Sun Tzu:

“Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.”

 

Say ‘Hello’ To My Little Friend.

 

I Ant kidding

Not long after I moved into the forty-fifth floor I started getting bitten at night. I could never find the culprit, too small or fast to catch in the dark without my glasses. It began with just one or two; insignificant enough to put out of my mind and go back to sleep, but each night got steadily worse. More and more itchy, nasty bites would wake me from my sleep and I became paranoid of every little texture against my sensitive skin. Whatever it is, is apparently the only thing in this country that has a taste for my legs and wants a piece of me.

 

At first we (I complained to Mum so much it became her problem, as did my lack of sleep crankiness) thought it must be bed bugs, collected in the not-often-used mattress. So we sprayed it and washed the sheets and all the junk you do to get rid of bed bugs. Two days later, just when I was starting to relax my guard, IT was back.

 

When I killed a mosquito in the living room some weeks later I knew it was them. A villain for most people of the world, and here a carrier of malaria and five different types of ‘dead in a week’ fevers. The mosy is the enemy. The war has raged against these winged beats for centuries and my bedroom is just the latest battlefield. The enemy is strong in these parts. So much so that once a month we all lock up our pets and keep the children inside, because of ‘the fogging’ (chemical warfare Baby, yeah). But the wicked beasts possess strong magic, and still they survive; replenishing their numbers from the watery quagmires of the city.

“But how do they get in?” Mum asked.

“How do the ants that are all over the kitchen get in?” I responded unswayed by her doubts.

And so, I launched Operation Aeroguard. A tactical shock and awe response to their covert attacks against my person. Simply put, I covered the house in a thick layer of insecticide and dosed myself in Aeroguard every night before bed for two weeks. By the end there was enough poison in my lungs to knock out a rhino, but I slept peacefully through the night, and even the ants were M.I.A.

 

Slowly but surely, it began again. I was tempted to get a new tattoo; ‘Banquet table’, in bold, down the back of my legs. Perhaps a more harmonic approach would be successful; I need to be more Buddhist, more tree hugger, more… whatever. I did a little reading and I had a plan – flanking. I ate more vegemite, because they hate the smell vitamin B. I turned off the air purifier-because they don’t like dry air. I jacked up the AC because they don’t like the cold, and I cocooned myself in my doona, because (it was freezing) I figured that if I was wrapped tight enough, they couldn’t get to me to bite me. Two weeks later I had a cold and a dozen bites down the back of my knees. I was out of ideas. I couldn’t even make a refreshing cup of coffee; the ants were back in the sugar bowl.

 

The months have progressed and so have my nightly torments. These days I feel as though I’m battling a super-natural foe. More often then not I can only sleep after sunup (maybe there’s a vampire bug loose in the city) or when I’m slowly choking to death of Aeroguard fumes. Mum bought little pieces of white chalk (which are actually highly toxic insect repellant) and I have a piece under each corner of my bed. Exorcisms would use less ritualistic bits and bobs than can be found in my bedroom. I kill anything that flies, creeps, or crawls that has the audacity to enter my room, except the geckos (they squeak, but they eat). To make matters worse, with the sugar bowl empty, the ants are invading the living room. It’s more and more common on the forty-fifth floor to pick ants off your clothes while watching TV, or out of your wine glass. “Don’t worry, they don’t drink much,” is my father’s wise input to the situation, unaware that my paranoia is growing expeditiously (No one believes me, but I swear the little buggers are crawling up my jeans and biting me too).

 

Then last night, I caught one of my bedtime beasties.

 

That’s right, after months of training, I was fast enough, agile enough, just dumb lucky enough to get one of the little buggers moments after he drew the fangs out. The dawn prayers had started from the mosques, but it was my prayers that had been answered. There it was in the palm on my hand (my leg itching and burning like mad) a 2.5mm long ant. I placed my bounty delicately on a shelf and began hunting the bedroom. Three more of the enemy I killed this day. High on blood lust I had become.

 

Specimen in hand (and with the help of the macro zoom feature on my camera) I searched the internet to identify the little creature that had so long been the bane of my existence. Ant after ant I stared at; no, nope, no, wrong colour, they all look the bloody same! Until I came across a site (a magical place) “Learn how to identify ants”… click. Twenty minutes later I was an expert. Five minutes after that I had him. His three profile mug-shot filled the screen. “That’s him!” (“Now arrest the criminal!”) I scrolled down, ‘What’s his name Officer?’ I mumbled to my laptop.

