FH Team Club Med Phuket

What a wonderful bunch of people to work with. We had a lot of fun in those days!

Sophia, Jakarta Selatan

My favourite books I read in 2016:

1. The Emigrants, W G Sebald

2. Beauty is a Wound, Eka Kurniawan

3. Why be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson

4. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Alice Munro

5. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel

Jakarta Selatan

"The “Muslim” has come to be a hollowed, emptied term that functions as a trigger for white anxiety. Little surprise then, when you add Muslim next to another anxiety-laden word “immigrant”, the result equates to half the country reaching out for the treadmill’s emergency red stop button.

Modernity’s pace seems too quick for some, but the keen reader would have noted that in my opening agreement I put the Muslim in scare quotes. I do this for a reason. The word “Muslim” belongs to a conversation born out of the “war on terror”. I distinguish it from the quote-less everyday Muslim whose complex life is beyond the headline and Hanson’s narrow parameters.

Any one simplified and generalising statement about Islam betrays the religion and its communities’ diverse contests, betrays Muslims’ internal debates on how to best articulate Islam’s universality. Whereas, the “Muslim” functions in a pure simplicity. It simply means them. It represents an abject figure that has to be excluded from the circle of us so to imagine a supposed pure integrity of our culture."

The Word Muslim Belongs to the War on Terror it has little to do with me, The Guardian, Sept 2016

Naka Meguro

The joys of existence this evening but not necessarily all at once:

• cheese & mushroom roti prata
• Reading Chekhov's Gooseberries
• Mucking about with Sophia
• Litening to A Moon Shaped Pool 
• Chocolate

Happy Mothers Day

Happy Mothers Day Mum & Rima

To My Mother

Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,
The angels, whispering to one another,
Can find, among their burning terms of love,
None so devotional as that of “Mother,"
Therefore by that dear name I long have called you—
You who are more than mother unto me,
And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you
In setting my Virginia’s spirit free.
My mother—my own mother, who died early,
Was but the mother of myself; but you
Are mother to the one I loved so dearly,
And thus are dearer than the mother I knew
By that infinity with which my wife
Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.

Edgar Allan Poe

Kamilla, Wahwah & Friend, Jakarta Selatan

It's been over a month since I've posted due to Dengue Fever, trips to the UK and Jakarta. I hope to be a little more regular over the coming few months.