This 20th of November, Akei and PinoyG4M will visit the Home for the Golden Days.
For more information, you may visit the event page on Facebook or join the conversation in the PG4M forums.
In celebration of Manila Pride 2011, PinoyG4M and Akei will hold an Outreach Program to Home for the Golden Gays.
Much like Golden Acres or Home for the Aged, the Home serves as a refuge for the elderly but is targeted towards the elderly gay. What better way to celebrate this Gay Pride season than to give back to help those who were there before us.
This is an open invitation for anyone who wishes to help us help the Home. Anyone who wants to pledge any amount, you may contact Lanchie at (63) 917 365 9620 or send an email to lanchie@gmail.com.
For more information, you may visit the links above.
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.
~Dr. Seuss
Like a lonely child lost in the wilderness, I wandered wary, ever watchful. This world, though I have walked for years, felt new and raw to my senses. The air I drew into my lungs, the sights that fed my eyes, the constant shifting of cold and heat on my skin, and the bittersweet taste in my tongue were not the same as the ones I had been used to. It all felt so new because for the first time I walked this earth and I was complete, my feet on the ground feeling its coldness against mine, my ghost at last in my shell.
Gingerly, I took my first step. The earth felt cold beneath my feet and the coldness swept to my spine making me shiver.
Shivering from the cold? I asked myself wryly, how could a soul as cold as mine shiver from the measly cool of the earth?
Yet, in all truth, I knew what the answer was even before the question was asked. The answer was something I have always tried to deny, a fact that I tried to escape. The answer was the reason why I built my sanctuary and stayed in that limbo. The answer was something more than I was able to admit to myself because it meant opening up a world of possible pain and suffering, of sadness and hurt... a world of reality.
Still I continued to ignore the ever-whispering truth, denied the nagging fact and dismissed the answer I had always known as foolery.
I took my second step, more gingerly this time. One toe landed first, testing to see if another shiver will run down my spine. The ground was still cold and the chill still had the undesirable effect. Still I went on...
Feet flat on the ground, the cold travelling from my heels to my spine, reaching my head, I felt nauseated. I never realized there were too many sensations a simple walk on this earth could bring. I felt the tingle of dust between my toes, the roughness of the earth beneath my feet, the silky caressing of the breeze on my skin. There was a plethora of intruding sensations and I felt them all and then some.
The sudden surge on my senses was astonishing, it made me want to withdraw... run back to my sanctuary. Only there was no sanctuary left for me to return to. I had no choice but to face the new world I have braved to enter.
I know there's a lot to blog about lately. With all the many things going on around the world, one'd think I'd have tons to write about. So why the hell have I not been updating this blog of late?
Why? I don't really know. A lot of things have been keeping me quite busy; work, friends family, etc. While I've been able to keep my online self alive through social networking sites, forums, instant messenging, blah... blah... blah... I haven't been able to keep this blog alive! My last post's over a month ago and that wasn't even a full blog entry but just something I posted at random.
Why haven't I been updating this blog despite the fact that there's been a lot going on?
Alright, let me muster some excuses... err... answers...
In no particular order:
Notice the period in the last excuse? That's because I feel that that's the real reason for all this nonsense... I'm not inspired...
Too many thoughts running in my head. They're like swirls of thick black smoke, smothering... suffocating... I see memories of life past, thoughts of the present, and fears for tomorrow. They imprison my slumber, depriving me of sleep, and force my eyes to open only to find darkness, oblivion. It makes me realize I am alone and that my life after all was just a game of solitaire played in desolation.
Recluse was my only companion. Detachment from this cruel world was the invisible wall I built to protect myself. It was too late when I realized that recluse and detachment had harmed me more than those I've protected myself from could have done. Too late... the damage had gone deep within. It had locked up my soul, chained my heart, and slayed my emotions that I became nothing more than a shell... empty... hollow... nothing but a cold, soulless corpse.
For a long time, that corpse walked this earth, and yet no eyes ever laid upon it, visible to none but itself. That corpse walked alongside people, and yet its feet never touched the ground. Always afloat, never descended, it was afraid to feel the cold earth touching its own cold self.
Slowly, though, the walls of the limbo in which this corpse' forgotten soul had hidden began to crumble. The forgotten soul struggled to rebuild its sanctuary's walls, brick by brick, stone by stone. Yet for each stone it laid, two fell. For each brick it placed back, two crumbled. The more it struggled, the more the walls collapsed. The fight was futile.
That soul, my soul, the real me had no choice left but to step out of the sanctuary.
This just came up because of a friend's status post in facebook. I'm not going to comment on this but will leave it up to whoever dares to read her sworn statement.
I was reading this post from Rainbow Bloggers entitled "The Ex-Gays" and wanted to share my two cents' worth. That I did but felt the urge to say just a little bit more and so here's my own post regarding the topic.
Gays are gays because they choose to be so, not because homosexuality is a side effect of some inadvertent experiences. It's my belief that while homosexuality may be classified as a psychological condition, it's a condition that the person has chosen to go into, a path one has chosen to take. We're not gays because we're lacking some essential fluid in our brains or because part of our hypothalamus is misshapen or whatsoever. I don't think it's anything like that. Although whether sexual orientation is genetically or sociologically acquired has yet any final answers and the debate over nature versus nurture is still ongoing, my personal though is that it is the person's own decision whether to be gay or not.
