happy
Would’ve been holding you now.

Could've, Would've

Last night, I stayed up until 4 am at Coffee War, a tiny cafe in Kemang which ‘opens until whenever’, with some good friends. I’ve fallen in love with this place which strangely manages to attracts a wide range of patrons. Filmmakers, writers, actors, or slackers with battered laptops looking for free wi-fi to update their status on facebook. The other day, a bunch of philosophers were debating as fast as a speeding train, dropping names like Deleuze and Badiou more often than when two most loudmouth fuckers calling God when they fuck. That, plus the heat because of the broken air-conditioner, made me do ballet near their table like a walrus.

I went home and decided to work on my website which should’ve been updated three years ago. After struggling with flash and xml with little success, I decided to go to sleep, a little bit past my usual bedtime (5 a.m.).

I woke up at 10 a.m. to the sound of my sms alert. I read the tragic news. Alexis Tioseco and his girlfriend were shot dead by burglars who were robbing their house. Alexis was a film critic and lecturer living in Manila. I only met him twice but his intelligence and kind personality have made an impact on me, like he did on many others in every country he visited. It was a great loss. Alexis’ departure is another big tragedy for filmmaking community after the death of Yasmid Ahmad last month.

A friend wrote on my facebook wall commenting on Alexis’ death, how the lives of some great people ended in the hands of those who don’t even know what the gift of life is. Which is very true.

I went out of the house after working on my script. My iPod shuffled some unusually somber songs in my car. I made a stop to buy some blank DVDs in a shop. I wasn’t noticing people were running out of buildings. I was about to yell to the store salesman who was only standing still behind the counter when I asked if they had what I needed. Then I realized there was an earthquake.

It took me two hours to drive to Ratu Plaza which usually only took 15 minutes. The traffic was ten times crazier than usual. The atmosphere in the city was very strange today. It felt like one of those moments in movies when the worst thing is about to happen.

And here I am, at Coffee War again.

I bought a nice SONY HDR-XR100 camera (with HDD) and had to go all the confusions trying to get the footages on FCP 6. I tried to import the .mts files directly to FCP but no luck. I even purchased VoltaicHD which converts the .mts files into .mov so they are editable on FCP. But It works so slow. It took me almost two days of googling to find a better work-around. Finding the best answer to such simple problem turns out to be as frustrating as finding a really good porn.

It turns out that the solution is sooooo simple.

1. Connect your camera to your computer.
2. Open a project. Existing or new. Just save it first.
3. Open “Log and Transfer” under File tab. Add files using the folder icon on the upper left side of the browser window. Try subfolder if the actual folder which contains the files isn’t recognized.

(NOTE: If you want to copy the .mts files from your camera’s HDD to your computer’s HD or external one, maintain the file structures of the camera. Otherwise, ‘Log and Transfer’ won’t recognize your files. ALSO: (VERY IMPORTANT. I really learned this the hard way. :)). I suggest you don’t delete any files in your camera’s HD from your computer. ‘Log and Transfer’ won’t recognize your files anymore. If you want to delete files on you camera’s HDD, do so ON your camera menu.

I hope this helps…

And I’m redesigning my blog. I promise to blog more. I need to blog more.

It was a long weekend two weeks ago. Like all Jakartans who are desperate for a holiday, me and my friends went to Bandung, the capital of West Java. And like all desperate holidays, it was ill-fated. With the new freeway, it should’ve only taken two hours to get there. But since everybody was going there, it was long enough for me to see two horror films on DVD while driving. (I’ve developed an ability to have my left eye watch the DVD monitor on my dashboard while my right eye watching the road, seriously). And when I had to stop because of the traffic jam, I read the “Financial Revolution” tips on my cellphone again and again.

I began subscribing the service since the advertisement on TV says it will give you guides on “how to become financially secured in two years or less”. It sends you one text message every morning and they charge you 1,000 Rupiah (US 13 cents) per sms. Since I always wonder how am I going to get or to save money to live the next month, I think 1,000 Rupiahs x 2 x 360 days = 720,000 Rupiahs is a nothing compared with the prospect of being financially secured in two years or less. Whoa… And they say that the guy who gives you the guiding words, Tung Desem Waringin, has been invited by big companies to give his words of wisdom to their employees.

