Tag: english literature

Prompt 16

What’s something most people don’t understand?

Oscar Wilde admired beauty. So much so that he proudly proclaimed that he chose his friends for their good looks, his acquaintances for their characters, and his enemies for their intellect. But at least he’s honest about it, vocalizing what most people do when judging one another based on what the eyes, not the minds, see for the instant recognition of optical illusion morphed into reality.

Our society favors gregarious extroverts, not reticent introverts nestled in the shade of anonymity, not because they are myogenic but simply because that’s how they are. Not everyone is uniformly outgoing. Nobody is impossibly happy go lucky. I always find it scary that having a happy face all the time is a specialty of a psychopath in disguise. But people do not usually warm to those who are lonely, quiet, or not so attractive, instead pinning them down as anti-social, incompetent, or negative to stay away from them. It amazes me to see people gossip about or ostracize unpopular, reticent people the way people falsely accused innocent women of practicing witchcraft in the past because they were in their selves. Or are they still? Come to think of it; if I had been born during the days of heightened witch-hunting, I would have been burned at the stake.

I feel that people do not like to talk to me because I don’t have the face of Helen of Troy to launch a thousand ships or do not open up a conversation first, or because of my race being Asian, a race stereotyped as being docile, if not submissive, to voice out what’s kept inside. Notwithstanding the account above, I do not want to force myself to become someone I am not, cannot, and will not because, as Wilde pinpointed, I am myself since others are already taken. I am not a negative person who always accounts for a litany of woes. Instead, I can see people’s ills in the swing of things around me and how they affect me. If discussing the malaise of what’s happening in my life when I need a company to share grief in halves, I call it cruelly erroneous and unjust.

Prompt 8

Are you superstitious?

I read daily fortune telling according to my zodiac animal sign and sometimes horoscope in the newspaper or the internet more than daily passages from the Gospel or Psalms. I believe in the existence of the spirits of the dead, curses, hexes, and folk beliefs in what and how to act to keep off evil spirits. Oh, and I do believe in haunted places and stigmatized properties.

Superstition is a manifestation of a belief system out of empirical truth that transcends the subjectivity of time and place. But being superstitious is different from being fanatic, pagan, or even satanic, all of which are dark and evil. In that regard, I am spiritual rather than superstitious and natural than religious.

There are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are explained in books.

Prompt 4

What is the last thing you learned?

When good things happen to me, I should not speak about it but lock it in my heart’s cabinet because otherwise, luck will soon be frustrated by jinx. Silly or superstitious as it may sound, but that is my empirical fact of life. I can write about good things happening to me but not manifest them in spoken words. For instance, if I say one of my co-workers at a workplace is pleasant, then all of sudden, the next day, that person’s attitude toward me betrays my trust in humanity beyond foreseeable and unforeseeable reason. Methinks there are evil spirits who swore a generational curse on my well-being because of unknown umbrage at my ancestors in the foregone times. So I have to keep good news or fortunate events sealed until such things actually bring me good results with long favorable effects that stay with me for a long time. This truth is the truth to the end of reckoning.