"It's All According to Whom"

I must admit I had been following this certain local gossip blog that talks about celebrities and personalities without giving up their names for some months now.
It’s actually a very clever site since no names are named, no pictures are posted, no blatant giveaways of the people being talked about, the writer actually gets away with the most notorious write ups of well-known people. You only get to guess the blind item with the readers’ comments that are as cleverly veiled.

Sometimes, I do feel bad for the people being written about but somehow, the brain junk food became a daily guilty pleasure for me; if not merely for reading the juicy stuff but for the addicting guessing game.

But really, how far and deep can you get into a game?

I remember some years ago accompanying Paolo to his photo shoot for a corporate print ad.
I saw this familiar girl as one of the staff of the ad agency handling the project.
Figuring out she was a Sienan therefore a former schoolmate in grade school; I gave her a friendly smile. She went up to me and we started chatting. I couldn’t for the life of me at that time remember her name although I knew she was from a younger batch. So we started exchanging pleasantries and small talk when her colleague came up to her to ask for something. She turned to me to introduce us and nonchalantly said,

“Si Isabel, ex-girlfriend ng Kuya ko.”

I almost choked on my own spit and breath upon hearing that.
All I could muster up was a weak “ha?”

I was utterly annoyed and shocked not merely because of the rude introduction (I was after all with my then future-husband and the star “mowdil”), but also of such untruth.

Sure, I did entertain some prospects in the past but I pride myself on saying I never gave away my yes so easily. In fact, though I may be an early-bloomer then physically which may have given people who didn’t know me the wrong notion; I was actually branded too many times as a nerd by people who did know me.

Save for one unremarkable relationship in College before Paolo, I never had boyfriends. My family takes relationships so seriously; we never got around having “secret boyfriends.”
Men were only branded as boyfriends if they are somebody we see ourselves marrying. Now that’s a scary thought, yes even for girls.
So two of my sisters married their first boyfriends. That’s how serious it was for us.

Turned out her brother was this little boy who had nice smiling eyes. He used to give me homemade cards and paper weights way, way back in FIFTH GRADE, during that time when I love you’s were uttered to mean “I have a crush on you.”

Now I remember, I did sat with him on the red tables in our grade school dining area…but goodness, I never thought such a hoydenish act branded him the title and I, a colorful fifth-grader past I couldn’t even recall.
I mean Grade five?! There were no cellphones or even pagers for students during that time to even communicate and maintain a fifth-grader relationship.

Goodness gracious. Now what concerned me about this little fiasco was the fact that the sister was so confident enough to call that out in my face. Thinking about it now, I realize she wasn’t being rude, in her heart she thought that was the truth.
She’s younger and was in 4th grade then, after all an 8-year-old wouldn’t know much about the sophisticated courtship of fifth-graders. :/

Now it makes me think about the grey areas and relativity of truth. We only see something from the angle it is revealed to us or opinions of others passed on as facts. Oftentimes we fall to the trap of thinking that perception IS truth.

But really, we see something not for what it is but for what we are.

Going back to the gossip column I was talking about, it makes me cringe to read the obnoxious comments by various anonymous readers who make it seem like what they know based from a classmate of a colleague’s sister’s friend as a truth and nothing but. Yes siree, that’s enough to make them a credible source.

But what makes me cringe even more is thinking how many more stories floating around about anyone that has been passed on first as an opinion and now as an anecdote. We can never really know.

There is only one truth and many variations stemming out because of different perceptions and opinions.

The sad thing is, everyone may not know that truth but everyone has an opinion.

"It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is a proper judge of it”. –Oscar Wilde