Literally Addicted

Dear, you.
What I'm feeling right now is indescribably uncomfortable and I want you to know that it's your fault.
Do you even have any idea what you did to me?

I had been dependent on your presence to be happy. I was just like a lab rodent with you as the lever I kept pressing to inject some drugs voluntarily right into my brain.

Then, just like any addict would, I developed tolerance. I wanted more and more of you. I needed more and more of you. You knew what was happening to me

But even so, you left.

I crave for you. Upon your disappearance, I experienced what clearly were withdrawal symptoms. You know the reward system in my brain already ceased the dopamine level released in normal state because you simply gave too much.

It hurt, dear. I started being with you to get high..and now I need to be with you not to get low. You, leaving, left a huge figurative hole in my chest. It wasn't sadness, no. You took the part of me that could feel sad along with you.

At least with sadness, I could have been whole.

I tried to cure myself, dear, but the best I could do was finding your surrogates. Among all of them, romantic fiction books are the least harmful ones. At least every 26 pages, I may find a phrase that elicit the sensation similar (but not exactly the same) to what you gave to me. It's exhilaration, dear. It's the very thing that makes me feel whole again, at least for the time being.

In relief, I realize that I have found my new lever.

Probably the only difference I have with the lab rodent is that I realize what's happening to me. I realize that too much drug will kill me someday. However, very much like the lab rodent, I simply don't care. I just keep pressing, and pressing, and pressing...

The Days of a (Seemingly) Perfect Couple #1

It was yet another holiday we spent together.

To be honest, I can't really say that this one was spent together. We were together in the same room, all right, on a carpet just next to our bed, leaning to each other's back. We were doing the same activity: playing The Sims; only on separate laptops on each of our laps.

Other people don't understand why we do this, but we have been doing this since the day I knew him and we love it. I remember that I glanced at the clock and mentally noted that that day's mutual activity had been going on for 40 minutes before he finally broke the silence.

"Ren," he called. "Hmm?" I replied while putting my laptop down and then turned to his screen behind him. I knew his geeky side was gonna strike again and I was ready to give him my reward (as any good Skinnerian behaviorist would).

"Did you ever realize how unrealistic The Sims features are?" he asked, proving that I really could read him like an open book. I rubbed my palms against his shoulders and proceeded to squeeze lightly, giving him the gentle shoulder massage I knew he loved. "Tell me," I said.

"Well, look. We can learn a skill to maximum point in just one day. Then, even though we don't rehearse over time, the skill won't decline."

I rounded my arms around his neck from behind and leaned to him. "Umm yes, I agree about the learning duration part, but you can see that skill set such as cooking and cleaning actually need procedural memory, just like riding a bike, right? So, you can't really forget those."

"Hmm, then what about this?" he persisted, pointing at the needs bar. "Sleeping restores energy? You know so well that sleeping depletes energy, no matter how little calories it burns. Eating AND breathing restore energy."

At this point I couldn't contain myself and grinned. "Dear, you're playing as a werewolf AND complaining about how unrealistic the needs bar is?" I then kissed his right shoulder lightly and turned back to my game. He laughed. "Well, it's a whole different thing, Ren," he said turning and gave me a light kiss on the corner of my lips.

He then turned back and again was focused at his game as if nothing happened while I had to try hard not to blush. I picked my laptop again to place on my lap and said, "Do you really think people would love such a realistic feature if there were one? After all, we all are here to escape reality."

He chuckled. "You got a point."

I was back to my game, to the "little us", the characters I created to resemble us both as similar to reality as possible. He knew that I had done that. What he didn't know was that I made my character shyly kiss his every time he did to me in reality.

Oh, I sure know that I play games to escape reality; a reality where I can't let him see how weak I can be in front of him.

Exploring Languages #1: How Klingon is Better than English

Due to my increasing fascination in foreign languages, I decided that I would start writing a series called "Exploring Languages." This time we'll talk about Klingon, the language only spoken fluently by more or less 50 people on Earth. For you who are not familiar with it, this language - that is spoken by fictional characters who inhabit an alien planet in Star Trek series - actually has its own structured and consistent language rules: phonemes and syntax and everything.

