A long-delayed laugh

I finally give in to the blog bug’s bite. How can I not? Blog is just another form of journal, or diary, I’ve been trying to write for the past couple of, errr…, decades? It’s simply more exhibitionistic than the old-paper-and-pen – and in my case, an extra freaking lock – way.

So, let me take you back in time, some twenty years ago (gosh, the number is so scary) when I first bought my diary. I was in the fourth grade of elementary school and I stood in front of a variety of diaries in Gunung Agung Book Store, Kwitang, the hottest book store in town. Yes, young Luke, there was a time when Gramedia was not the name of a book store and just a publisher. I made up my mind and bought a dark blue cover diary with a little lock on it to keep those unworthy trying to dig in the dark secret of my 10 years of existence.

Now, why did I ever buy a diary in the first place? I owed every thing to …, well, I warn you, don’t you laugh, don’t you dare laugh. Anyway, my inspiration is, brace yourself, Laura Ingalls Wilder. (You’re laughing, I’ve told you not to, yet you did. I hate you.) But, helloooo…, I grew up watching and reading – I still have some of those books on my bookshelves – ‘Little House on the Prairie’. How can I be immune from its influence? Of course I was affected. I have always felt like I am a part of the Ingalls family, as I feel like I am one of the guys in ‘Friends’. I laughed every time that curly-barbie-like Nelly Oleson cried after being teased by Laura. I cried when Mary lost her sight. I cheered when Pa Ingals won a fight against, well, whoever tried to abuse his right as a pioneer in the wild west of America.

So here I was, two decades later, in my old room that I have never slept on for more than a year, digging my old coackroachful cupboard in effort to clean it, there it was lying at the bottom, my precious, a somewhat bluish book that held details of the age of my innocence. It was a funny feeling when I first found it. How could I ever forget it? I remembered how I tried to keep it away from other people to reading the the book, yet I let it lay there, forgotten.

I sneezed as I tried to open the yellowish and fragile paper and read what I wrote then. And boy, how I was embarassed reading what I wrote. On one entry, I wrote that I was mad at my mom because she took side with my sister over housework. I didn’t like to mop the floor but my mom made me with a gender-bias reason: I am a boy, and mopping needs harder effort. So, the lesson was mopping was meant for young boys while sweeping was for little girls (my sister is only one year older). And I wrote about how unfair my mom was, about my lazy and spoilt sister, about how neglected I felt. Gosh, I was ten and I sounded like I already needed a shrink back then, when going to shrink meant totally-nut-case-only.

Nevertheless, I had a good laugh reading my old diary. As I kept on reading, I couldn’t stop smiling and laughing and I thought, wow, there was a time when life was so simple and all I ever fussed about was who would mop the floor. So, I guess, here it is, my main reason to write a blog: I want to save a good laugh. A good-hearty-healthy-laugh some decades later.

My precious.

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