You Are Who You Are

I was asked by a friend of mine last week what I thought of homosexuals. It seemed odd that he’d spring up the topic all of a sudden, considering that we were right in the middle of a heated argument as to who would win a street fight between Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein – more on this in a separate post.

In any case, I said that I have no problem with homosexuals, even pointing out to him that I spent a lot of my formative years in a school where it seemed like the gender lines were drawn at about an even keel between the straight and the not-so. I told him that I have a lot of gay friends that I speak highly of, not because of their philandering lifestyles, but because of what they’ve done for themselves, regardless of their sexual orientation. Right off the bat, I told him that most of my homosexual friends are doing quite well for themselves and that I’m extremely happy for them.

The conversation – strange as it was – ended up becoming a fleeting topic, but in the short time that it was brought up, I found myself defending homosexuals more than I did questioning their gender choice.

Why am I writing this all of a sudden? I have no idea. I have no clue as to how a conversation between the merits of Hitler and Hussein as street fighters led to this topic. But since it was broached, I felt compelled to think about it and give my two cents on the matter.

I’ve never believed in the concept of ‘fitting in’, which is what I believe a lot of homosexuals have resorted to out of fear that they’d be judged differently.

My problem with the whole notion of fitting in is that it prevents you from being who you are. I think that the moment you lose touch of what you bring to the table, then that’s the time you begin to lose your identity. Humans - whether you’re straight, gay, lesbian, or otherwise – are capable of great things. The only thing that holds people back is fear, fear of being mistreated and misjudged by those who feel that they’re more adequate than them.

But fear of being different is a misplaced fear.

Nobody wins when you think so little of yourself that you go out and hide inside the closet, afraid that the world would judge you for being so different. Playing the part of the oppressed and subjugated doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightening about being afraid of your true colors so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. When you let go of your inhibitions, cast away all your anxieties and be the person you were meant to be, that’s the time – at least as far as I’m concerned – when other people will do the same.

In as much as some people would argue on the shortcomings of being homosexual, there are also those that believe that sexual preference has nothing to do with making your mark in this world. The list of homosexuals that have made positive contributions runs long, and if you ask me, there’s absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t run longer.

Straight or not, you are who you are, and it’s what you do on your time here on Earth that counts.

Uninvited Guest

A few years ago, I had - on more than one occasion – the displeasure of having to sleep in my own bed while a bat innocuously flew around my room. At first, I found it maddeningly annoying, not because I was scared of it, but because I was afraid that it would excrete its putrid excrement all over me while I was dozing off. Nobody wants to literally get shit on and I sure as hell didn’t want to wake up the next day having to explain to everyone how I managed to get bat dung all over my face while in the middle of a deep slumber.

Before I continue, let me explain first how bats can get inside my room. The thing is, my room is on the top floor of the house and being the closest room to our roof, it has an exhaust, which is then connected to a vent that can be found on the roof. When the weather becomes unbearably hot, I open the exhaust on my room to allow air – however little it may be - to pass through it. Makes sense, yes?

But, being the forgetful idiot that I am, I sometimes leave the exhaust open, which, in turn, gives these creatures of the night an unobtrusive access into my room.

The first time I saw a bat in my room has actually become a sort of folk legend between me and my mother. It was back in college and I vividly recall studying for a Philo exam for the next day. In the middle of my eyebrow-burning session, I noticed a shadow of something flying around in my room. At first, I ignored the seemingly harmless distraction and thought nothing of it. It wasn’t until the little creature plopped down beside me where I realized that it was, in fact, a bat. My girlish shrieks notwithstanding, I did try to get these blood-suckers out of my room - even resorting to throwing an orange, a broom, a dust pan, and my brother’s expensive Gucci shoe with the hopes of catching them square on the chin and knocking them down. But as you can imagine, I failed miserably and, after what seemed like hours of throwing whatever object-turned-projectile I could get my hands on at them, I mercifully resigned and accepted the fact that I was being evicted from my own room by – of all things – a bat.