I just finished watching the first DVD, a horror about sheeps that kill village people when the traffic jammed again. It was 1 am and all my friends were asleep. I stopped driving and read the sms from Financial Revolution:

“We can change our emotion to be better (sic) by sitting very powerlessly, then suddenly sit very straight as if we were 10 centimeters higher, look up and smile.”

So I tried that. The car shook very violently and it woke my friends up. But they didn’t know what was going on. “Go back to sleep.” I said. My mood didn’t change. So I watched another horror movie on DVD, this time about cows that kill, and drove on.

We arrived at 3 am, and checked into an over-charged hotel with towels not even big enough to wrap around my smallest friend’s waist. When I wanted to go out of the bathroom to get something from my bag, I had to decide whether I wanted to cover my front or my bottom. Hera, who had to swallow all the complaints because she was the one who made the reservation, finally sulked. “Yeah, try to find the hotel next time!” she said.

The next morning, after listening to Bernie’s complaints about us not having a schedule where to go, we decided to take his suggestion to go to this place called “Kavling Strawberry” where we could pick strawberries ourselves. None of us had been there but someone suggested that it would be a fun place. We immediately imagined the strawberry field in that karaoke video of the Beatles song.

It was quite a long drive. I received another sms from Financial Revolution. It read:

“Basically, it’s easier to change our (body) movement than to change our feeling. By changing our (body) movement spontaneously, we’ll be happier.”

It was Jeffrey who was driving, so it was easier for me to do what the guide said. My hand was reaching out to scratch my head when I suddenly “changed the movement” and picked my nose instead. For the next hour, I kept changing my body movement spontaneously without my friends knowing it. I couldn’t recall if I was happier then.

After several wrong turns, we arrived at the strawberry place which looked suspiciously… small. However, one of the employees told us that the actual place where we’re gonna do some serious strawberry picking would be huge.

Each person who wanted to pick strawberry had to purchase a ticket. And the ticket was a plastic cup of strawberry juice. After we bought “tickets”, a female guide gave us scissors and strawberry baskets. “No eating strawberries before we scale them,” she said. So she walked us down the hill for five minutes. Then we arrived at the strawberry picking site.

In front of the strawberry fence, I squatted down. “I’m not going in there,” I said. Everybody else was so stunned by the scale of the strawberry “field”. One of us actually muttered, ” I feel like such a loser.” But then the laughter broke. Everybody seemed to be imagining that it was actually a huge strawberry field. To make the “field” looked wide, Hera was running forward and then backward.  Tatut was picking the strawberry which were quite hard to find in slo-mo. But the most diligent of us, as usual, was Priesnanda who searched for ripe strawberries to the very edge of the “field”.

Meanwhile, I tried to read another sms from Financial Revolution:

“In order to be instantly happy, do the following: take a deep breath, arms wide open, face up, and smile widely.”

So I tried just that.

We drove back to Jakarta that afternoon. Our car was extremely quiet and I was running out of horror DVDs. I turned on the TV but I was afraid that we could only watch gossip shows. The other day, it was about some celebrity who was supposed to have a huge collection of basketball shoes. Me and Hera counted them. Only ten pairs. Was it a rip-off or were we just guilty of having high expectation in the land of mediocrity?

I read another sms from Financial Revolution:

“To have a faster change, we have to master body movement (physiology), how to breath, and how to see..”

I didn’t finish. I just type UNREG.

Oh… Jeffrey left his bag in the hotel lobby in Bandung.

My iPod is possessed. One day, I was shopping for cheap clothes in one of those stores that sell merchandises which have been rejected buy regular stores because they were damaged (pairs of sandals that are both lefts or  t-shirts with only one sleeve). When I got back to my car bringing a mountain of clothes, I opened the back door and just dumped all the stuffs in there. I was trying to close the door when something seemed to be preventing the door from closing down. I thought it was the clothing, so I opened the door    w i d e    then SLAM! It still didn’t close. I checked it out. It was my iPod.

Since then, my iPod has been giving me premonition. Every morning, I play my iPod in shuffle mode. The first song that my iPod chooses will describe how my day’s gonna be. Yesterday, it played “Just” by Radiohead. Since it’s one of the classics in my list, I thought it was gonna be a great day.

After being broke for months, I finally got a paycheck for a commissioned work. The amount was quite nice. It would enough to pay a year rent of a new house and for pocket money while I’m in Korea (read about this here). It would even be enough for a new cellphone. So I called my little sister Tia to accompany me to spend.

