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The History
of my Swearing In North America (I started to use the term North America, because it’s more correct. America means the whole continent, where the U.S.A. was only a small part of it), I have a reputation to be a nice Indonesian girl. I don’t try to be one, but that’s what people think of me. So when someone hears me swear, he or she is shocked. Like Li Yan, my Chinese friend. She was shocked when I said, “Shit! I forgot my blanket!” She thought it was the bad influence of my Jamaican friend, Winsome, who is very fluent in inserting swearing word in every sentence elegantly. Today I received an e-mail from Rick Brown, someone who knows me for more than 6 years now. He was also surprised that I wrote, German students “got a freaking two-month vacation.” My parents never swear in front of their children. My dad, though barely finishes junior high school, never swears. He must have sworn before when he grew up. He lived in a rough Chinatown of Semarang, where swearing is a part of the air people breathe. I bet he stopped swearing after his children were born. The only time in my life I witnessed him swearing was when I was not get accepted in the most prestigious Catholic high school in the province because I was not a Catholic. My mom, a soft-spoken lady from a hilly area of Central Java where the women were famous of being very gentle, obviously has never sworn in her life. I think swearing is a creative use of language. In Javanese, the language that is spoken in Central and East Java, where I grew up, swear words are composed creatively by individuals in different ways. The literal meaning of the words is sometimes not dirty at all, but when they are put in the swearing context, they can be very mean. Many animals can turn into swearing words if they are pronounced without any other words. For example, Goat! or Cricket! However, there are some animals that cannot be used for swear words. For example, if you say, “Panda!” or “Giraffe!” Javanese will laugh at you instead of getting angry. I don’t know why these animals are never used for swearing purposes. However, squirrel is one of the most insulting animal to be used in a swear word. “Bajingan!” which literally means “that squirrel” is normally translated into “Bastard!” Maybe because squirrels love to damage the crops that these agricultural Javanese grow. Well, shit is always a swear word. But it can also be added by putting an animal in front of shit alone, such as “Cat shit!” For an American, it is hard to understand that “Dog!” is one of the dirtiest swearing word in Javanese (and also in Indonesian). Dog is regarded one of the dirtiest animals in Islam, so saying it by itself can be very insulting. But don’t worry to use it when saying, “I have a dog, or I love dogs.” It’s OK. Other than using animals, Javanese use body parts plus the word “your” when they swear. For example, you may say, “Your eyes!” or “Your head!” when you are pissed at someone. Your anger doesn’t necessarily have to be caused by a bad eye or a bad thought from another person. You can also put “your” in front of any word referring to a family member, and it will be insulting. For example, “Your grandmother!” or “Your father!” or “Your mother!” is a common swear word. It does not take a motherfucker to insult a Javanese. I imagine it must be hard to translate these swear words into English. Therefore, most of them will be translated either into fuck, damn, shit, or bastard. Interestingly, the swear word that has a direct translation to fuck is very uncommon. I can’t think of any on top of my head, except a Jakarta slank “ngentot” which is not widely used by Javanese. The degree of insult varies from area to area. Sometimes words that are regarded a mild or friendly swear word can be very insulting when it is exported cross-culturally, even between Indonesians and Malaysians, who share the same language root; Malay. I remember that my sweet Malaysian roommate can’t take it easily when an Indonesian friend often says, “kurang ajar,” which literally means, “lack of education.” For Indonesians, the word is very mild to describe any events or persons that we don’t like. It is also used often in jokes. It does not have anything to do with being lack of education. However, for a Malaysian, the meaning is very strong. It means that their parents do not educate them well when someone says it in front of them; an unbearable insult to the whole family. I started to swear when I was in junior high school. Part of it was an influence from a girlfriend, but part of it was a statement against being regarded as a weak girl. I grew up hating to be a girl, because of the limitation placed on an Indonesian girl. However, my swearing habit achieved its peak when I was in high school. Well, this was the Catholic high school that first did not admit me. It placed quota on how many girls they accepted (25%) and how many non-Catholic girls they accepted (4-5 students each year). However, after some girls refused the offer, some girls in waiting list was allowed to get in, including me. Starting on the admission day, I secretly promised to myself to make the principle of the school to regret their decision not to accept me in the first place. I wanted to project myself as a tough, smart, daring, and determined girl. I did not want to dress up. I did not want to date anybody (well, I succeeded only for two years). I want to be as tough and hard as the guys. So I swear a lot. A lot. Swearing felt damn good. You may have an imagination of a repressive almost-all boy Catholic school, but it was not like that. As an American, you may have a certain picture of a Catholic school, but every place has a different story. We were the only high school in the whole province who refused to wear the national uniform. Individuality was promoted and respected, an idea that was very radical in the authoritarian Indonesia before 1999. We were introduced to principles of free speech, where students also could voice their opinions. We were also taught to regard everybody as equal. For Americans, what how we were educated seem to be normal, but for Indonesia before 1999, no other school would allow the students to engage in arguments with teachers. As we protested against our headmaster in an open forum in 1996, in 1997 people who were protesting against manipulative installation of the leader of PDI, one of the opposition party, were kidnapped and tortured by the government and the military. Unlike the image of a Catholic school that Americans have, our school was very