Over the next few months, the same scenario repeated itself over and over again: I’m in my room, a bat unexpectedly appears, I shriek like a pubescent girl getting her first period, I vainly try to shoo them away, and I always end up sleeping in another room in the house. Over time, the fear began to dissipate and was instead replaced by general indifference. ‘Fly in my room all you want’, I said. ‘Just don’t bother me when I sleep and do not, under any circumstances, do your business on my face’.

I don’t know if these bats understood my attempt at a truce but whether they did or not, they sure as hell left me alone. So, in return, I did too. And just when it seemed like my room was beginning to become a vacation spot them, they stopped coming, which in hindsight, may have come as a result of us changing the exhausts in my room to one’s that actually closed when I wanted them to.

Nevertheless, they did stop coming and for the longest time, I never saw one of them in my room. That is, of course, until tonight.

For the life of me, I have no idea how this particular one ended up here. I checked the aforementioned exhausts and they’re all closed. The screens on our windows (another former entry point) remain perfectly intact – a striking achievement in its own right considering the wimpiest gust of wind always seem to be enough to tear them apart.

In any case, the bat is still here, although as of right now, its hanging on the ceiling next to my cabinet like a cocoon, without even the slightest glimpse of a twitch. Although it looks completely stoic right now, I’m pretty sure that when I turn off my lamp, it’s going to fly around again, just like old times.

That’s fine, so as long as it doesn’t decide to defecate on me while I sleep.

The Trek of a Lifetime

If somebody gave me 5 pesos for every dumb-ass assumption I’ve ever made in my life, I’d probably have enough money by now to indulge on a brand-new car. The worst thing about trying to make sense of something you absolutely have no idea about is when you’re incessant postulations end up being completely different from what you experience. And if history has taught me anything, there haven’t been a lot of times that I’ve been proven right.

Take my recent trek to Mount Pinatubo as an example.

In the days leading up to that trip, I had conditioned my mind to believe that the adventure was nothing more than a stroll in the park. It’s my way of psyching myself to believe that this trek would be a cake walk when in fact, somewhere in the recesses of my consciousness, I was deathly afraid of having to explain to everybody how neurotically scared I was of taking the trek.

So I stuck with the image of bravado and went off to Pinatubo together with my sister, my aunt, and my 73 year old – yes, 73 – uncle.

The first part of the trek involved riding a 4x4 jeep for an hour on a vast and barren lahar field. It seemed easy at first, considering that it was pretty much like driving along mud; but as the ground started becoming uneven and the 4x4 began twisting and turning in directions any normal-moving vehicle as no business being in that’s when I knew that I had gotten myself into a situation that was evidently, more than what I bargained for.

After the hour long drive, the 4x4 mercifully stopped and the toothless driver gave us a nod as if to say, ‘you’re on your own from here’. At that point, I jumped out off the God-forsaken death ride, grateful that I was still in one piece. As I got out, I took a quick glance of the surroundings and began to think that this was really going to be was a stroll in the park – if this is what a park looks like in the moon.

It was an eerie feeling to be standing on a place that never in my life have I seen anywhere in this world. There were rocks as big as houses scattered all over the place, some were even stacked on top of each other. The surrounding mountains had enormous slabs that were so smooth it looked like a giant knife sliced through it. Really, you have to see it to believe it.

Truth be told, describing that three-hour trek leaves me at a loss for words. I’ve spent countless nights trying to come up with a reasonable – and believable – explanation of what you can expect when you do take that route and I’m still dumbfounded on what to say. So, in a blatant cop-out attempt at storytelling, I’m going to let the pictures do the storytelling for me because, well, it’s easier that way.

When you’ve walked in unimaginable terrain for three hours under the sweltering heat of the sun, you tend to get delusional, as I did. I tried configuring my mind to believe that the destination was around the next corner, but at about the 56^th ‘next corner’ I convinced myself was finally it, I gave up any attempts at figuring out how much further we’d still have to go to make it to the damned crater. It was a useless exercise that only sapped whatever remaining energy I had left, and if I was to make it to the top and subject myself to another three-hour stroll back to civilization, I’d need all the energy I could muster.