When we got to the first mall, we were looking for iPhone. But it wasn’t out yet. So I bought some DVDs instead. I told her that our shopping plan wasn’t successful since we only got three cheesy horror flicks on DVD. So we decided to to go to another mall to buy a new Sony Ericsson. I got get me a new cellphone!

“You know, it feels lighter to walk when you’re loaded,” I said. Tia was just giving me that look. “Why aren’t you trying to stop me from getting a new cellphone? You know the one I’m using now is still new,” I said. She just rolled her eyes. She knew nothing can stop me if I want to spend.

The cellphone vendor was on the 4th floor. We took the elevator but we stopped on the 3rd when I saw some nice black polo shirts. I tried one and it fitted perfectly so I bought two. I used my BCA debit card and the cashier swiped it on the little debit machine. When the print-out came out, we saw that the cashier had mistakenly put too many zeroes. To cut the long story short, it only left an amount in my account only enough to buy rejected underwear. The cashier tried to cancelled the transaction but failed. I called the BCA service center, the operator told me that they would file a report and they would probably be able to out back my money into my account after 14 working days. That means three weeks from now. While my trip to Korea will be in ten days, my house rent is due in three days. Meanwhile, Tia was laughing her guts out.

“I can’t stop you, Brother. But the little machine can! Ha ha ha… Or is it God?” Tia said. I left the cashier and the manager fighting with the BCA operator. I said “I need a cigarette.”

Then the song echoed in my ears: “you do it to yourself…”

Today, I’m wearing the most expensive polo shirt in the world. Wanna see?

P.S. Thing morning, the first song my iPod played was “Detachable Penis” by Flaming Lips.

There’s always a price to pay when you’re being a smart-ass.

A few months ago when I was shopping for cheap underwears, I received an SMS which sounded something like “So, shall I do it?”

I figured that somebody must have sent it by mistake. I could have replied and told the sender that he or she might have typed the wrong number. Or, I could have simply ignored it. But noooo… I must do something witty so I replied, “Please do.” I immediately making up stories in my mind. The sender was a woman and she was asking her husband’s permission to put on her sexiest lingerie that night. Or a boy asking his mother’s permission to appear in porn.

What I didn’t remember was that two hours ago a friend of mine borrowed my cell phone to talk to someone in the catering business about the possibility to order 1,000 boxes of food for an event.The next day, I was five millions Rupiah poorer.

***

Last year, in a bid to curve terrorism and cellphone-related frauds, the Indonesian government made a regulation that all pre-paid SIM card users must register their name and address by SMS. So anyone can still purchase a SIM card without ID, but before you can use it, you have to register. I thought it was just silly. There was no way that regulation could do anything good. So I registered my number under false name and address, just to spite it.

Last month, there was something wrong with my SIM card and I could make or receive calls. I couldn’t just simply buy a new SIM card because then I would have to notify all my contacts. So I went to the SIM card center and asked for a replacement.

After waiting for almost two hours staring at one of those big digital indicators which display which number could go in to be served, it finally showed my number.

I was then greeted by a lady who, after a day long dealing with consumers’ complaints, looked very bored. I told her about my problem and then she typed something on her computer. She deadpanned, asking for my ID. I gave it to her. Then she said, “Sorry the information on your ID doesn’t match with what we have on our computer.”

I immediately realized that I was in a deep shit. Not only I knew that registered under a false name and address, I completely forgot what name I used. So I kindly asked, “What do you have on your computer?”

She turned her monitor to face me. I read it in horror:
Name             : Brad Pitt
Place of Birth : Mojokerto (A very small town in Java)
Address         : Jl. Sawo Gang Jambu no. 2

“Why didn’t you register under your name?” the lady asked.
“The card used to be… uhmm… my brother’s,” I said.
“Then he has to come down here to file the complaint,” she said.
“He can’t… Umm.. He is in… Russia,” I didn’t know what else to say.

I didn’t know whether she was tired or simply didn’t want to make me even more embarrassed, she just handed me out a piece of paper.

“Just make the statement here that this SIM card really belongs to you,” she said.
“What should I write?” I asked
“I’ll dictate it to you”
So I began writing what felt to be the longest line I had ever written:
“I hereby state that this SIM card belongs to me and that Brad Pitt is truly my brother…”

***

One time, I was so proud that I could get an unlikely production company to finance my film. It turned out to be a big disaster. But that’s another story. In fact, this is just the opening for a book called “Things that Come Back to Bite You in the Ass” that I’m writing.