ALMOST. BOX. THE RIGHT AND THE WRONG

ALMOST

“I almost lost him”, I thought while staring out of the cab window, passing through the darkness of Marcos Highway.

When I reached my friend’s house, I told them what my problem was. I got blank stares, empty smiles but most of them said nothing but, “Gaga ka!”

I asked them, “Baket? Anung mali?”

One friend responded at the top of his ill-mannered falsetto, “The fact the iniisip mo na pwede, eh maling-mali na?!?!?!”

I stood, raised my eyebrows, and swished my slender arms, “EH PANO KUNG SOULMATE KO SIYA!?!?! Grabe ka ‘teh? Porque ba badez tayo eh bawal na …. Grabe ka mang-stereotype ha! 
Witchelles ako naka-kahon!?”

And I drank my last bottle of happy horse.

BOX

As a little child, I have always wondered why my grandad would never let me play with the neighborhood girls. He would always tell me, "Hindi ka dapat nakikipaglaro sa kanila", and period. I didn't know what the restriction all about is. All I knew was "I should not". But I enjoyed playing with the neighborhood girls. I enjoyed the swiftness and the ability to be agile and flexible playing tinikling. I loved the sway of palm and wrist and the strategy of jackstone while watching the plastic stars disappear with the bounce of the rubber ball. My eyes glow and my smile gleam as barbie dolls were dressed up and hairstyled.

I never got the chance to understand and appreciate the physicality and brutality of the neighborhood boys’ games of “Tug of War”, “Agawan Base” or “Sipa Ball”. I always find it tiring and irritating as you sweat all afternoon and smell like “araw” in the end. It was never fun!

As I grew older, little by little I realized that I was not supposed to play with girls just because I am not girl and I am supposed to be play with the boys just because I am a boy (I would like to put a hard emphasis on the word “supposed”).

In reality, we all know that we are bound by rules. We are NOT SUPPOSED to do things JUST BECAUSE we are not supposed to. We live and we breathe by the rules. But there are indeed MAJOR rules that need to be followed and these are the things that make a society a solid one. Well, let’s just think about the most basic ones that Moses “supposedly” to have carried from Mt. Sinai and delivered to the ailing Humankind. These make people live peacefully, mutually and harmoniously. Okay! This is already given! I am not to talk about the rules of humanity, the Ten Commandments or the constitution of the Republic of the Philippines – as civilized people, we all know how these run.

I guess what I would like to talk about here are STEREOTYPES and STEREOTYPING.

As how the freedictionary.com define stereotype:  A conventional, formulaic, and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image 

Now, we all believe that every person is an individual and every person is unique. Yet almost every person would like to belong to a certain clique and almost every person would like to follow the fad and be “belong”. That’s how I find us contradicting, we want to be personalized and yet we want to belong to a certain group and be accepted because of common goals and perspectives.

I have my own share of stereotyping. Just because of my sexual preference, I have been stereotyped as someone without direction and focused and as someone WHO SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY. It hurts a lot when you are being compared to a straight guy when all he knows is nothing but copy and paste things while you can bring out an entire philosophy based from nothing by purely statistics. It pains me when people think of you as someone who’s just filled with carnal thoughts and malice. Above all, what hurts the most is that you are judged just because of your sexual preference without getting to know the real you.

Partly, it might be my fault just because I am flamboyant, loud, voracious, someone who would always express his mind and just simply being fabulous. A clear stereotypical formula of a gay guy. The tendency is people would perceive me the way they see how most gays are.

But I guess what’s always important is the concept of TWISI-TWYSI. It’s meeting perspectives. It’s the concept of making reality to be in the middle of TWISI (The Way I See It) and TWYSI (The Way You See It).

The event of being stereotyped, whether it’s about sexual preference, religion, sex, position, politics, musical influences, job, etc, has always been inevitable, As human beings, we are made to judge each other. The only important thing is how we will rise from that judgement and make people believe that we are different and not just because we are like this THEN WE SHOULD BE LIKE THIS.

Yes. We can always say, “Who the fuck cares!?” but in reality, everybody cares!

There is still the thin line of what’s right and what’s wrong.

THE RIGHT and THE WRONG

Have you ever been caught in the middle of THE RIGHT and THE WRONG? In some cases, we are bound to make stupid actions and decisions mainly based on our clouded thoughts and perhaps infatuation.

We may think that we are in THE RIGHT when we do things our way and in the process makes us HAPPY or SATISFIED, while at the back of our heads, we know for sure that what we were doing WERE COMPLETELY and UTTERLY WRONG?

The hard question is how to we compensate with the WRONGNESS of our actions? Do we correct it by stopping what we were doing? Or by just merely running away from it?

It is really hard to accept flaws and wrong decisions that lead to harsh results. But I guess, the results will always be the results; how we would deal with it makes more of the difference.