The past three months had been overwhelming: I finished an internship at the UNFCCC Secretariat, made new friends, and most exciting of all, launched a video essay YouTube channel with Wikan. We named our little brainchild Frame and Sentences because that’s what we think we’re respectively (somewhat) good at: taking pictures and putting words together. If you’d like to know more about the channel, we shared our background story through an interview with Swedian from Dialogika Podcast.

There are times when I feel like life has given me too much I might explode.

That said, August also marks the month that I left Indonesia last year. They say distance makes the heart grow fonder, but I’m not sure if I can say the same about this damned country of mine. Now when I say that, it never means that I’m not going back home. In fact I’m very much looking forward to dipping back into a sea of problems that is my nation and try to discover a little space where I could make a difference.

For now, my home is Cambridge/Boston. Despite their ruthless winter, they have become a city of comfort. A place where people are warm anytime you’re in need of companionship, but provides caves of privacy when you need some lone time.

Speaking of home, last weekend Wikan and I took the train and bus to visit Göttingen, a city my family used to call home in 1998-1999. Things did not change that much; they simply shrank. The playground I used to hang out a lot at is now too small, though my elementary school somehow looks exactly the same.

I’ve come to like Bonn, too. The city’s weather never stays for more than two days, but maybe it’s just looking for our attention. It’s kind of cute, if you think about it.

Oh we visited Rotterdam and explored it on a bike, too. It was lovely.

Overall, it’s been such a rewarding and lessonful year. I look forward to what the next cycle has to offer.

On an unrelated note, I love how seasons come in four, and with this fourth blogpost, I have come to complete my seasonal blogpost series. I look forward to communicating my opinions and ideas visually, which—I’ve come to learn—is a completely different animal.

I surely hope that this does not mean that I’ll stop writing, though. Video essays are the new cool guys I’ve been hanging out with, but I know my first love will always be a long, pictureless, sometimes structureless, good-old blogpost (just like this one). Onwards!