What are we worth?

Are we worth so little to ourselves that we rely on others to define us? We listen to “experts”, “academics”, “learned ones” without question. Where is our critical thinking skill? Were we not given brains? Where is our compassion? Were we not given hearts? Where is our intuition? Were we not given guts?

This is blasphemous to the gifts that has been given to us. All of us, as humans, have been given three incredible tools to help us make decisions. And they are our brains, our hearts and our guts.

Working together as a team, they help us make our decisions, big and small. Each as important as the other, we shouldn't ignore any of them. Often we're too lazy and too busy to listen to the quiet whispers of our guts. The gentle voice of our hearts. The soothing reasoning of our brains.

Our guts are given to us as a gift of intuition. Somehow, deep within ourselves, we know what we should and shouldn't do. Our guts, our intuition, sees what our eyes cannot see, hear what our ears cannot hear, touch what our touch cannot feel, taste what our tongue cannot taste and smell what our nose cannot smell. Then it whispers to us its suggestion, like Jiminy Cricket to Pinocchio.

Our hearts are given to us as a gift of feelings and compassion. It is there to keep us in check, to keep us human. It lets us know whether we're being humane in our decision making. How do we feel about the decision at hand and its impact to the people around us?

Our brains are given to us as a gift of logic and intellect. We are able to reason cause and effect, have deductive reasoning, and have critical thinking skills. It is there to deduce the logical decision that must be made given a series of facts.

Separately, they can help us make decisions. But seldom there are problems in the real world that are purely intuitive, emotional or logical. Most if not all life's problems have aspects of logic, intuition and emotion. If we simply take our logic and attack a problem purely academically, we will surely fail to take into account the irrational human behavior (this is where our intuition helps us) and we will surely fail to take into account the emotional issues that are always present (this is where our emotion helps us).

Now that we know the three tools we have to make decisions, why don't we use it more often? This fact is used every 2 years for political elections. It is used every second in advertisements. They will tug on our heart strings and make us decide solely on our emotions. Ignoring our brain and our gut instinct.

Then there are the academics who will appeal to our logic and our logic alone. They make themselves look and sound intellectually superior to us. Then our brain says if they're smarter than us, then whatever they say must be right. We blindly follow these men of science.

We need to use these gifts and overlook the glitter and flash. We need to use these three gifts and do our own critical thinking. Are these people right, logically? Are they compassionate and are they emotionally intelligent enough to do the right thing? Does my gut say these people are to be trusted?

Let's rise above what other people tell us. Rise above what other people expect of us. We are strong, intelligent, and beautiful men and women of this world. We are one, yet we are many. Each of our individual is worth more than what we give ourselves credit for. Start valuing ourselves, think on our own, be aware of who we are, not what other people expect of us and not what they say we are.

A boat ride across the Strait of Sunda

First, an explanation of the pictures. First one, see the cigarette in his right hand?  And then see the black rubber tubing near it? That's the fuel line. Under his feet? the fuel tank. Scratch that I meant a10 gallon water jug that is full of fuel with a hole punched out for the fuel line and the lid not quite tight (I can smell the fumes).

Second one, focus on the young man with a small water container. yep, he's bailing water out of the boat. And at this time, the water was calm so no, the water in the boat was not from the waves.

Third one, it just shows the state and size of the boat.

That night was a bit of an adventure. We chartered a small boat to go to this island across the strait.  Well I guess we stayed too long and when we came back, the evening winds were picking up.  Basically we were in the white caps condition on this rickety boat with a small, old outboard motor.  One guy was bailing water out of the bottom of the boat. It's open so we were all getting wet. But we made it safe and sound.

When I saw the guy with the cigarette, my brain calculated many scenarios as to what might happen and what I would do if such event occurs.  I would dive to catch the cigarette as it falls INTO the fueltank...I would grab the wet blanket they used to cover some dubious pile of stuff on the side...I would grab the water container and threw water at it...I wasn't that worried about having to swim, I can see both the island we're going to and the island we just left. So I can swim toward the closest one if the boat was gone.  The boat ride was over an hour long so at worst I'd have to swim for an hour or two.

