2018 in Retrospect

2k18 has been a pretty eventful year. I wasn't expecting it to be, but I'm happy it can be a year full of memories instead of another year of simply getting by. 

The year started with a bang. I got my first Day6 Season’s Greetings : Day & Night. The calendar, poster and the diary/agenda were beautiful. The diary didn’t come with daily planner which is what I usually use, so I manually lined and dated the pages. It was a tedious work but I thoroughly enjoyed the process because it gave me some space for creativity. For that I was glad.




Then, at the end of January, the whole batch of my program (mind you, the whole batch consisted of only 12 people) went to Japan for excursion! It was my first overnight flight so it was rather nerve-wracking. I ended up not sleeping on both flight to and from Japan for unknown reasons. I think, if I can help it, I won’t opt for too long a journey on flight because those 6 hours was totally draining. On a brighter note, the trip itself was fun. I got to feel winter for the first time :) Despite the fact that the cold bothers me very much, it felt great to be able to experience something I never could before. Japanese food in Japan was even better than the already great Japanese food in Indonesia. Eating matcha ice cream in the winter still was a treat and did not add to the cold, eating piping hot taiyaki offered some comfort in the bitter cold, and eating anything else there was simply pampering my tummy. Getting lost in Japan was a mini adventure and I am happy to have my friends with me there. In fact, the group I went around with in Japan became some friends I am more comfortable with to this day which was rather surprising because I didn’t spent much time with them before Japan. No matter what, it was definitely something to be grateful for.

Moving on to another topic, I shall talk about one haunting/daunting activity that all students should have same experience with: committee work. There were 2 events that left bitter taste in my mouth even months after they ended. One had problem with uncommitted chairman, the other had very committed chairman with very little support from other members especially on the aspect of funding. Since I was one of the key committee members, It really opened up my eyes to the real world in the sense that not all work will be smooth sailing and more importantly not everyone cares so we have to manage our minds and feelings. After all, they will be common occurrence during work. These rather disappointing committee works were just a sneak peek to the more chaotic real world I have yet to face.

Another tough ordeal was of course, exams. The exam schedule was great up to semester 4. There was always some space to breathe after the end of a difficult exam before starting another. However, this semester there was no break as the tests were less than 24 hours apart. The whole batch was losing hope and energy pretty fast. I hope everyone can pass, please pray for our results this coming January :’)

All those challenges made most of my friends want to be done with uni, or at least our campus because it, perhaps, reminds us too much of struggle. Do you remember how my batch only consists of 12 (now 11)? Well, 8 of them expressed that they want to go for student exchange on the 7^th semester, when all our important exams will be over. Having a class with only 3 people sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Thinking about it I was rather tempted by the idea of also going away for one semester but my parents had made it clear in the previous semesters that they feel that student exchange program is rather useless and thus doesn’t really support me to join that program. As days went by, my resolve of not going wore down. My classmates encouraged and enticed me with the idea of the exchange and some of my friends and acquaintances were having the time of their lives while doing student exchange. In the end, I persuaded my parents to let me join, because after all student exchange program means additional expenses. After days of persuasion and pages of mini proposal, they finally allowed me to apply. Wish my friends and me luck for the application! We are very excited for what awaits us in the respective countries we choose.

Enough with the story, I would like to tell you about general things I learned this year. The first lesson I got was from my attempt at doing “Year in Pixel”. FYI, year in pixel is a page where you try to represent your feelings or mood each day into colours. At the end of the year, you can see a plethora of colours on that page, it will be pretty and unique to yourself, no one will ever have the exact same year in pixel :) The problem was I’m rather inconsistent, so sometimes I’d colour for the whole week in one sitting instead of the supposed day by day. What I learnt from that is that memory is very fickle and unreliable, I can’t even remember what my mood from few days ago was, or what caused that mood from a month ago. It shows how insignificant our one day in life is, that one day is nothing compared to the number of days we have lived, what more when we grow older. What I mean is that, we can let those bad mood go, let our anger go, let our disappointment go because it’s just a bad day and we still have a lot more days to be happy.

I am also reminded of how fleeting life is. The passing of someone I knew, the loving mother of a good friend made me realise that yet again. It is a timely reminder to cherish the people around me even more everyday because I never would know when they will be gone. I may not be good at expressing my intentions to people around me, but I do hope I can show that I’m available for my friend when she needs me. And I also hope that she can be an even stronger person, facing the adversity of life in the days to come.

Aside from that, being in my early 20s means that this is the peak age when people around me and myself want to love. A friend is actively looking for love, another falling in and out of love, and some others staying in love even after years of togetherness. The desire to love and to be loved is natural, everybody at one point of time would want to find their significant other. And the time is, perhaps, now for my friends and I. The guys are starting to set out their sight on girls they are interested in, another friend got her first boyfriend and broke up a few months later, another couple I knew from JC days are staying strong to this day and I wish them even more years to come together. This paragraph is maybe more like a realisation rather than a lesson. But I thought it’s good to write it down for my future self to read, how the want to love is great enough to be a highlight of the year.

So yeah, that’s all for this year. I hope you all also had a great year and get to enjoy 2019 even more than 2018 :)