Rate Your Day

The past few years I learn how to rate my feeling. I keep life journal since very young but hardly pay attention on how I feel about my day. That’s part of being an Asian, or Indonesian, or… Javanese. We don’t show our feeling, as we don’t show, we ‘forget’ to feel so if someone asks how we are… we go speechless. Or, let’s talk about me. I go speechless while trying to rate my feeling: good but not super, not good but not bad, bad but not depressed,… most of the time I prefer to say I’m flatly okay (not good but not insane). What kind of feeling is that? My invention.

And more, I also learn how to rate my day. How’s your day? Mm.. okay. I don’t like okay as an answer to any question. To me, someone has to come up with something can be rated: great, good, bad. Definite. I don’t say that I never say okay as an answer. Often.

So it’s good to know if someone says I have a great day because most of the time I could not say that. If I say, I must have had a super super good day. But I always believe that any day is a good day so I don’t superstitiously believe about bad day to make a celebration. Every moment is a celebration yes. Now I’m being ambiguous :-)

Still I’m luckier than Chiko who spends 99% of his time inside house. Poor cat. I design his life like that, I take his freedom to show my care. I’m tired of going to vet to cure diseases he fetches from street. I don’t know how he rates his day of sleeping in many beds or sitting in balcony looking out. It touches my heart to see how he spends his time in balcony watching the world goes by. He even sleeps by the glass window most of the time like me having my computer on by my bed when I travel. My computer is my window to connect with the world.

If Chiko can talk, I would like to interview him. I have tried though many times in our session lying on floor face to face like this early morning. He rolled himself in kilim to catch my attention. I was deeply into my window when I realized he needed to talk to me. So I lay on floor by him, face to face. We often do this these days. Like kid, he can be closer when I pay more attention. How do you rate your day, Chiko?

I’m up to have a good day today. Stop at 6:42.

I wish I had a good day. Or I might say, I had a potentially good day but I got headache that lingered since morning. Quite bad that even walking hurt my head. Sneeze is bad. That stopped me from doing many. I visited Benny’s house for the first time. I need some of his artwork for Pallava. We ended up talking endlessly till hours passed. Meeting him is already dangerous, meeting him in his workshop is disaster. So many ideas came up to refine our work. I could not imagine if we join a workshop with a troop of craftmen, our people, we could be the most creative ethnic-goods producer.

I could not continue to visit Frangi as I really needed a break. It was hot. So hard to think with mixed feelings: excited, sad, missing, liking, warm, headache,.. I need to calm down to disentangle the feelings. I can’t have too much at the same time, so I can rate my day.

Photo of Starbuck's tabletop in Changi, Singapore.