
I never read any of his book. A friend offered to lend me the first book of his Laskar Pelangi series, but whatever written on the back cover didn’t convince me enough to dedicate hours to reading the actual book. He may have a lot of fans, therefore feel entitled to such behavior, I’m just glad I didn’t contribute to his arse-ry.
But he is most certainly not the only one.
Just last week I had to listen to a guy spewing bullshit for a couple of hours. We sat together and the sad excuse of a human being started to lecture me on how I should’ve done my job by showing me a slideshow he shamelessly downloaded from the internet (the nerve). Then he made a sexist joke of how he’d told a guy he was ‘training’ to wear a skirt for lacking initiatives. I was kind of fed up I couldn’t be bothered to hold back and just straight up called his ass out, “That’s sexist.”
He later explained how that was not a sexist remark, I think I threw up in my mouth a little. And I swear I couldn’t make this up even if I wanted to, but he later told me that he ‘had been around long enough to know that some people I was working with would not make it very far because they had tattoos or dyed hair. Again, my unfiltered mouth quickly verbalise my thoughts, and I didn’t regret not trying to stop myself from saying, “That’s judgemental as hell.”
Since I’d been trying to be polite even to dickheads, I let him invited himself to my lunch.
I’m telling you, this guy just couldn’t help himself. Before my first bite, he already scored a bigotry hat-trick by saying the n-word repeatedly. When I called him out on it, he said it wasn’t racist since he had black homies. I told him that he still shouldn’t have been saying it, he yelled at me, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I spent 23 years of my life in America. I once lived in the ghetto.” Quote-unquote.
That coming from a privileged Asian immigrant in the US, is similar to an Arab immigrant in Indonesia saying he knows everything about the struggles of Indonesians of Chinese descent.
But then again, what did I expect? It was just last month I met his associate who called millennials ‘spoilt and lazy’.
I’m not even sorry that I have no plan on paying attention to whatever garbage that falls out of his mouth.