FIRE ANT SUB-SPECIES: SOUTHERN FIRE ANT, WORKER VARIETY;…highly aggressive… often nest in voids in walls, under carpets and furniture… common in blah, blah, Indonesia, blah… painful bite… inflammatory saliva… headaches, nausea… anaphylactic shock… nasty little buggers that bite you in your sleep for no bloody good reason. (Okay, so that last one was mine.)

Son of a bitch!

“MUM! That’s it, that’s what’s been biting me, I found the little prick!” (no pun intended) I yelled stabbing my finger at the screen.

“Oh, I guess we should get some ant bait then,” she muttered calmly in response.

“Or a little napalm!”

“I wonder where the nest is?”… Scratch the napalm, nuke ‘em.

 

Lolita, Molita

One of my friends’ (friend #2) favourite night spots is a club called CJ’s. It’s a fun place.

It’s one of several bars in Jakarta where old, white, guys go when they’re looking for small, young, Indonesian, girlfriends. I walk in and even the security guards aren’t quite sure why I’m there. The men and I take note of each other (I’m so white I glow in the dark), but there is an unspoken understanding that they’re not there for me, and I’m not there for them. I drink. I dance. I let loose. I’d get more attention in a gay bar; at least there they’d appreciate my really pretty shoes. Being ignored can be liberating. It can also drive you to talk to a Wilson volleyball with a finger-painted face on it.

 

‘Sex and the City’s Charlotte York once said that it takes half the length of a relationship, plus two weeks, to get over a breakup. My four month affair with Norway ended two and a half months ago. I wouldn’t say I’m over it, but I’m over being ignored and sending out ‘don’t touch me’ vibes. I was sitting at Starbucks watching the Swiss embassy boys strut in and out of Fitness First when I became very aware that I needed attention, and my mate’s wedding in Singapore that weekend would be a good place to start.

 

As far as wedding goes it hit all the marks. The venue was unique, the food was actually palatable, and the old ladies cried at all the appropriate moments. In six layers of French silk, adorned with 100 year-old Italian lace, the bride was beautiful (in a fluffy way). They kept it short and sweet. The speeches were out of the way early and we all got down to the very important ceremonial act of drinking (a lot). The bride is half Columbian, so it was less chicken dance and more Samba when I stepped on the dance floor, where I happened upon Cute Blonde Guy.

 

The previous night the groom had non-too-subtly thrown me at his short though, good looking and amusing friend, Johnny. He was fun to chat too, but with the CJ’s understanding in place (few men go for girls several inches taller than them) we got drunk together and gave one another crap until Johnny went home with Snow White The Dwarf. I’d all but made my piece with the fact that the only attention I was getting that weekend was when Dad said I looked pretty in my dress, then Cute Blonde Guy joined the Salsa. He was younger than my usual type, 22/23 I surmised (and the female parental unit agreed) and that was enough to make me distance myself from his advances… but at 6’2”, with a great body and the subtle easy confidence that leaves a girl feeling chosen, not drooled on, my resistance was dissolving steadily. Champagne is known for having that kind of corrosive effect on me.

 

We danced most of the night (in between champagne breaks) and Cute Blonde Guy didn’t ‘grind’ against me (ewe) once. How had I not seen him earlier? He was smart, articulate, didn’t need to start a conversation with “so what do you do for a living?” and I was laughing for the first time in a long time. I could also feel the cliff that was his lat flex under palm, but I’m far too sophisticated to be affected by that.

Cute Blonde Guy played national level water-polo. By midnight I’d decided if he could kiss, I was officially going to become his stalker. We already had in-jokes and a dance move that was as good as a secret hand shake. What more could a girl want?

 

I was in the middle of a conversation with a 28 year-old with a goatee and the unfulfilled dream of being a journalist, when Cute Blonde Guy came up and draped a hand around my waist. “There you are.”

“Hey, we’re all going to Clarke Quay, you coming with or do you have an early flight?”

Cute Blonde Guy scoped the crowd looking for whom ever it was he would need to confer with before giving his answer. It was at this point that the very drunk bride, now in a gold sequined micro-mini-dress, stumbled up and put an arm around each of us.

“I’m so glad you guys are having fun together, I was so worried you’d both be all alone not knowing anyone,” she slurred.

The Golden Bride took Cute Blonde Guy’s face between her hands and crooned at me over her shoulder, “Isn’t he gorgeous? Can you imagine the chicks he’s going to pull?”

An odd thing to say, surely.

“I mean look at him, where were guys like that when I was in high school? Can you believe he’s only 15?” Turning back to him she spluttered, “You have to come out with us, don’t worry, you’ll totally get in.”

 

For the first time in my life I was speechless.

 

I’d gone looking for a MAN and instead gotten stuck on a boy barely off the bottle.

 

“Are you really 15?” I managed to say, still not having blinked since The Golden Bride’s declaration.

