Who Am I ?
May 13, 2014. 3.28pm.

To my mother I am her daughter, to my son I am his mother, to my husband his wife. I was my professor’s student. I am also that other random anonymous person according to whoever is sitting next to me at the moment in this crowded coffee shop while I type away on my gadgetry.
I am a freelancer or alternately unemployed, presently unaffiliated to any organization pledging allegiance to the turn of the wheel of economic progress. I am a housekeeper, a housewife. I was a research scientist, a microbiologist, a molecular biologist, a graduate student, a computer programmer, a postdoc, research fellow.
I’m a reader, a writer, this is what I spend many of my hours doing presently, though I do this at an approximately equal amount of time I spend doing laundry, wash dishes, cook, take breaks watch tv, social media. I’m an independent scholar, an independent scientist. I’m an essayist, a philosopher. I’m a 2–5K a day runner since the start of 2014 though I haven’t the time to do the routine recently.
Geopolitically speaking, I’m a citizen of Indonesia, though I’ve spent most of my life out of the country. I used to do some painting, pencil drawing still life, though I don’t anymore. I uptake role as home educator when the kid’s school art teacher forbade him from choosing his own colors for the flower she dictates for all to draw, “so they will choose the ‘right’ colors…”. I tell him to splatter colors of his own choosing, maybe it’ll break the color wheel rule, as long as he feels them beautiful, expressing himself, his identity.
Perhaps crystalizing such identity or identities is a simply pragmatic way for human beings to make simple the complicated world they long to make some kind of meaning of. As the automated reflex of our brains having evolved to compartmentalize and find patterns, to make sense, so that we can move on, come up with solutions to problems, the challenges of life, to survive.
An urge perhaps as similarly felt by impressionist painters, to capture the elusive as a thing frozen in time though we all see as obvious that all things refuse to keep, but evolve according to context and the movement of time. All things change, all things fade, all things die.
Everyone of us, the physical presence of our body, the cells that compose them, someday in a definite sense, will disintegrate, into thermodynamic zero. So who am I? A temporary collective of cells, atoms originating from stardust swirling in that mysterious space time, propelled from some massive death of stars that had once existed, carbon to carbon?