It's not surprising for homosexuality to be regarded negatively in some sections of society. It doesn't surprise me that some people still think of gays as immoral, unnatural, unacceptable or whatever negative adjective one can think of. What surprises me is that there are so-called "cures" to homosexuality.
I'm not sure if many people have heard of "Conversion Therapy", but this process has been officially defined by the American Psychiatric Association as "psychiatric treatment...which is based upon the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or based upon the a priori assumption that a patient should change his/her sexual homosexual orientation."
During the early 1950's, the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental disorder. Many researches believed it to be a psychopathology, a behaviour that indicates mental illness, and thus regarded homosexuals to be abnormal or "almost invariably neurotic or psychotic." Attempts were made to "cure" this so-called disease with techniques like behavior modification wherein behaviors and reactions to stimuli are altered through positive and negative reinforcement of adaptive behavior, aversion therapy in which the patient is exposed to stimulus while being subjected to some form of discomfort, primal therapy, EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, and several other techniques. Some of these techniques have been reported successful only to be proven otherwise later on. By 1973, the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder due to intense lobbying by gay groups and new scientific information, but conversion therapy remained to be used.
The term "reparative therapy" was introduced in 1980's and is sometimes used loosely as a synonym for conversion therapy in general. Reparative Therapy, however, poses as offering a possibility of change for homosexuals who are dissatisfied with their sexual orientation. This technique does not propose to eliminating homosexual desires but rather minimize them. Although most professionals of the field had discredited this therapeutic model, there are some who still make an effort in the endeavor.
Yet, whether attempting to minimize homosexual tendencies or eliminating it entirely, there are still no established data to prove that homosexuality is a psychopathology, a mental disorder, or anything caused by biological or genetic conditions. Sigmund Freud, so-called "father of psychoanalysis," wrote in a letter written to a mother who had asked to treat his son: "Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development." Being so, there is no reason to believe that a cure for homosexuality is necessary.
Although I agree with conversions therapists when they argue that people should be able to determine their own therapeutic goals, I should emphasize that it should be the person's own will to undergo a change in sexual orientation and not because their parents, friends or their social environment told them so. I mean, they should be happy in not being gay anymore.
I found this wonderfully interesting article written by Isaac Asimov in 1989 for the Skeptical Inquirer aptly titled The Relativity of Wrong. It talks a great much about the theories concerning the shape of the earth: from the ancient concept of flat earth to the Greek philosophers' theory of a spherical planet to the early 20th century proposition that the earth is not mathematically spherical but an oblate spheroid until the mid-20th century discovery that our dear Mother Earth is pear-shaped.
Yet, the whole point of the essay was pointing out that not just because some old theory has been replaced by a better-accepted one meant that it was absolutely wrong, that, in fact, they are true to a certain level, and that the concept of "right" and "wrong" are not absolute.
There is no such thing as an absolute and complete "wrong" but, in the words of Asimov himself: "....in a much truer and subtler sense, they need only be considered incomplete."
Now I like that so much better than being told I'm wrong.
***
Speaking of wrong... I was - in all honesty - surprised to learn that Sarsi, after all these years thinking otherwise, is not a cola.
I realize that I might be the last person on earth to know that, but if I hadn't read my friend's blog, Sugar and Spice, I would have kept on believing that Sarsi was just another cola like Coke or Pepsi.
When my friend referred to Sarsi as a root beer, I quickly googled it - just to be sure. I had to know. After all, years of belief, of childhood memories, and certainty of what I know might crumble because of that one fact...
And it did! Alas! I was proven wrong. Sarsi - I could never look at this drink the same way again after this - is a root beer: a type of soda also known as sarsaparilla (from the Spanish zarzaparilla, literally little grapevine bush).
Upon reading the term "sarsaparilla", I knew I was wrong. Now my certainty in all things I believe in has crumbled... thanks to Sarsi.
***
Oh well, I guess that's okay. After all, nothing is ever wrong. They're just incomplete.
There are times when all you want is to say goodbye, even though it's not yet time to say goodbye; or let go when things aren't supposed to be let go. There are moments when you feel like leaving, and will leave if not for some circumstances that prevent you from doing so, circumstances that tell you that the time is not right.
But when is the right time? And if ever this time should come, how will you know?
Two things people tend to do when things don't turn out as expected: we either find something or someone to blame or we just attribute whatever happened to destiny and say "it wasn't meant to be." The first reaction, looking for something to blame, is mostly common, but there are times when there is nothing to blame so we simply resign ourselves to thinking that whatever we wanted was not meant for us or that "the time isn't right." However unhappy we may be of what has become of our efforts, we choose to wallow in the failure of not achieving our goals.
Therein lies the problem, because we chose... we chose not to do anything. We chose to stay put and accept that destiny did not include what we wanted in her plans for us; we say "who are we to go against the will of the cosmos?" Yet what we don't realize is that we are always given a choice.
Everything that has ever happened in our lives is because of the choices we've made, not because they were destined to be so. Whatever we do and whatever happens to us, we have a choice and those choices are always ours to make, thus we cannot blame anyone else, but ourselves.
Not even destiny.
