Category: Notes Catatan
-
dari meja pembaca
November, Desember, Januari: tiga bulan pada penghujung 2025 dan awal 2026, saya meninggalkan tumpukan buku dan daftar baca saya. Mereka terbengkalai, entah karena saya ingin “berlibur” atau sesederhana kemalasan yang terbingkai dalam kerangka swa-perlindungan “bulan-bulan sabat”. Saya masih melihat arsip dan mengumpulkan data, merevisi manuskrip, menghadiri konferensi, tetapi saya betul berhenti membaca dengan tekun dan…
-
Another Lunar New Year
My family rarely plans for Lunar New Year. It’s not part of our household tradition, from which I often say to friends that we’re more Christian than Chinese even when one of my core memories is about fifth-grade peers at school bringing red envelopes (one of them said she got almost one million rupiah from…
-
hold house
for the ones who are ready for holding me and my space The kitchen sink leaked without breaking. It was the pipe: condensed, hardened oil and fat. Per landlord’s request, two building maintenance workers knocked on the door and started cleaning. Necessary noise, very much needed labor. I sat on the working desk, trying not…
-
love in time
notes on heavy raining days “I am a love theorist” is what Lauren Berlant wrote in mid-2012 on Supervalent Thought after the title “The Book of Love is Long and Boring, No One Can Lift the Damn Thing …” Their philosophical I moves through their own feelings of dissociating from all their loves—sometimes. They wrote:…
-
*sigh* *smirk*
Dusting the weather; I checked my back, and my damn dear drenching sweating without pocari sweat. I swore to the sky that I wouldn’t write shit about coming back to Jakarta–oh lord here I am vomiting words. My grammar is rusty and my speech bubbles aren’t popping and yada yada yada, I always have reasons…
-
phase eight; for now
“What kind of history do I want to write?” is a constant question I’ve asked since day zero of my graduate studies in the US, knowing that I would turn my intellectual gear from policy analysis to history. It’s an inquiry about method and form, about questions I want to answer, all the things about…
-
phase seven; a call
Thursday morning in mid-December: a sudden call from a hospital. I was in my office, talking and having a casual discussion with Sofyan and Ridha about politics, dissertations, and everything else in-between. I didn’t pick up the call right away. I quickly sighed. The last time they called me, they moved an appointment (which I…
-
phase six; telltale
An artful life sojourned through a cliché: a young kid from an Old Town once tried to make staging theaters out of the world yet failed because their economy was just too cruel. Later, after two decades, a friend asked: “what would you do if you can?” “Maybe theater; a dying art in this country.…
-
phase five; come on to
Weeks in-between spring and summer were bright; most times dull. I keep contracting my own deadline. I’m not hard on myself. I know I wanna do more things, but I’m just tired all the time. I already have half of a draft and whatever. Should I celebrate small things? I don’t wanna. I keep refusing…
-
phase four; pacing
I kissed her goodbye a thousand times; and yet the gaze still sees her as part of me. It doesn’t matter anymore what I call myself. I can only write. Out of disaffection because what I have right now is responsibility to finish, to think, to answer, to sit with the past always for the…
Nik Setiadarma 