Once upon a time (or three weeks ago), I was cleaning my room when I found this treasure: an old diary of mine. Not that old, actually, as the last entry was in 2010. The diary has a picture of a blue elephant with a “HAPPY DAY” heart shaped balloon on the cover. But believe me when I say that there is almost no a single entry telling about happy day in it. Everything was so stressful and sad and bad and negative back then.

85 % of the pages are filled with the sad story of 19-years-old Dara, who was dealing with her first and second years of university, her psychological issue, and her boyfriend back then. Not the story 21-years-old Dara could be proud of. If I could, I really would like to take everything back. Oh God, how I had wasted my time!

Looking back at how stupid the me depicted in the diary was, I decided to also look back at the old posts in this blog. Whilst there are some stressful posts just like my old diary entries, I could totally see that what I posted here are not 100% true. There are some “I’m happy”s to cover up the ugly truth about how unhappy I actually was. For the love of God, I really want to delete those posts but I’m still not sure yet. Should I delete them or shouldn’t I?

My life is moving forward. I’m growing up (a lot) and I have plans now. I have moved on from the past, but as long as my past is still there in the form of old blog posts, I can’t feel secure. I’m afraid that they would interfere and mess up my future plans.

So, should I or shouldn’t I?

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So what if I’m obsessed with wedding?
How is it different from being obsessed with traveling, cooking, crafting, et cetera?
So what if I love talking about my dream wedding on Twitter?
It’s not as if I’m going to get married right at the moment, no?
So what if I already have a wedding plan on my mind?
How is it different from having a plan for cooking dinner?

And why do you have to be bothered by what I’m saying about how I want my wedding to be?
Don’t you have anything else to deal with in your life instead of bitching about mine?

Get a fucking life, losers. And yes, it is not a competition because I never said it was.

Midnight coffee has become a routine for me for these past two weeks. All the haze and craze about final paper and student teaching report paper have taken their toll on me. I should’ve finished writing them, like, last week, but you know me. I’m the number one procrastinator of the year and the best deadline-runner. There’s something about the adrenaline-rushing, heart-pumping procrastination that I just can’t live without. It’s in my blood, ya know.

But perhaps, there’s another reason why it takes me so long to finish my papers although I’ve spent nights staying up late. It’s the fact that when the clock strikes two, I always find myself reminiscing last year. There’s a lot of thing happened last year. And even though I’m okay now, I can always find something to be sad about from last year’s memories at 2 in the morning in every single day.

Every now and then, I need to remind myself of something someone told me a few months ago:

And here’s a song that I dubbed as “Soundtrack of June 2012”:

I’m not really into politics. In fact, I’ve had my trust broken for oh-so-many times by the politicians I used to admire. However, if you’ve been following me on Instagram, you might’ve known that last Sunday I somehow joined a campaign program held by a candidate who is running for the mayorship in next month’s election. The program was a kind of The Amazing Race called GARARETEK (Game Amazing Race Ngangge Teknologi). We got to run around the city, solving riddles and racing against time whilst uploading pictures through Twitpic and this app.

The general idea behind the game was actually new and creative. It was a good and out-of-the-box idea for a political campaign. I like how they used technology effectively for the campaign. (FYI, campaign programs in Indonesia usually consist of dangdut music events where the candidates give a statement in one occasion. But the program itself mostly consists of singing and dancing.) However, there were also some things I need to highlight here.

First, the use of text message to deliver the clues of our next destination. Let’s be honest here: no one uses text message nowadays, when the number of chatting apps increases every day. I’m quite sure that the carriers pay less attention to the text message services compared to data connection services. For an event which had the word technology on its name, the use of text message was understandably questionable. Why used text message? There were some groups that couldn’t finish the race just because they didn’t receive their clues at all. What a shame.

Second, it was clearly seen that the committee didn’t prepare the event quite well. It looked as if they prepared it in only four or five days. The rules and guidelines for the game were confusing and unclear. Also, the participants were told that each of us would be given a voucher, but then they told us that the voucher couldn’t be given that day. We had to come back the next day to get it. I still haven’t had mine today because I’m too lazy to go back and pick it up. In my opinion, they should have had the voucher on their hand before the event.

But above all those matters, I still think that this event was a good campaign program. This is how a campaign program should be: creative and standing out of the rest.