Be neat, be gay.

OK, so I'm writing another post, so the blue moon has officially arrived :P But you should understand that this post requires A LOT of thinking coz the topic has bugged the heck out of me for about 6 years now and there are so many aspects to it that it would take me a few days just to outline all the things I have to say about it. But I guess I'll just throw what I can think of off top of my head right now and add whatever I consider important later on in the comment section. So... where do I start?

Please allow me to introduce my topic. In one of the recent shows from Russell Peters, he mentioned the stereotype that gay people have a good sense of fashion. Then he added something like (not exact wording) "I'm not gay, but I have a sense of fashion". Well, that's what I wanted to talk about. It seems to me that in this country (if anyone from abroad reads this, I'm currently in USA), neat-looking guy = gay... S#iiiitt.... And it's not only big football player type men who think that. Gay people think that way too, and that just annoys the heck out of me. Why? Well, let me tell you about myself.

I do my laundry weekly, so you will rarely see me wearing something wrinkled, or dirty... I get one food stain on my shirt, and (after me recovering from a minor heart attack) down the basket it goes. After being hand-washed with soap, of course (otherwise stains made by wine, coffee, lipstick and every other thing from Indian cuisine just won't leave no matter how much you launder the thing later on). I dress up every day, to work, to school, to any public place. Hell, I put on a decent shirt to step out of my house and check the mailbox. If you don't see gel in my hair, that probably means either A) I'm having a bad day, or B) my beloved GF has talked me into it (she doesn't like gel, I feel so bad, but I'm not Asian, my hair is NOT naturally silky, so I NEED to take care of it). I wear cologne every morning (and I put another "coat" of it in the afternoon when it wears off), unless I'm sick and I can't stop sneezing. My shirts are always ironed (and no, my mom doesn't iron them for me, whoop-dee-doo!), and so are my jeans and sweaters, if a necessity comes. My shoes are usually black (I don't drive, so I end up getting a lot of dust on them by walking all the time), but I clean them about once in 3 days. Throw in the fact that I manage not to ruin all that "grooming" during the day, and you get a picture of my perception of being neat. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I give YOU the craziest thing you'll ever hear!!!

...I'm straight. As an arrow. Not bisexual. Not curious. Never have been. Not planning to. No. I'm European, and that should explain it. Yeah, not all of us back at home are like that, but I'm from a family with good European traditions. In Europe, if a person shows up to a university wearing pajama pants and slippers (even if you're Asian), the only class they will let you go to being dressed up like that is physical education (or maybe not, because they don't expect you to show up wearing the PE clothes right away). My parents used to tell me that not dressing up for school can be taken as an insult by the instructors, and apparently I'm not the only one from my town who was told that.

Now I'm here, in the US, and every now and then I wonder, do I need to look like a freaking bum to be considered straight? Or what is it, do I need to look like a football player, drink Budweiser (dishwashing water, by the way, I can't believe you could make Budweiser Light out of it, it's lighter than water as it is for gossakes) and eat stake every day? BTW, eating 1-pound chunks of meat for a meal and driving cars that look like tanks except no tower cannon is something that I will blogg about too someday... but not now. Another problem on the same topic is that I'm sick of gay guys bugging me... You'd think that they should know that the damn stereotype is not always correct, but I've had some cases when a dude would stick to me like s#it to Velcro, no bull. WTF? I even started thinking that there's something about my image that looks gay, but the fact is that I've had some gay friends, and they looked anything but gay (for all you ignorant bastards out there, some of them actually DON'T look like Christmas trees, one can be gay, but not be a flamboyant faggot, pardon my language).

I just want to look neat, people (not to be confused with looking good, I hardly have any complaints or room for improvement in that department)! I don't want to go out with other men, no. Just looking nice, that's all I want, and I really don't understand what one has to do with the other. Some might say, Well, if you're straight, you don't care what others think about you, you know better! Yeah, right, just wait till instead of usually expected stern handshake you'll get a soft "hand-rub" and the guy who appeared straight a second ago will start talking to you in a girly voice... And guess what, I've noticed that the more "macho" a guy is, the more scared and freaked-out he gets when some stranger addresses him as a "sailor". Hah! So much for your confidence.

I'm not just straight, I'm what they call metrosexual (for those of you who grew up in the US, you probably don't know what it means, I'm sorry, just keep reading), i.e. I can grab my guy-friends @ss and say that I'm just trying to keep in touch (Butler, if you're reading this, don't worry, no one will ever guess), and not have anyone, including myself, doubt my sexual orientation. I'm straight to the point where I can easily afford doing that kind of stuff. And I don't hate gay people (I'm afraid of the raging ones, because they can get really goddamn persistent sometimes), just so you'd know. I don't care about the whole issue of gay marriage either, by the way, simply coz it will NEVER affect my life and I prefer to mind my own business (this practice has proven to prolong life more than all Oriental medicines combined).

On the finishing note, I just want to ask people (especially gilrs): don't assume that a guy is gay just because he looks nice and neat. Some men actually like it that way. Some of us are, as one of my friends put it in a song he wrote, "As good as gay... only straight" (Kira from "30 days out" band). Thank you for reading this far, ladies and gents.