“Yeah, why?” he said and then he scooted off to ask his mum (!!) if he could come out with us.

 

I don’t know what had shocked me more, that he was fifteen or that he was fifteen and didn’t think the 25 year-old woman he’d been working on would find that an issue of contention.

 

Cute Blonde Guy’s mum had given him a firm “No” (at least someone had a firm grip on reality), and two hours later I found myself playing wingman to the groom’s sister. We were in an area I can only describe as Asia’s answer to Surfer’s Paradise. Clad in a silver dress which had a hem line that met the neck line somewhere near her belly button, the sister was on a mission, and as the only other single girl at the wedding, that apparently meant I was too.

By two a.m. my little piggies were trying to go “wee, wee, wee,” all the way home through the peep toe of my high heels. I didn’t feel like dancing, I felt old… I was old and a paedophile.

 

The next day I was paying for the new ‘Vanity Fair’ at the airport newsagent when I looked over at the ‘Classic Reads’ rack and spied a copy of ‘Lolita’.

“I’ll take this too, please.”

 

Computer wha?

I recently paid a small fortune to get a new passport. (I’d run out of pages-bragging) Plus the additional fees for extra pages, faster processing, and desire not to be yelling into the phone “Doesn’t postal service mean you actually deliver something occasionally?”

Of course, I wouldn’t have been half as annoyed about the decline of my saving account if I had known that my new passport came with a cool computer chip in the middle. Upon discovery of a toy that would catalog my travel history for all the world to envy, I did a little dance and even felt the need to wave it under my brother’s nose, and that of his room mate, his girlfriend and just about anyone else that would give me attention, including my cab driver.

 

I was still waving it around when I got to the outgoing immigration counter at Melbourne Airport. For me there is nothing sweeter than the thud of an immigration stamp marking the beginning or end of an adventure. My old passport photo made me look like a meth-head. The new one at least had upgraded me to gothic transvestite. Life was changing. Imagine how deflated I felt when my ultra cool, computer chip meant that I no longer needed a stamp.

I tried to appeal to She-Who-Wields-The-Stamp logically; “I travel a lot to places that one might call… third world…they’re not exactly up there with the computer chip techno thingies readers (technical term) on account of trying to feed the masses and evade civil war and all that, think I could maybe get a stamp just so everyone feels comfortable?” Crickets. A slight tactical shift, I pouted my lower lip until it hit the floor and asked, “Can’t you just give me one for old time sake?” Evidently stamps, and senses of humour, are out of date.

 

There was a time, not so long ago, that foreigners coming into Indonesia would more likely than not find themselves locked in a hot immigration office with a rickety fan and fat man-for a long time. Said fat man would smile at them with bad teeth while they searched their wallets for the appropriate ‘tax’ to be allowed into the country. Times have changed, but major companies still tend to supply little men, sorry ‘escorts’ and ‘translators’ for their employees, just to avoid any drama. As a resident of the forty-fifth floor I too get said perk. I feel very elitist when I get off the plane and there’s a little man holding a sign with poor spelling of my name. He stands with me while I get a visa stuck in my passport, and my ego takes a big deep breathe when I get to use the diplomatic persons line, while everyone else on my flight lines up behind the two planes from China and one from Saudi Arabia. Ten years of coming to Indonesia and I haven’t had a problem, until now.

 

I knew something was wrong when the little man escorting me called me back because the head immigration official “wanted to look at me”. My ‘Freak on Side Show Alley’ hackles were raised, but I headed to the indicated area (ignored the blaring question of ‘Why?’) and put on the best smile I could with little sleep and bad airline coffee. I thought, ‘Okay, we’ll all get a good look at the seriously pale white girl and then I can go home’. When I was met by the biggest Indonesian in history and lead into an office with no air-conditioning I was not a happy camper to say the least; even less so when asked to take a seat near the rickety fan. I got the feeling Mr Immigration didn’t think my new passport chip thingy (technical term) was as cool as the kids in Oz thought it was.

 

“Where you from?”, “What job you do?”, “Where you live?”, “Why are you here?”, “When you leave Australia?” and six versions of the same questions over and over in bad English took up the first fifteen minutes that I sat sweating in my chair. My little man had long ago proved useless, and slightly cowardly. If this had happened in Oz I would have bitterly asked the official if he could read an immigration form or if I got to fill those out for fun?

Eventually, I rode the merry-go-round long enough to come to the point. “Australia doesn’t stamp passport now?” Apparently they didn’t get the memo either.

 

Mr Immigration needed me to prove that I was a good traveler, and not someone that had been kicked out of the country and was coming back on different papers. Easier said than done. I’d made sure I’d taken my old passport back with me, just in case I needed it. Now if only I could find it.

