Saturday, June 16, 2007

On numbers and labels.

This entry is a product of previous week’s exhausting task of accomplishing my pre-employment requirements.

Life after school, which according to some, is the ‘real world’.

At some point, however, my initiation to that so-called real world made me think otherwise.

The previous week had been marked with the exhausting tasks of accomplishing my pre-employment requirements – i.e. getting a medical clearance, an NBI clearance, and SSS number.

I have had that experience: of allowing other people –

… test samples of what are inside me (literally);
… count how many times I breathe and how often my heart beats;
… dirty my fingers with that purple ink so that they can have a record of prints that are distinctively mine;
… give me that one number that’ll identify me for the rest of my life;
… question my identity due to a birth certificate (which, according to her, had my name printed unclearly).

And although I have told myself (since the start of this jobhunt) that this is not the best time to ‘philosophize’ – I believe the experience calls for it.

Other than my complaints about the sticky face and the bad bad hair (because for the past two months, each day is a bad hair day, hehe) – I’ve had these whiny thoughts on being objectified. But so as not to add up to the heat in the heads and the bodies (literally) of other souls lining up to be killed – by being enslaved in this system of alphanumerics and fingerprints – I decided to shut up and confine those rants in my head - but here, I shall write.

There is more to my person than:

… the counts of blood, bacteria, air, water, (and blah blah) that I have been carrying;
… the K-R-I-S-T-I-N-A that I carefully had to write in those boxes;
… the picture on my NBI clearance (in which I ironically look like a hardcore criminal);
… the pattern of lines on my fingers;
… those pieces of paper that are more worth believing than the person seen face-to-face.

I was being welcomed into this real world – and all they were interested in knowing were those realities farthest from the real person that I am.

It does not feel good letting other people define you less than who you really are. Better put, … less than who you believe to be who you really are.

But believing that you truly know who you are is dangerous. Because the moment you say you are this person – you just gave your self a number, a print, a record – that’ll determine and prove your existence, and/or essence.

And this is where the importance of being objectified comes in. For one, to understand that there is always more in every person; and it is that more which we continually struggle to discover in various interactions with others and the self – whether it be in a two-second glance with a stranger, or a 2-minute transaction with a woman behind a counter, or a summer fling, or year-long friendships, or the life-long talking to oneself.

Labels, numbers, identification documents – they call for a Relationship Check. In our dealings, try to realize how much of us we have actually revealed – to our selves and to other people; how much of our sub-realities we have faced, and have allowed other people to face as well.