Letters from the past

I've found these stacks of letters in my old bag in my bedroom in Indonesia.

please ignore the mess behind...The blue box contains Barbie doll dresses @.@

This photo excludes Christmas cards from my primary school days.

I threw most of the Christmas cards except a few. Being primary school student, we wrote little on Christmas cards =P

However, the letters were too hard to be thrown away. I washed the bag and moved the letters to a nice cute tin. Unfortunately, the tin was a little bit small as it can only contain C6-size envelopes. I kept the DL-size envelopes in my other memorabilia-shoebox.

I used to have pen friends. Initially I only planned to keep one letter from each friend. I think I only had two or three pen friends. The memorable one was one from Bali. She sent me a Westlife poster. It was my first celebrity poster, as my dad put a poster of ministers' name and photos instead of celebrity photos on the wall. I am really curious, what if I send them letters now? In this facebook era. Are my pen friends still staying in the same house? Well, you know..Indonesia is a huge country.

I had another type of letter, which is from friends from my old school. I changed school when I was Primary 4. There were two or three friends whom I wrote letters to from the primary school and there was another friend from English course who has the same birthday as me =P

I can't remember how and why I stopped corresponding with my pen friends. I guess it is because of the busy schedule in secondary school? I suddenly miss the experience of writing letters. At the moment, I correspond through postcards mainly with my two friends, both are in UK. It's quite funny because recently I don't travel, so I don't have a nice postcard to write. I went to a bookstore with my colleague and I complained to her that I didn't like the postcards. She's a good photographer and I told her, "I think your photo is much better to be a postcard!" Afterwards, she let me choose her photos and we printed three 'postcards', very beautiful photos of Singapore landscape!!

I still have the habit of writing Christmas cards and as I travel overseas sometimes, I write postcards. I think these hard copy letters are really irreplaceable. Nothing can replace the excitement of waiting for letters and of thoughtfully put my thoughts down in writing. Unlike writing emails, which provides me the option to click backspace or delete, I need to think carefully before I write and I need to plan what I want to write (most of the times I run out of space). I guess I should write postcards more often. Hahaha. It's a good exercise for me to be less impulsive.

Journey of this blog

I'm still in new year mood, even though things are getting tougher already. Well, I keep telling myself that Chinese New Year is coming, so I still can finalize my new year resolutions.

Anyway, I would like to talk about this blog, especially that my best friends are currently making new blogs :)

This is my second blog. My first blog was the Friendster-blog. Hahaha. We all know Friendster, right? I remember my URL was something on 'Ferninda-kepang-2' (Ferninda with two braids) because I used to braid my hair EVERY MORNING since secondary school to high school.

Then, people move to Facebook. In my second year of university, I still kept my friendster blog until I did my internship in Yahoo!Southeast Asia and became a little bit more tech-savvy. Thus, I decided to make this blog (even though my supervisor encouraged me to make Wordpress =P, you know...blogspot - google, wordpress - yahoo).

This was my first post. That guy, Dominic, the first commenter on this blog is now a political science lecturer. Cool right??? Hahaha. If you notice the change of my writing style, it's mostly because of his comments. I still remember he told me to 'finish my sentence'. I like to break my sentences and use a lot of '...'. I think these days, I like to use to use a lot of quotation marks, which indicate my laziness to explain the terms that I use in my posts.

This blog was a mixture of Indonesian and English posts. When I felt sad, I couldn't express myself in English well, so I chose to write in Indonesian, like this. Now I read that post again, I laughed at my self. =P I was so childish (yah..now also still childish). If there's something that I could tell to my past self, I would tell her to control her feeling more :) It doesn't mean that I should've suppressed my feeling, but I think those days I spent too much time day-dreaming, and I had uncontrolled 'what-if's, and I wish I knew something about emotional chastity since I was in high school :)

And then, in 2011, I did another internship in India. Well, commuting by public transportation from the inn to office, and from one city to another, witnessing real poverty (I would say that it's worse than in Indonesia), having slow internet connection, made me reflect, read, and write a lot. I typed many posts in Word document, then I went to internet cafe twice a week to upload all my posts in this blog, my Indonesian blog, and my internship programme blog. I would say that this 2.5-month-internship was another major turning point in my life.

I don't know when it started, but after I read some Catholic blogs regularly, I was inspired to write more regularly. However, the sad thing is I lost the habit of writing my diary (it's the real diary, the so-called "Dear Diary" entries). I think I also stopped writing my diary because now I can express my feeling better even though I use English (and even though my grammar and vocabularies are still so poor, eeek...). The fact that my boyfriend can't speak Indonesian also contributes a lot to this change because now I need to express my head and my heart in the language that he knows (he really HATES it if I don't finish my sentence and say 'like that' or 'you know...').

Oh and for the first time (and so far it's also 'the last' and 'only' time), I wrote an English short story. Hahaha. I'm not sure if people can read what these three rings are. Actually I like writing fiction. I still have a half-done Indonesian novel that I started when I was in high school. Now my Indonesian language is too poor for formal writing and my English language is also not good, I haven't really decided to write a new story or even to continue that half-done novel. I really really really don't like to describe place or object in English, so I am very reluctant to write an English story. I can't set up the setting of my story. Even in my blogs, my writings are dominated by feelings, events, but not description of places or persons or objects.

So yeah.. It's 2014 now. Soon I can celebrate the 4-year-anniversary of this blog. Hahaha. So young! :)