I Love Bookkeeping I Love Bookkeeping, I Love Bookkeeping, I Love Bookk... I Love...I Love...

As told my friends recently, one of the things that I regretted the most for not taking more seriously at school is business related knowledge. In those days, I viciously ignored all things related to it including my personal finance management. And now is the harvest time. I reap the results: many not so delicious fruits. There are always challenges when you want to start something new in life, a new job or a business. But that ignorance contributes a lot to the stress I got. I was overwhelmed by what I had to do in business administration, you know, where to start and what to do. So I have been trying to catch up with it little by little: reading how to create a business plan, visiting the sba.gov site, pay more attention to my personal expenses, bank accounts, credit cards, read the AIA Handbook (a great resource… by the way), and most recently learning how to use Quickbooks. Yesterday was my first day of officially using it. It really stood up to its reputation: an easy, flexible and powerful book-keeping software. It was really fun to use and took less than a day to understand the basics. The main key is to understand the difference between sales receipt, invoice, and statement. I started to memorize what is credit and what is debit. One is out and the other is in, right? Right? It really makes a difference in the way I go through my daily life (and spending) now, just become a little bit more thoughtful and less repulsive.

Crossing the Telen

I have been crisscrossing the Equator here in the last couple weeks. Yes, literally passing back and forth the zero-degree line, the middle earth. By the way, I started to get more accustomed to the travel terrain here, the vast landscape of Kalimantan Indonesia. The tropic heat, the cool breezes, the dirt-roads, the jumpy and broken inter-province roads, mountains, forests, fields, blue and white cloudy skies, street warung foods, bugs, squat toilets, and many more excitibles that one would hate and then love. All composed into a beautiful song of mind… still playing on.

A slice of that experience was a few days ago when crossing the Telen River, a branch rivers that feeds into the mighty Mahakam. Obviously, there was no bridge connection yet so we had to park our car and then took a (sort-of) boat taxi to cross the Telen. Unlike other parts of remote areas in Kalimantan, there were more native Dayaks on the riverside here. Not so many people around but everybody was looking at everybody, just imagine the small town scenes in the wild-west film right before the protagonist riding in on a horse. A little eerie for a self-professed Jakartan like me but still ook-lah.

Our boat came and I jumped in immediately. The boat was quite low on the water level and I was just sitting so liberally stretching my arms and legs feeling like an MTV travel channel host until… Until I remembered the many crocodiles with their big smiles that populate the rivers here. I, instantaneously, in approximately one-over-a-thousand second, reworked my sitting position and be in a little less machoistic pose. Yeah, crocs are just the scariest animal to me.

The return trip was more memorable to me because it was after dark. We came to the riverside with a windowless jeep transport along dusty roads. While waiting for our boat to come, I looked up the clean cloudless sky and could see all the stars quite clearly. We got on the boat and I sat nicely (this time) and as close as possible in the middle. The moon light was shining so bright, maybe because of the dark surrounding. It was during that time that I encountered a new kind of aesthetic unlike anything I knew before. The moon light was reflected off the river and casting an even dark gray uplight on all objects. Everything is a profile, a silvery outline. It is surprising to me how much one can see in total darkness. The faces of the people on our small boat were dark-blue-ish or gray with long shadow under the eyes. The air was cool and fresh. I felt like there was only me (with a very loud boat motor) and a vast and black idyllic quietness beyond. I link this to the many interesting “river-ee” moments I have: walking along the Scioto in downtown Columbus on a snowy night, observing the busy Rhein on a cold spring day, Soane under the flickering Eiffel Tower at night, and zipping through the Venetian canals at night on water taxi.

The Moderator

It has been a week since the bombs in Jakarta. Investigations are still going on, the victims' families are slowly emerging from the painful facts, and the nation is building up momentum to further fight the terrorist activities through-out the country. This Sunday, there will be an event going on by musicians and other cultural or public figures to speak out against terrorism in Indonesia. They are trying to garner up support from the whole country to speak up and unite against extremist thinking and activities within us. It is also an indirect but bold statement from the Indonesian Muslim majority to reject the effort by the terrorists to freely hijack their religion, Islam. And they are a few more spontaneous and grass-root events like that among the communities in Indonesia that are standing up to highlight their rejection toward this sort of violent and foreign extremist activities in the country. That’s a good sight for me and am proud of it.

Once in a while in the US or European media, there is a always a talk or sort of “cry-out” of the failure or ineffectiveness or slowness of moderate Islam world-wide to contain the extremists within them. While acknowledging the progress of the moderate movements in countries such as Egypt, Jordan, or Turkey, the majority of the global community still expect a more effective (or “fast”) solution to this endemic. But as many experts have said on this issue, there will be no fast way to fight religious extremism like this. The key solution is always a combined effort of pervasive economic and educational strategies. It seems to me, for them, the best way to combat the surgical effectiveness of extremist terror tactics is with a long-term, slow but consistent therapy of common senses.

So in light of the two phenomena that I observed above, Indonesia, I think can be the best bet for moderates in the Islamic world to counter that narrow but potent stream of violent and extremist thinking. I hope the moderate Islam (not the ‘liberal’ one) in Indonesia can be as effective as the moderate majority in the United States in countering the resurgence of an extreme right wing thought in American politics. Well, by the way, what I mean by the moderate majority in the US is more like the NYT readers or NPR listeners although I know most people there wouldn’t think about those two as the “moderate”. One example is the recent case of Henry Gates, the Harvard professor. I am impressed to see how well the moderates there, because of their intrinsic nature, can quickly rebalance the public debates on high-expletive issue like that.