Excuse Me, My Mother Tongue...

My early writings were in English. Not some great writings, with lots of data, beautiful quotations, and nicely prepared.

My early writings were only some kind of daily journals. A task that I had to do every week at school, for a year or so. My teacher, Ms. MacCandlish (yes, I do remember my 2nd grade teacher!), always used the same topic for those writings.

‘What did you do yesterday?’ was the one and only topic that we used.

And I would go ranting about the supermarket that I visited, or the dinner that my family had, or a short story about me being chased by a dog at the park. I wrote them all in my yellow note book.

It was a simple task. Surprisingly, the task was quite a fun weekly ritual for me. It was a pleasure to be able to share my stories using my own words. It was on my Top 10 Favorite task chart. Second place, after the reading task.

The best part is my teacher never judged my writings cruelly. She only corrected the grammars, or the mis-spelled words. Such as correcting Ardian to Adrian, because she didn't knew anybody with Ardian as a name (though it really is my brother's name). She, probably, never heard of Ardian.

Haha. And there's a red line beneath the 'Ardian' word. I guess this spell-check that I am using right now also agrees with her.

Back in Indonesia, I learned to write in Indonesian. I had a lot of task but not as fun as my previous task. At Sekolah Dasar, I started to write in Indonesian. Yet, only for formal uses. I continued to write my daily journal, or my creative-personal-writings, in English. Not a perfect one, but it was quite, um... understandable.

Of course, without giving too much attention on those grammars.

I used to write all my personal things in English, as I remember. Daily journals, letters, notes, to-do-lists, you name it. Until a point where writing in Indonesian felt 'odd'.

I know. That was not a good thing and such disrespect for my mother tongue. I needed to be able to write in Indonesian.

Then, I pushed myself to write in Indonesian. I never wrote in English, if it was not necessary. A bit extreme, perhaps. But it had to be done. I started writing in Indonesian. From my personal writings, to the writings that were made to be published.

Anyway, I got carried away with these writing in Indonesian things. It's just as the same fun as the English writing task that I used to have. Now, everything is up side down. Writing in English felt 'odd'.

That's why, I think, I have to start writing in English again.

"What time is better than now? What place is better than here?" said a friend of me, few years ago.

So, what do you think? An odd writing? Good night!