After what seemed like forever – and that seems like an overstatement – we finally made it to crater.

And if you’re going to ask me if that mind-numbing climb was worth it - which, by the way, included a snake crawling on my foot and a swarm of dragonflies trying to build a nest on my head – I'll take the easy way out again and let you be the judge.

Somebody asked me if, given a chance, I’d do this trek all over again. I thought about it for a while and said no. Make no mistake, this is one experience that I encourage everyone to do. The trek, murderous as it is, is pretty fun, and catching a glimpse of that lake for the first time after spending every ounce of energy in your body just to make it to that point is breathtaking.

But just like everything else, once you see it, there’s really no point seeing it again. You go there, bask in the moment, and move on to your next destination. No more going over rocks, crossing streams, and having snakes crawl on my foot. I’m done with that.

All I can do now is go back to the comforts of home and brag to anyone willing to listen that I conquered Mount Pinatubo - and lived to tell stories about it.

Self-Examination

The wheezing sound of the fan can be heard in the background, drowning out the orchestra of crickets in the far distance. I lie on my stomach, staring at the monitor – which incidentally, is the only source of light in my room. As someone who has over 70 published works, the mere sound of fingers effortlessly punching keypads should be routine by now. The creative juices should be pumping, the mind should be racing with ideas, and the hands should be relaxed, effortlessly molding a piece of work worthy of acclaim.

But somehow, tonight, there’s a feeling of uneasiness. Whether it’s the seething heat of summer’s infancy or this deafening silence around me, there’s a palpable atmosphere of apprehension. My fingers are subdued, punch the keyboard aimlessly, almost as if it’s not used to it anymore. What was once considered bosom buddies have been reduced to mere acquaintances. Even worse, the words that come out are incoherent; a hodgepodge of nouns and adjectives that doesn’t make even the slightest sense. If someone had read this embarrassing attempt at prose, it wouldn’t too far off for them to think that it was the masterpiece of an infant with a lot of free time on his hands.

In an effort to restart this stalled engine, I went back to my past and dusted off my archives. Going back to read some of my previous works made me realize why I enjoyed writing so much. I was never forced to write something just so I can post it on my blog and wait for the comments to come pouring in. That would have been too self-indulgent. At the same time, I never wrote (or published) anything that I felt lacked merit and ingenuity. I wrote those articles because I was motivated and inspired. I wrote those articles because I enjoyed it. It’s surreal to think that I was capable of those works back then, yet be stumped and clueless on what to write now.

So after reading some of my past works, I took a deep breath and gave out an exasperated sigh.
I closed my eyes and I began to wonder where that writer had gone to.

Because if there’s one thing that’s obvious on this hot summer night; he sure as hell isn’t here.

Hey Knicks, I want that job!

In yet another lame attempt in pre-occupying myself on another hot, lazy afternoon, I have decided to apply for jobs in the NBA.

Yep, the NBA. Ze National Basketball Association.

Now I know I’m more likely to get hired as an oversized child in a Combantrin commercial than being called up to become a PR guy for the New Orleans Hornets. But with nothing else to do and with resources dwindling by the day, I might as well shoot for the stars and hope that I get noticed.

Upon seeing the NBA’s careers website, I was floored to see that there are a ton of jobs available. ‘Great’, I thought. I’m going to have better odds of getting hired! As I scrolled down the list of open positions, I realized that I was neither qualified nor had any background experience on 90% of the said openings.

Deflated but not undaunted, I scoured for more openings and landed on a particular job description that piqued my curiosity:

http://nbateamjobs.teamworkonline.com/teamwork/jobs/jobs.cfm/Communications?supcat=166

As I read the job descriptions, my heartbeat started beating a few more times than I cared to know. This job is perfect for me! I have a place to stay in New Jersey, and that’s only a 15-minute bus ride away, I love sports and the NBA (duh!), and I’m going to be writing about them for a living. The only thing I need to work on is my support for the team - or whatever they're called these days.