radical and critical against the government indoctrination that guards the regime’s interest to limit opposition. It’s critical perspective has inspired me. I learned to put every structure and system in the light of a critical mind. I began to develop a critical perspective on culture, religion, and government. And if now I can speak against the structure of the Catholic church, against Indonesian culture, or against Bush administration, part of the credit shall go to my educators in Loyola High School of Semarang, Indonesia. Swearing reminds me of my enlighting experiences in the Jesuit high school. Excessive swearing brought everybody closer together. Swearing became something dear you could only say to someone close enough to you. So when people swore to me, I knew that I was already considered their pal. Swearing brought people from different class to the same level of discourse that enabled mutual trust to happen. We were not afraid to make fun of each other and to make fun of ourselves. So I swore with almost everybody, with the man who cleaned our school, with the women who sold food in our canteen, with our Jesuit priests, with our sharp-tongue biology teacher, with our funny English teacher, even with the ones that I had crush on. And they swore back to me. When I first came to the United States, I missed my swearing friends the most. Swearing is a highly undesirable habit in the “mainstream” American culture, whatever mainstream means. What I miss from it is what is attached to it in a Javanese culture; honesty, trust, love, and equality. Except for my few black and Indian friends, swearing in North America does not produce the same warmth and bound. Honesty, trust, love, and equality thus are perceived differently here in the U.S. Although people smile and ask “How are you?” all the time, North Americans are taught to select whom to respect and whom to trust. Although people are generally very polite, North Americans are taught to present themselves as someone so capable and perfect despite what is true from them. Now I cannot swear as much as before. And when I occasionally did, it surprised everybody. I guess my North American education will not be able to afford to produce a swearing graduate with a Master of Art in Communications.
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Sex at the Box ’05 This is the best Shadowbox
Cabaret show I’ve ever attended. Granted, it’s almost
100 percent comedy material but the troupe’s home is in
a mall on the opposite side of The Funny Bone Comedy Club. So
maybe that’s appropriate. That said, I think what makes
this particular production great is that almost everything is
written by Shadowbox’s writing team. That obviously is
a risk well taken. Broken Key by Rick Brown 2Co’s Got the Blues ‘05 2Co’s Cabaret by Rick Brown Blank Sight by John Bennett Litterae Scriptae Manet Patrick O'Malley  My New Year's Resolution by Ted Kane At the end of every year, countless people in this and I'm sure nearly every country on Earth make a New Year's Resolution in one form or another, even if they don't use that exact terminology. The phrase "New Year's Resolution" can be taken as an oxymoron; the old year is what's being resolved, while the New Year is just beginning. Still, as the noted semanticist Robert Plant once said, "Sometimes words have two meanings," and I guess the construction makes sense if you look at it from the perspective of it being you resolving to do something different in the year ahead. That's not necessarily a bad idea; we all have things in our lives that we should work on. The
problem comes when people set unrealistic goals for themselves.
I've long since given up on the idea that I'm going to change
myself quickly or drastically. I try to be happy with myself as
I am and where I do find shortcomings that I wish to address,
I try to do so incrementally. I figure it has a better chance
of sticking that way.
continued... My January Mix by Cory Tressler You have to use a little bit of magic to make the perfect mix CD. It is an art form that is rarely perfected by anyone, yet it is tried by almost everyone. In the not to distant past the cassette tape was the only way for music enthusiasts to cut and paste their favorite tracks together in order to make a collage of sound that best represented where they were at during that exact moment. Today we have iPods, MP3 players, mini discs, and CD burners at our disposal making it incredibly easy to fit together the latest greatest songs into one eclectic masterpiece. This month I give you my soundtrack. Although not perfection, it does sound pretty damn good to me. Enjoy. 1.
“The Pusher” – Nina Simone from the album
entitled It Is Finished. I purchased a foreign bootleg double
CD of Nina Simone’s records Emergency Ward, It Is
Finished, and Black Gold on eBay from a kind Canadian and
I’m very glad that I did. For whatever reason these
albums are only available on vinyl here in the States, which
is an injustice to every Simone fan. This live version of
Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher” is incredible.
Performed with so much feeling and emotion. Rivals Neil
Young’s Needle and the Damage Done as the song most
likely to make you not want to do hard drugs. Not that anybody
needs any more reasons than the obvious. “Poetry a Language for the Chosen Few” byDavid G. Hochman The finesse of
prose one can learn. One can learn by reading, by studying.
Poetry, on the other hand, is like a foreign language; if
you speak it, it is ever so self-evident. Unlike a foreign
language, however, no matter what you do, there is no way
to learn poetry’s mysteries; you either understand
it or don’t and there isn’t a damn thing you
can do about it. And it has little to do with education,
for I have seen those hardly educated understand poems at
will. A
Visit to
by Wes Boomgaarden Last
November I traveled to As
noted above, my personal mission in traveling to |
Nu
Combo
Flowing in this melodic groove
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My Miata was already scheduled for a front brake job so I figured the dealer could fish the key out while it was there. The guy on the phone said if they couldn’t it was $400 for a new ignition. Wow. When I dropped it off a sign behind the desk read: LABOR - $80 per HOUR Wow again. I hoped for the best. The next day at work I got the call.
No dice on the broken key. But the manager told me a locksmith could
probably get it out for a lot less than a new ignition. No shit.
I’ve bought entire vehicles for less than $400. |
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