AMC's The Walking Dead (2010 - present)

It's the fourth season of AMC's hit series, The Walking Dead, and yesterday the series finally release its mid-season finale. In a sentence: It's a war of power between Rick and The Governor, resulting in multiple deaths on both fronts. (Oops, spoiler alert!)

I've enjoyed watching The Walking Dead, simply because I love to watch gore movies. But in this post, I will try to delve deeply to the show; and I will put my conclusion as to why The Walking Dead is so popular. TWD is a show that's set in a post-apocalyptic world where zombies are the main cause of the apocalypse. Up until its fourth season, we still don't know what's the cause of this zombie outbreaks in the first place. I am curious, I don't know about others, but it would have been relieving to know why.

Contrary to popular belief, TWD is NOT a show about zombies. The zombies aren't the main characters, they're just means to tell a horrific story. They are tools for us to understand why the characters did what they did. But they are created and developed in such a great way that when they appear on the show, you know things are about to get bad.

TWD starts as a survival story, it's about a group of people who survived the virus' spread and try to live a safe life. But life loves its irony. As it turns out, they didn't escape the virus' effects, they merely delay it. They are not survivors, they are just another undead-to-be. When they die, no matter how they die, they will turn into one of the undead.

I'm quite excited to see how things are going to end. As it appears now, there seems to be no happy ending to the story. I can only imagine if there's a cure since the cause and the patient zero remains unknown until now. But, you don't know what these crazy creative guys will bring in the next episode.

Our Pursuit of Happiness

I think happiness is the most crucial thing in our life. It's the thing we want most from our life, it's the destination of our so tiring journey of life, and of love. And since it's our last destination, it's only fitting if it is also the hardest thing that we might achieve.

Before we delve deeper into the concept, I would like to point out that happiness is a lot different from a happy feeling. Happy feeling is very easy to achieve, we see it everyday, it happens on simple matters. Like when a child gets balloon, when a student finally graduates after 4 year long studies, when a worker gets a paycheck at the beginning of the month. These are happy feelings. A feeling of joy that will last for several hours at most, before it turns to another worries.

The happiness that we seek, is a feeling of joy, of peace, and maybe of freedom, that will stay forever in our hearts. It's a more divine feelings that we can't conjure in days. It requires a very long journey, very long years, to finally achieve it. The path to happiness is not a one-way road, it's tangled with intersections, turns, and dead ends. Every turns, every path is our own choice. There's no right or wrong, no black or white, no certain answers. It's not an exact science that you can count and formulate, it's a journey of hearts, of truth, of self discovery.

Our pursuit of happiness is often clouded by our own limitations. Our wishes, our dreams, our ignorance, our pride, our fears, our will to seek instant happiness. These are our obstacles. We are incapable of ignoring them, we have a giant curiosity to fulfill and we keep pursuing the wrong things and thus dragged further from our true happiness. I think the only person ever to achieve true happiness is Buddha. He is able to leave every distractions behind, and therefore granted an eternal peace of mind.

I believe we all are still struggling on this pathway, trying to find our way around, trying to find our selves. Every turn we choose, every decisions, will likely cost something worthy from us. The journey to true happiness, is the exact same one that will lead us to pain and sufferings. It is our ability to rise above the pain that will make us stronger to keep going. However, we are racing against our own fear, fear of getting hurt, fear of pain.

Our journey to happiness is always be a battle of our bravery and fear. Will we rise or fall? Will we give up to our fear, or will we stand against it?

The Time-keeping Concept

The Befriending Process

So, a while back I was talking to one of my best friend in university. We have been graduated in 2012 and now experimenting the cruel world of reality. I was working in a totally new environment: new city, new job, and what follows next would be new friends. Unfortunately, the last one is not as simple as I thought. Apparently, according to my best friend, people in our workplace are not supposed to be our friends.

Workplace is a place where different people gather together with different agenda. Some pursue fame and popularity, while others pursue wealth. So, by default, the objectives of a working person is always self-centered. Also, there are people with higher grade than us (that would be our boss, senior, manager, etc.) and there are people with the same or below us. All of whom have their own point of views and we might unintentionally step on their toes one chance or another. There's also office politics, which I don't quite understand and don't intend to find out.

For a fresh graduate whose parents have never worked in a company, this knowledge is something new to me. Something I would be happy to reflect upon. I won't lie, but I'm intrigued with the idea. Is it true that our colleagues can't upgrade their status' to be our friends as long as we still worked together under the same management?

My friend said that the time when we're supposed to make friends is during our school time. In a workplace, you're looking for a way to pay the bills, not to play nice with people. "But, isn't it a little harsh?" I think to myself. I have no problem to be friends with anyone, but the thought that I might be thrown under the bus makes me uncomfortable. On the other hand, there is just no way for me to survive without a single friend in the workplace. It's just not possible, especially I'm working on something that requires me to do team work. How am I supposed to do my job without making friends with my team?

I remembered one of my dean used to say that as a designer we are taught to express our authentic ideas in our work. Sadly, authenticity requires solitude. It is our idea and our idea alone that we expressed in our design, causing us to feel uncomfortable working with other designers. But, as an animator, it's our job requirements to make friends with people we work with, because let's face it you can't make awesome 2 hour 3D animation movie alone. So, as an animation graduate, I'm wired to not be able to work in solitude. I have to be able to make friends, even if I'm thrown under the bus once or twice. 

The Talk and The Deed

"It is better to do without talking, than talk without doing."

This weekend, I chose my way back to God by going to Church and participating in Focolare gathering. My life has been very unsettling these last few weeks and I feel that I have to go back and start over. So there I was, sitting in the Word of Life meeting in Pandeyan, Yogyakarta. Word of Life, or in Bahasa "Sabda Kehidupan", is a monthly gatherings held by Focolare movement to support each other in living truthfully according to the Law of God. What we do in these gatherings is we took a phrase from the Bible, and we try to apply those phrase in our daily life during that month.

For those of you who don't know, Focolare is a youth movement all over the world founded by Chiara Lubich in 1943. Its main purpose is to create a united world of people from all age, vocation, religion, conviction, and culture by respecting and valuing diversity. For more information, visit Focolare web page in http://www.focolare.org/usa/en/.

The phrase we took in September is from the first chapter of The Gospel of John, as written in the picture. We were told to 'love thy neighbour', to love without intention, and more importantly, to love in truth and action. A while back, I was strolling through 9gag, and found a post about how we all have this annoying friend who would post Bible passage in social media, while we know that this particular friend lives far away from the Law of God. This sad truth is the proof that not all of us able to love unintentionally, unconditionally, and that most of us choose to love in words, rather than in action.

When we love in words, we show what we do to other people, and we are praised for that. But when we love in actions, most people will not notice what we do, we will not be praised, but the person that receive our love will remember us for the rest of their life. For me, this brings more than enough relief than any praises I might get if I love only in words.

I remembered one of my friend thanked me, out of the blue, for some good deeds that I did two or three years before that. And as I recall, I didn't even do much back then. I teared up, because I was so happy that she still remembered it, and still feel thankful, hopefully, to this day. Because then, I have become God's instrument to bring happiness to others. And to me as a Catholic, being God's instrument is the highest honor a child can get from her Father.