But hell, if they give me this opportunity and pay me while doing it, I’m more than willing to elevate them as my second favorite team. I probably just shot down my chances right there but still, the Hornets are still number one.

Regardless, it’s an avenue worth exploring. Who knows, right? It’s far-fetched to think that the NEW YORK KNICKS will even give me the time of day, but with my current state of mind, nothing seems too unbelievable anymore.

In the meantime, while waiting for a response from my soon-to-be-I-hope-second-favorite-professional-sports-team, I’ll keep my fingers crossed, hope they notice me, and see how great an asset I can be to them.

Now, about that Combantrin commercial; are there any casting calls for that?

When Bandwagonning Goes Wrong

I had a conversation with a good friend of mine recently and predictably, our dialogue ended up on basketball. Now this friend of mine, much like yours truly, is a die-hard fan of the game. He once called himself the greatest New York Knicks fan – a title I completely found unenviable.
We’ve spent countless hours debating about our favorite team, figuring out how to improve our team’s fortunes with otherworldly trade ideas and ridiculous free agent signings. Since our little game was devoid of any salary cap restrictions, all the ideas – ludicrous as they are – were fair game.

“I’ll trade for Chris Paul and Tyson Chandler for Stephon Marbury and a bag of peanuts,” he once said. I couldn’t blame for his attempt at the trade since CP3 and TC are two of the leagues up-an-coming stars whereas Stephon Marbury is most famous these days for his bizarre television interviews and a tattoo of his official logo on his head. “Hey, at least New York peanuts are delicious,” he retorted. Those were his trade ideas. Anything to improve the Knicks dreadful standing as league laughingstock, I thought.

Then, in one of our more recent conversations, he said something that completely caught me off guard.

KG: James Posey - New Orleans Hornet
KG: We’re going all the way, baby!
Air-nest: Hopefully, Pose can help the Hornets reach the 2009 Finals...
Air-nest:... and then get crushed by my Celtics!

Wait a second...your Celtics?! The BOSTON CELTICS?!

I vainly tried to wrestle an answer from him. In sports, it’s an unwritten rule that if you’re from New York, the last city you want winning a sports championship is Boston, and vice versa. There’s a detailed history of sports rivalries between those two cities that has transcended sports and has become a way of life.

“You don’t root for a Boston team if you live in New York!”

He smiled and said, “Well, the Knicks suck and the C’s are relevant again so might as well ‘lend my support them’ to them, right?”

Then it hit me. My friend – the man who once said Hubert Davis was his favorite player of all time – is a bandwagon fan.

“Nobody wants to root for losers”, he told me.

While I sympathized with his plight (the Knicks really do suck), it made his case as a bandwagon fan all the more convincing. The moment Kevin Garnett signed with Boston last year, that’s all he talked about. He even made a bet with another friend of ours – and a fellow New York Knicks fan – that the Celtics would win the championship.

I have nothing against bandwagon fans. They are free to choose which team to root for – even if they switch allegiances every few days, depending on how said teams are doing in the standings. I’m not even worried about offending him with this. We’ve thrown worse verbal lobs at each other that I’m confident that he’ll take this with a grain of salt and laugh about it. I venture a guess that he’ll even be the first to comment.

I just find it hard to believe that out of all the teams that he could’ve jumped on the bandwagon, out of all the teams he could’ve ‘lent his support’ to, it had to be a team from Boston.

A Right Kind of Buzz

As one of the biggest New Orleans Hornets fans this side of the Pacific, you can imagine my delight with the success they had this season.

Sure, they didn’t exactly win the championship, but if one looks deeper inside their season-for-the ages then you’d understand why this year will go down as the most successful – and most memorable – season in the franchise’s history.

