My cousin met this guy in New York who was Pinoy and a lawyer at one of the leading firms in Manhattan. The night they met he wore a purple and green muscle shirt and spoke with a British accent so weak that you could pop it with a hair follicle. And he liked to act gay, like fake gay. I mean what was he trying to do? Be some kind of a Bacardi man (lawyer by day, David Arquette/ Oscar Wilde by night)?
I grew up in a house filled with eccentrics, relatives who married their Egyptian cab drivers or waltzed around in carriages, artists of life as I would call them. These are the only kind of people that I knew. That’s why I continue to have a love affair with the riddles of life, their richness of being is hypnotic. My friend Myrza Sison, editor of Cosmopolitan Philippines, says that fakeccentrics are there for a pragmatic reason, to blame their unpredictability, instability and unreliability on being "eccentric." My friend says that fakeccentrics exist because it’s a refuge from the boring and sometimes to call attention to themselves. I also add to that salad of reason that it’s the only way to date really cool people and get into magazines.
So what are the eccen-tricks of fakeccentrics? Here’s an express supermarket.
List rundown:
1) You are not eccentric if you are doing the Atkins diet (just vain).
2) You are not eccentric if you drink flavored water from France (just pretentious)
3) You are not eccentric if you are promiscuous (societal standards however imply that if you’re really rich you can get away with the definition liberated at best – Paris Hilton).
4) You are not eccentric if you are in the closet (you just are in the closet, it’s a completely different ballgame).
5) You are not eccentric if you have an indescribable accent (just annoying).
6) You are not eccentric just because you do drugs (just stoned).
7) You are not eccentric just because you have a drinking problem (just drunk).
8) You are not eccentric just because you have an eccentric significant other (just dating).
9) You are not eccentric just because you space out in conversations (just spacey)
10) You are not eccentric just because you like impossible men (just stupid).
Eccentrics are basically people who live in an abstract world. Most have not grasped what it’s all about and therefore live in a place where rules don’t exist. They are the most magical creatures I know. Their depth comes from somewhere undetermined. Their uniqueness defies the very definition of unique. The original souls that charter our land to be misunderstood only to be revered when they are gone, human works of art. You can’t blame vanilla people trying to be them.
Peggy Guggenheim was hated in the art circle because she was believed to buy herself into the circle of untamed spirits by being a patron of their work. At best she was summed up by most people in her circle, which included people like Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp (her allies though), as "curious." She was believed to use her money to buy a fantastic villa, buy paintings with a dysfunctional husband to boot in trying to fit in. You see, I’ll never know even after reading about her endlessly if she was a true eccentric. It is only when you meet one that you will see if you are in the presence of a numinous character. Eccentrics have this way of bringing out intense feelings in you either that of great affection or repulsion. This is because they are walking hyperboles of human nature.
When I was working a few years ago in a magazine, I asked someone how you can make one’s sentences more interesting. He said when in doubt, put an exclamation point. This is how I see fakeccentrics, they use these predictable shockwares to hide their banal natures. There’s nothing like an artfully worded phrase to take someone’s breath away. As you can see with sentences, exclamation points on people do not make them more compelling. What can I say. Exclamation points are so overrated. Fakeccentrics don’t even make the cut.