Wednesday, June 07, 2006

have you ever intended a well thought-of reply, but your voicebox had its own ideas? and the next thing you know, alien words are coming outta your mouth and they ended up sounding all wrong? call it freudian slip in some instances. or kick yourself in the shin when it comes to the 5-sec-too-late delays it took for you to come up with a smart retort to that moronic bloke, but these things happened.

it happened to me.

i met 2 pals for coffee several months ago. afterwards, i mulled over the topic discussed over our lattes but its the sorta mulling that conveniently goes away when the next piece of doughnut reaches my mouth. fastforward 3 months and a darn good 'lipstick jihad' book afterwards, i realised my responses to that topic do not sit well with myself.

NoW, I kNnnOOwWW ThHHHaaAttt'SssSSSSss liKkKKEeeee, SlllOoooooWwWww mAaaaaNnn, BuUttT... *drawls off in a retard stupor* (note the alternating caps, cos thats typically how morons type. then again, if they have the capacity to press the caplocks and shift key relentlessly like tat, some might argue they might have half a mind, after all).

*i am merely trying to prove a point here*

yes, i know thats kinda slow. so anyways, lets move on.

the discussion harmlessly strayed towards the precarious race topic.
without intending to offend, my friend asked my opinion regarding some race-related questions. now, i thought my replies to the questions are not fully reflective of my opinions and are snappy at best. i could think of a thousand excuses to justify my banal replies."the aliens drug my coffee, i was having a bad hair day... yadayada" but more likely than not this is why my emotions and logic are reduced to one-sentence blah-ness that night:

i feel somewhat nervous trying to explain to my friends my perceptions concerning race and religion, cos there might be this possibility that what i say might be taken to be indicative of the general community. so it makes me anxious trying to find the correct words and phrases to put across my stand. this in turn means that i clam up. and when i try to speak, the words morphed into something else right before they escaped my mouth. the intended replies slipped away, nagging at me only a full 3 months later.

this anxiousness in providing an explanation does not imply that i am ashamed of my background. not at all. it might suggest that i still have a lot to learn in understanding my culture but it certainly does not suggest that i m ashamed of it. i would gladly hold my head up high, plant my feet firmly on the ground and hold a neon pink placard announcing: 'i m malay/(or boyanese)-muslim and proud of it.'

i m just having a teeny wee bit of difficulty undoing the damage done by terrorists and such who have distorted the image of my religion. i am also having another teeny morsel of difficulty explaining the misconceptions about my race. but i m gonna keep on trying. the best way to undo all the stereotypical views is to rise above all these claims and and prove them groundless. not to sit idyllic and wallow in all the self-pity you can muster and blame life, the universe and everything for your predicaments, and definitely not with the view, "well, thats what they think of us anyways, so why not just live up to the reputation, eh?" you know what pisses me off? that some dun realise this. it pisses me off cos i know they are capable of so much more beautiful, grander things deserving of their giving nature.

oh.dear.god.

r.z 11:02 AM  0 comments