The Jakartan Monologue

It's smoggy, crowded, dyslectic  between annoyingly humid and steaming hot, populated by rude people from the village areas who don't give a rat's ass about hygiene nor manners, frequently smells like a messed up fusion between carbon monoxide and septic tanks, crowded with unlicensed drivers driving all kinds of public transportation, controlled by local authorities who treats bribery like gods, and a whole lot of other wrong things you could imagine in running a city in a Third-World country. 

The funny part however is that those things mentioned above are frequently paired with the paradoxical counterpart that miraculously go hand-in-hand in the name of coexistence. A parasitic coexistence, that is. To call it ironic would be too bland, and to label it devastating would be a slight-hyperbole. We, the Jakarta people, tend to name our city's issues as something that goes along with the unnamed sequence from bitching to eventually dismissing it into a "whatever"-infused state. Just imagine New York's poorer, adopted, lazy, procrastinating, mentally-unstable, masochistic sister who constantly gets pregnant with bastard embryos while finding out that she's the only one left out from a will inheritance. That's Jakarta in a nutshell for you heathens. Teeheehee.

Who needs this city, really? Our beaches are dark green with a black tint up, unlike Bali. The weather offers nothing but overacting conditions such as when the sun scorches your skin during the dry season, while the monsoon hands giveaways in the form of floods. The traffic made you wish you were James Riady with his endless hordes of helicopters. The local state officers makes you wanna reach an AK-47 and turn them into target practices with their so-called version of public assistance. The criminal activities are so intense that it's actually starting to get a bit funny whenever you see a pickpocket being bludgeoned to a pulp by the angry mass on some local TV program.

At the end, a rant is just a rant.

Alas, I hate my city the moment I realize that I can't live without it. They say that hate and love are like two opposing sides of the same coin. They were right. 

And I share this sentiment with the rest of my fellow Jakartans.

-Tevia-