 

I was too busy ripping apart my laptop case, gripped by fear of becoming the next Shappel Corby, to notice the distinct vocal shift in Mr Immigration, from official, to officially flirting. He scanned my e-ticket print out and asked if I was married. I gave him old boarding passes to prove it wasn’t my first trip to Indonesia, and he asked if I had a boyfriend. I knew I’d packed my old passport (aka ticket to freedom), I just didn’t know where. According to Mr Immigration I “should get a husband to take care of me, to make sure I have all my documents in order when I travel”. [HA! He’d be the one man in the world that didn’t need step by step instructions on how to wash his own socks. And those documents would be the invalid ones that I’m not required to carry because they’re CANCELLED.] I wanted to go home, I knew what I needed to do and that I wasn’t above it. I sat up straight, smiled coyly (yes, I can do that, when I try really hard) and flirted my voluptuous arse off.

“Perhaps you will find Indonesian boyfriend while you’re here?”

I giggled. “You never know.”

“You have visa for one month? Thirty days?”

I nodded and giggled.

I found myself doing a lot of nodding and giggling.

 

Five minutes later I was escorted to the door and issued Mr Immigration’s final words of ‘wisdom’, though it sounded more like a command than something more subtle. (Though that could have been the influence of the shot gun in the corner)

“Thirty days, Miss Katrina, thirty days to find love in Indonesia.” I nodded and giggled.

 

I wasn’t waving my passport around anymore.

 

Snot a cappuccino

The green mucus drink (first mentioned in Side Show Alley) has been identified!

I know, like me, you were all losing sleep over it. So, here is the secret to the flem inspired beverage.

May you rest well tonight.

 

Snot juice:

Take two avocadoes (peeled and seeded), half a cup of water, and blend (in a blender guys).

Add a dash (sparingly now) of full cream milk and blend again.

Pour putrid green juice into a plastic cup filled with ice.

Add 250grams of sugar and a squeeze of chocolate syrup (syrup is optional).

Place straw in cup and serve.

enjoy!

 

Learning Curve

Three hundred and sixty-five days ago I lost someone I cared about very deeply. I won’t bore you with the details (check out the link on the right if you want to know more). Suffice to say a plane crashed, 22 people died and my world turned into a Robin Williams movie without the great one liners.

 

To say that today had concerned me would be like calling The Big Bang a significant event. I’d been marking off the calendar since February, each day one step closer to March 7 and the dreaded anniversary (I can’t remember my brothers’ birthdays but this I have branded to my brain). My energy levels were dropping, my motivation was in the can and I was petrified. I’d come close to breaking after it happened, how would I deal with it a year on? The fear of old pain and new sadness can be paralyzing. Before going to bed last night I prepared myself mentally for the challenge ahead-It was one day. I would ride it out and just like every other day, it would soon come to an end.

 

Surprisingly, I feel pretty good.

 

This last year I’ve learnt a lot about the different ways people grieve. There are the quiet types, the therapy seekers, the drinkers (huh hum), the talkers, the shrine builders, the widows in black, the justifier who needs every one know that they have the right to grieve, and there are those that try so hard to hold them-selves together that their tears escape only in their sleep.

 

This year I’ve learnt not to judge others for now they choose to express their grief. Okay, so that’s not true, but at least I’ve learnt to keep my mouth shut – like at the funeral when the deceased was likened to Jesus in the eulogy and Monty Python popped into my head, “He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.” I had to pretend my snickers were sobs. (Don’t look at me like that. He would have thought it was funny too!)

 

This year I learnt that in Indonesia grief deserves a Tony. Along with the big hearts and immense kindness you’ll find in the people of this country, you’ll also find a capacity for theatrics that is unmistakable. When someone dies the world is a stage and the play is “Why Suffer in Silence”. The stiff upper lip of the English world is a completely foreign concept in more ways than one. Here, you aren’t grieving unless the whole world can hear you, so they make sure that it does. And because they care, everyone around the mourner will put on their best supporting performance. In a country of 220 million, that’s a hell of a show. Surprisingly, it gives back a lot more than you’d expect, even if you’re only a member of the audience.

 

This year I’ve learnt that you never know how you’ll react when something CRAP happens, or how you’ll deal with its anniversary. I spent my morning reading old journal entries. I read about a twenty minute interview that became a four hour conversation and the start of friendship. I read about a hatred of throw pillows and a love of flannel PJs. I read about Travolta-style dance moves and promises of birthday brownies. I read about my friend, and I laughed. Then I watched some TV and put on a load of washing.

 

This year I learnt to say good bye.