Once we arrived at the island, snorkeling, seashell hunting and exploring ensued.  I was told that the Japanese (who used to occupyIndonesia for 4-5 years) used this island as a lookout station.

Since we stayed a tad too long, our ride back was risking the darkness (no lights on the boat, either indicator lights or to see with). Though there is a lighthouse, which I was hoping was still functioning if it came to that. *It was*

But the worst bit of news is the fact that we'll be sure to face the evening winds that will whip up the ocean, plus the currents.  This is not the open ocean, but a strait (look up Sunda Strait). So there area lot of conflicting natural forces at play here.  Hence the whitecap conditions that is sure to happen every day past 5:00pm.  

While it doesn't take much for the waves to be bigger than this boat...it was still unnerving for some people on the boat. Even my thoughts of just swimming to shore is now a scary proposition.  So again my brain came up with several solutions to different scenarios to ensure our survival. But I didn't count on the freight ships crossing our path! And the wakes they leave that are even bigger than the size of the waves (it got bigger after the ship's wakes).

I picked the windward side rather than the lee side of the boat.   So as the boat crashes into the waves, the wind would blow the spray onto my side of the boat.  This way I figured I would catch most of the water spray and save the children from it.

When we arrived back on shore, we were about 4 miles from our hotel(we could have taken the boat directly there but everyone was scared so we crossed the strait in a straight line).  We then took a public transportation that is a minivan with bench seats around the edge rather than in rows.  It fit 11 of us in the back, the driver, and the boat driver safely inside. The other 2 deck hands on the boat were hanging on the door throughout the whole ride.

I wasn't worried or anything for me. I was sure I could survive anything this little adventure threw at us. But it was both funny and disconcerting to watch how worried other people were (luckily the boat crew wasn't worried, if they were, I would be too).

Yep, that was our boat

Anyway, I thought this was a fun adventure.

Note the cigarette in his right hand

Bailing water out of the boat

Barbers and chiropractic services

I don't know if the two should be mixed together, let alone being performed by the same person. But that's what I experienced today. My first haircut in Indonesia that was not by my mom's hands. Not being able to articulate the necessary commands to convey that I wanted a haircut mimicking David Tennant as Dr. Who, I went with my cousin's recommendation; “pendek”. Short.

So what I got was a buzz cut with a trimmer, with 3 different lengths. He paid pretty close attention to the strays that are quite common with a buzz. The buzz procedure took less than 10 minutes, then commences the finishing move. And yes, with a straight razor. The edges were trimmed and shaved with a disconcertingly sharp but not quite hair splitting sharp razor.

No big deal so far.

Then came the all too familiar wafting smell of baby oil. No worries, I told myself. It's probably normal here instead of a hair gel or hair wax. There was a refreshing complete lack of expensive, of dubious use hair products here. I was correct, my head was rubbed with baby oil. And his hands came down to massage my neck, and my shoulders.

OK, that was quite pleasant.

When he put his hands on opposite sides of my head and cracked it sharply, I was quite surprised. There is quite a fine line between a trained killer performing a neck snap, a trained and experienced chiropractor adjusting one's cervical vertebrae, and someone untrained, but experienced adjusting one's cervical vertebrae.

One would hope that at the very least the untrained would have enough experience and learned from his failed experiments that by the time he's adjusting yours, he knows how to do it. At best, he was trained by his predecessor and he has enough experience WITHOUT any failed experiments.

In the end, I survived a quite pleasant, expedient and inexpensive haircut in Indonesia. Without being turned into a quadriplegic. Would I go again? For the equivalent of $1.25, you bet. But I probably won't go as often as my cousin. Currently, I look like an Asian Telly Savalas.

David Tennant
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Telly Savalas
Telly Savalas
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Asian Telly Savalas