Random Questions

"Mbak Kiki kapan nikah?"
** Seharusnya ditanyain kapan lulusnya dulu dong dik. Menikahi skripsi dulu baiknya. Kalau sudah sip dan sah, maka syarat minimal sudah terpenuhi lah insyaAllah.
"Mbak Kiki tutor ya di kelas ini?"
** Padahal saya kan masih mengambil 3 SKS mata kuliah ini.

Dua pertanyaan random itu keluar dari ucap spontan dan polos kedua adik angkatan saya hari ini. Pertanyaan yang sederhana, dan mungkin tidak mempunyai motivasi apa-apa, selain adanya keingintahuan. Namun nampaknya saya harus mulai merenungkannya, dan memberikan jawaban yang paling masuk akal, terutama dengan kesadaran penuh : dimana kaki saya berpijak sekarang dan mau kemana (dan bagaimanakah) langkah ini akan dibawa. Akankah merangkak, tertatih, berjalan pelan, berjalan tergesa, ataukah berlari. Saya yang harus merencanakan dan memutuskan. Semoga tidak akan terlalu banyak penundaan, dan kesia-siaan tentunya.

Semangat move on & move forward!

Kiki Fauzia

Rumusan Masalah?

picture from here

Beberapa hari ini hujan mengguyur kota. Hujan tak hanya menahan raga, namun meninggalkan elegi tentang kelumit peristiwa. Entah apa itu, tapi nuansa hujan memberikan rasa janggal dalam diri. Rasa hangat yang diidamkan, tempo melambat tanpa disadari, dan keinginan untuk lebih memanjakan diri sambil menikmati deru rintik hujan. Namun bagi saya, hujan identik dengan satu kata: sendu. Entah. Dan dalam kesenduan menyelinap, saya masih mencoba merangkai koma, titik, dan tanda tanya. Saya pun makin tertantang menyelesaikan permainan puzzle kehidupan .

Pola-pola yang bergeser, partikel yang saling bertindihan, bangun-bangun yang tidak kongruen, fenomena simetris-asimetris, imparsialitas, subyektifitas, ambiguitas, mispersepsi, ekspresi, kepentingan, ketulusan, kasih sayang, masa depan, penghargaan, kepekaan, artificial, kekuasaan, kekayaan, keangkuhan, prestasi, harga diri, teman, lawan, kecewa, cinta, kinerja, ironi, anomali, produktivitas, dan lain lain, dan seterusnya saya kehilangan kosa kata. Saya gagap menyusun makna. Saya asal memilih diksi. Dan pada akhirnya saya menyimpulkan bahwa: hidup memang harus diperjuangkan.

Oleh karena itu, pertama kali kita harus mampu mendefinisikan rumusan masalah terlebih dahulu, tentang apa yang benar-benar ingin diperjuangkan. Dan pertanyaan mendasar yang perlu kita jawab adalah what do you really want?

If you fail to answer that in details. You should figure it out soon. Beware : time is running.

Regards,

Pesan Ibu

gambar diunduh dari sini.

Anakku sayang...,simak baik-baik kata-kata bijak dari Mario Teguh hari ini. Mudah-mudahan bisa menjadi motivator seiring dengan doa mama...

"Menjadi orang muda berhasil tanpa harus menjadi tua. Menjadi pribadi anggun tanpa harus dilahirkan dalam keluarga ningrat. Tegaslah dalam memelihara diri dari hal-hal yang tidak memuliakan dan fokuslah pada hal-hal yang MEMBESARKAN KEHIDUPAN. Semoga Allah SWT selalu menuntun langkahmu. Amin. "

**Pesan yang disampaikan ibu saya kepada kedua anaknya. Amiien ya Allah!

"Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish"

I found a very inspiring blog. On the recent update, she published a letter from Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer & Pixar Animation Studios. It's such a worth-reading. So, please take your time to read it, and you might be surprissed how much positive energy you have absorbed. Inhale those magnificent virtues and exhale the bad notions you kept. Then, take a chance to make a small action by using inhaling energy filled up your breath and blood.

** I coppied the transcrip from here.

--------------------------------

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example. Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.
When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thank you all, very much

--------------------------------------------

Hungry and foolish regards, _Kf_

uncertainty

In the middle of finishing my take home exam, I am feeling sad and uncertain about various things in my life. Here are some questions that popped up on my brain right now..
1) Graduate soon, or experience more study abroad
2) Skripsweet, when to start, when will finish, what is the topic?
3) My GPA, this is my last semester of taking courses, maybe. So, I want to get my best! Can I?
4) My age, concerned about life planning after graduating,
5) Achieving my master degree abroad or working to make more money
6) What is my ideal job? Values, interest, money, .. longterm security
7) Personal life : marriage, settled with family, taking care of family: children and husband
8) Living nearby my parents or taking my parents live near by me
9) so on, and so on

Then, I started thingking that the list above are ALL 'BOUT MYSELF. Does that means that I am too egoistic. Then I come to my 'klise' question: When I stop to think about myself// When I come to the point that I am enough with myself// Is that possible?