If you’ve been following this team for as long as I have – 16 years and counting – you know that the Hornets aren’t exactly a ‘storied’ franchise. They haven’t won a championship and the farthest they ever got was Game 7 of the Conference Semifinals. It’s easy to forget that out of the four teams that entered the league during the ’88 and ’89 expansion years, the Hornets are the only team that hasn’t reached the Conference Finals. The Miami Heat already has a championship banner hanging in their building after Dwyane Wade led them to a title. The Orlando Magic reached the Finals in 1995 and if it weren’t for Nick Anderson’s world-class choke job, the probably would have had one by now. Even the Minnesota Timberwolves – perennial underachievers that they are – reached the Conference Finals during the peak of KG’s reign in ‘Sota.

Sadly, the Hornets’ past reads like a laundry list of unfortunate, ill-fated events and circumstances. On the court, they’ve always been a good – not great – team. And when they were a great team, they were damned – as with all the other teams, anyway – to have played during Michael Jordan’s reign of terror in the league. They also couldn’t attract big-time free agents to join them, primarily because most players were turned off by North Carolina’s glowing reputation as the “Bible Belt”. Go figure.

It gets even worse when you consider what’s happened to this team off the court. From George’s Shinn unprecedented fall from grace in Charlotte (ironically, due to a sexual harassment case), to relocating in New Orleans in what was then known as a dead basketball town, to enduring the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, to relocating AGAIN - albeit temporarily - to Oklahoma City, and finally, moving back to New Orleans in a time where the effects of the hurricane was still fresh on everyone’s minds and hearts.

The adversity this team has gone through in the past couple of years is unheard of in sports. It’s absolutely ridiculous when people make such a big fuss about a ‘supposed’ franchise player’s trade demands on YouTube, or another team who, until recently, employed a coach responsible for single-handedly burning what was once a storied franchise to the ground.

Would you trade that for what the New Orleans Hornets have gone through?

Me thinks not.

Their biggest headaches are walks in the park on a sunny Saturday afternoon compared to what the Hornets have been through.

And that’s precisely why as a Hornets fan for three-fourths of my life, this season will go down as the best one in their history - both on and off the basketball court.

Before the year began, the New Orleans Hornets were actually considered an up-and-coming team, penciled in most mock play-off trees somewhere along the sixth to eight seed. If somebody actually said the Hornets would finish number two in the West, he would have been called a cocaine-sniffing, ecstacy swallowing delusional idiot. “The Hornets having a better record than the Spurs, Mavs, Suns, Jazz, and Rockets?! Please!”

Most had them rated, predictably, as a good – not great – team. Good enough to make the play-offs and be offered as a sacrificial lamb to any of the true contenders. It was the usual step for a franchise, people would say. From not making the play-offs the past three years, to getting a taste of it and eventually, be bounced out wanting more. That’s how everybody thought New Orleans’ season would go.

For my part, I actually had them as a sixth seed, but I didn’t think they’d go quietly into the night. I thought they had a great young nucleus of Chris Paul, David West, and Tyson Chandler, complemented by veteran guys like Peja Stojakovic and Mo Peterson. They were a good team that had tremendous upside.

But not even myself, die-hard New Orleans fan that I am, thought that they’d be one of the West’s elite teams for most of the season - spending the last month of the season as the conference’s number one seed (they ended up being the number two seed).

So imagine the number of jaws-dropping after every New Orleans win. With every blowout of San Antonio, with every trashing of the Suns, the Hornets were slowly earning recognition around the league. But most importantly, their success has spurned the city to finally support them.

Playing their home games in front of crowds that resembled a Saturday morning YMCA scrimmage, the Hornets’ success began drawing in more people. In the end, the half-filled arena became a hotbed for rabid and delirious fans that at the beginning was a complete afterthought.

And it wasn’t just at the New Orleans Arena. The Hornets, with the irrepressible Chris Paul leading the way, were doing their part in galvanizing the city.

Even after two years of rebuilding, New Orleans was still a shell of its former party-town self. There has been an increasingly absurd lack of progress, with various parts of town still looking more and more like a third-world country.

But in spite of that, the Hornets were determined to do more than their fare share. When their minds weren’t on basketball, they could be seen fixing homes, visiting children, and participating in community events.