I think it's obvious that fictional / made-up languages are always better than the already-existent ones, but here we'll semi-subjectively review five ways that make it better than English in particular.

1. It's an official stamp of nerdiness / geekiness (along with only a few other languages, such as Sindarin and R'lyehian).

2. The number of phonemes (i.e. the smallest sound unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning) is exactly the same to the number of letters. In other words, every letter only resembles one phoneme. There is no change of speech sound of any letter despite its position in a word or its position in relation to other nearby letters.

For example, in English, the letter "u" is pronounced differently in the word "cut" and "u-turn"; the letter "e" is pronounced differently in "bee" and "bed". Klingon doesn't have this issue, thus simplifying the act of speech.

The Klingon Alphabets

(If you're interested to listen to how these are pronounced, visit this page: http://www.kli.org/about-klingon/sounds-of-klingon/)

3. It has humorous implications from its intended purpose as the language of warriors. For example, the closest thing to translate to "Hello" is actually translated directly as "What do you want?"

Similarly, the closest thing to translate to "I love you" is " qamuSHa' " which is directly translated as "I unhate you" or "I don't hate you."

Well, it seems that the Klingons normally hate people.

4. It's both rough and romantic at the same time (I think it's universally agreed that those two adjectives combined constitute one adjective, that is "sexy.") For example, if you wanna ask, "What's the color?" then you'll actually say, "How is it stained / tinted / dyed?"

If you tell me that it doesn't turn you on, I judge you, people.

5. This language is relatively easy to be spoken especially for Indonesian people, since all vowels and almost all consonants (with the exception of "D", "gh", "H", "Q", "S", "tlh" and " ' ") it has are pronounced exactly the way Indonesians do it.

If you want to learn Klingon, know that there are reasons for the little number of Klingon fluent speakers. First off, the rules, although elegant, are alien. For example, there are only 6 words in Klingon to express colors: four of which are the colors themselves and the other two are translated as "dark" and "light". This kind of rules can easily stumble you in the learning process. Second, you will have to memorize all vocabularies from a scratch since they're nothing like any already-existent languages vocabs. You may have to stick with its dictionary longer than you expect.

However, if that doesn't stop you, you can start here:

http://klingonska.org/

or here:

http://www.kli.org/members-only/klcp-prep/

and then you can learn its basics when available on https://www.duolingo.com/ (which has currently progressed to 9% in the hatching process).

Finally, you can do some self-help by reading Marc Okrand's (the creator of Klingon language) books, primarily "The Klingon Dictionary" and "Klingon for the Galactic Traveler."

That's all, folks. Hope you had fun reading this entry.

He

A flash comes before my eyes.
I see that I woke up to a pair of deep-brown irides, staring at me. Was it an accurate verb, "staring"? Usually, when people stared, I would feel uneasy, but not then. Then, I was happy.

"Good morning, angel," said he. It was his morning routine. He would compliment me and I would blush. No matter how many times he did, I would still buy it. He, then, would proceed to softly brush his lips against mine, leading to a series of tongue wrestling and - at least 5 mornings a week - love making.

I thought I would know if someone faked affection.


Another flash comes replacing the earlier one.
It was one of those days, when he would slam his fist against some furniture and raise the pitch of his voice to call me an idiot. It started with me complaining about how little time he spent for me if not for sex. It ended with him saying that he wouldn't need sex anymore - at least not from me - because there was this woman he already started sleeping with.

I did not think that something true could slap me harder than if it were a lie.


Here I am, back to my reality. I survive, or at least I try. Sometimes I make it through the day, but sometimes I end up weeping to my sleep. What makes me sad, more than anything, is that I believed every single "L" word he uttered. I believed every reason he gave me for not being there when I was down. He made me convinced that if he could spend 25 hours a day with me, he would.

The most pathetic part about all this is that even after all he has done to me, I'm still questioning myself if I did the right thing by leaving.