Uncertain regards, -KF-

Di Balik Dies Natalies UGM ke-60

Saya ingin menuliskan cerita dan pengalaman saya beberapa bulan yang lalu. Daripada hanya mengendap dalam otak dan tersisa menjadi memori-memori pribadi, lebih baik saya berbagi- supaya bisa menjadi inspirasi untuk terus bermimpi. Dies Natalies UGM ke-60 terasa sangat spesial bagi saya. Saya bersyukur dan merasa beruntung hadir di tengah orang-orang besar, yang sukses dalam karir dan profesinya. Rasa bangga terutama karena berada di antara mereka yang sangat concern terhadap masa depan bangsa ini.

Saya tiba-tiba tertawa kelu. Menertawakan diri sendiri ketika mencoba mengingat kembali jawaban spontan saya kala itu. Dan sampai saat ini saya masih pada pendirian yang sama, menimbang dan bertanya-tanya sendiri, 'apa ada yang salah dengan pilihan jawaban saya itu'. Tatkala itu saya menemani dua orang kenamaan yang telah membesarkan nama Indonesia di kancah internasional. Agar lebih akrab dan mengenal lebih baik lagi, kami saling mengakrabkan diri dengan pertanyaan yang lebih personal. Beliau pun menanyakan tentang diri saya, termasuk tentang jurusan. Saya pun menjawabnya. Kemudian mereka menyebutkan dua profesi yang yang mereka harapkan dan amini untuk menjadi pilihan profesi saya. Karena sebuah doa yang baik, saya pun mengamininya dalam kata. Berapa menit kemudian, beliau menanyakan apa cita-cita saya. Entah, secara spontan saya menjawab “menjadi ibu rumah tangga yang baik…”. Hee =). Mereka pun hanya diam tak berkomentar. Sebenarnya penjelasan tentang cita-cita saya itu belum lengkap. Menjadi ibu rumah tangga yang baik yang…, …., …

Kemudian saya pun mengantarkan kedua tamu UGM ke perhelatan agung di Keraton dalam acara "HB IX Award" yang diberikan kepada dua akademisi UGM yang dianggap berkontribusi terhadap masyarakat dan bangsa ini. Event ini menghadirkan Sri Sultan HBX, segenap pimpinan tinggi rektorat, fakultas dan tamu-tamu Rektor dan Sultan. Belum sampai selesai acara, saya mendapat sms yang meminta saya mengantar dua orang tamu UGM tersebut untuk undur diri lebih dahulu. Yang saya salute malam itu adalah walaupun mereka berdua adalah orang besar, namun tetap menjaga etika dan sopan santun, agar terlihat tidak ‘melukai’ perasaan orang lain karena pamit terlebih dahulu. Saya pun merekomendasikan agar lewat pintu belakang agar tidak terlihat oleh banyak orang dan lebih sopan tentunya. Alhasil, saya pun mendapat pujian karena inisiatif saya itu.

Setelah mengantar salah satu tamu ke satu hotel terkenal di Jogja, tempat beliau dan istri menginap, Bapak yang satu meminta saya dan pak sopir berbalik lagi ke arah Taman Budaya Yogyakarta (TBY), karena telah membuat janji dengan kawan spesialnya di Jogja. Saya pun diajak menemui orang special ini. Susasana di TBY masih lumayan ramai. Padahal waktu sudah bergerak hampir menyentuh angka 12 malam. Karena memang saat itu sedang ada Biennale Festival, salah satunya di TBY. Kami pun bertemu orang yang telah lama menunggu. Tidak lama, hanya beberapa menit. Mengingat dia perempuan dan rumahnya jauuh di Bantul. Mereka hanya saling bertanya kabar secara singkat dan membuat janji lagi untuk esok.

Saya pun masih penasaran dengan wanita berambut panjang berkulit sawo matang dan mempunyai aura yang kuat itu. Usianya sekitar 30 tahunan akhir atau mungkin juga awal 40-an. Dalam perjalanan pulang ke rumah rektor di kompleks dosen Bulaksumur (karena memang Bapak tersebut 'stay' di situ selama di UGM). Bapak tersebut menceritakan bahwa ibu tadi merupakan seniman terkenal di Indonesia, bahkan di mancanegara. Lukisannya bahkan sudah mewarnai berbagai galeri seni dan festival di berbagai penjuru dunia. Dia pun sudah menjelajahi dunia, terbang bersama lukisannya, mulai dari kota seni di Paris, Roma, Venezia, sampai Amerika Serikat dan berbagai negara di kawasan lain.

Kemudian Bapak itu juga menceritakan bahwa salah satu lukisan ibu itu dijadikan gambar dalam cover buku terbarunya. Lukisan yang dijadikan salah satu gambar cover tersebut sangat unik karena memuat huruf Arab pegon, bertuliskan "I LOVE YOU'. Di akhir ceritanya, sang Bapak berpesan kepada saya, "Sebagai wanita, kamu harus bercita-cita tinggi dan menjadi apa yang kamu inginkan." Nasehat lain yang masih terpatri di hati saya adalah, "Untuk menjadi orang yang sukses atau ahli di bidangnya. Resep pertama yang harus kita punyai adalah : RASA SENANG. Jadi intinya, kita harus menyenangi dan menjiwai pekerjaan kita atau apa pun yang kita kerjakan."

Baik Pak saya masih belajar untuk meramu resep tersebut. Terimakasih banyak.

Best regards, -KF