That’s what makes this team different from all the other 29 teams in the league. They weren’t just playing for a championship; they were playing for a city that was left in tatters.

That mindset carried them throughout this season. Through all the win streaks, through all the bumps, they rode on that motivation and it led them to the play-offs were they manhandled the Dallas Mavericks and took the defending champion San Antonio Spurs to the brink of elimination (would you believe that the aggregate final score of that series was 645-645?).

After being eliminated by the Spurs, head coach Byron Scott said that the Hornets needed to learn from this experience to become better next year. “You don’t go from not making the playoffs to winning a championship. It just doesn’t work that way,” he said.

With apologies to Byron Scott, I believe the Hornets won more than just a championship. It’s easy to get caught up in that quest for the title because, after all, that is what everybody’s playing for.

But while everybody is focused on reaching the destination that is the “promised land”, they begin to lose touch of the journey that led them there.

And that’s where the success of the Hornets’ season lies. It’s not how far they made it into the play-offs, but how far they came from being a wandering vagabond of a franchise a little over three years ago to becoming a symbol of hope the city of New Orleans desperately needed.

I’ve been waiting a long time for the Hornets to hoist the NBA championship. And while they fell short in that task this year, I’m left with a lasting thought that while no trophy was won, this team still hoisted something far more important than championship hardware.

They hoisted their city, put them on their shoulders, and gave them what nobody up until then had given them – a reason to cheer and a sense of hope that one day, New Orleans will rise again.

Tainted legacy

0 for 7.

For all of Tracy Mcgrady’s achievements, this is the one figure that might inevitably define his legacy.

The man has been in the play-offs seven times and for all his efforts, he has never gone past the first round. It’s an unsettling fact and surprising if you consider the caliber of player Mcgrady is.

That’s not to say that he hasn’t come close to advancing. Out of the seven first round series’ that he’s played in, three have been decided in Game 7’s. It happened against Detroit back in 2003 when T-Mac was with Orlando, and twice since he moved to Houston – in 2006 against Dallas and last year against Utah.

It’s beyond comprehension to think that somebody like Mcgrady would have lost three Game 7’s – let alone seven first round series’ - when everybody knows that these are the kind of games that define superstars and cement their legacies as one of the greats of this game. Hey, Lebron James did it in his first year in the play-offs. So did Dwyane Wade. T-Mac’s failures only magnify the long-held belief that he’s not superstar-material.

Some might argue that it’s unfair to put the onus on T-Mac’s failures all to himself; after all, most of those teams were better than his when they met in the play-offs. But isn’t it fair to say that the 2006 Cavs were no better than Mcgrady’s Rockets?

Besides, that shouldn’t be an excuse. Great players don’t use the ‘I-tried-my-best-but-they-were-a-better-team card’. Great players say “get the hell out of my way because I’m winning this game”.

Sadly, T-Mac doesn’t have the latter mentality. Too often he has differed to his teammates in key stretches of the game. You can look no further than Games 1 and 2 of their series against the Jazz this year. Those were two winnable games for Houston. In both games, Mcgrady scored a grand total of one point in the fourth quarter of both games. You think Lebron, Kobe, or D-Wade would have let that happen?

Tracy Mcgrady is an all-world basketball talent. His skill set is unmatched by all but a few. But while he does have all the talent in the world, he lacks an important trait that all other great players have: a bona fide killer instinct.

Even if he has shown flashes of brilliance, his biggest problem has been consistency. There are some nights where he scores 13 points in 30 seconds, but on the other nights, he literally becomes an offensive and defensive afterthought.

That’s the most important thing Mcgrady needs to develop a closer’s mentality; a killer instinct that says ‘I’m not losing this game’. All the greats have it and if he wants to be considered as one such, then he must learn to have it too.

But until he learns to have that mentality, his lasting mark as a player will invariably be defined as someone whose immense talents were devalued by a lack of results.

That’s the truth and unless he gets this immense gorilla of his back, that’s all we’ll remember him for.

It’s unfortunate considering T-Mac’s legacy deserves a happier ending.