Celebrating My Philippineness

As I continue to blog, I will reveal more and more about myself. But I don't know if I've ever talked about being Filipino. I don't think that the Philippines gets enough credit, partially because no one knows how to categorize the Philippines. Are they Asian or Pacific-Islander? I have literally taken a test where they had Asian, Pacific-Islander, and Filipino. Another is that no one knows how to spell Filipino. People spell it Filipino or Philipino and either pretty much works (but from my editing side, apparently Google spells it the former way, not the latter). There aren't that many famous Filipinos either, at least primarily Filipino. There are a lot of people who were born in the Philippines to non-Filipino parents (Tim Tebow is typically the first name to come to mind) and a lot of people who are a little bit Filipino (Jessica Alba is the most cited one, but she's a little bit of everything). There are famous Filipino people like boxing superstar Manny Pacquiao. A lot of great singers are Filipino, primarily Charice (or Sunshine on Glee). But being Filipino is a great thing. We are like one big large ethnically similar family. If you are Filipino and you see another one in any state outside of Hawaii or California, it is like a dream come true. Filipinos will always have your back, and we always put family first. Maybe we aren't as stereotypically smart as your "typical" Asian, but Filipinos are more beautiful, more talented at singing and dancing, and more social than the rest of Asia, stereotypically of course. Hey, I'm biased. I may be a little bit further removed from my heritage, but I gladly say that I am a Filipino-American. So I'm gonna throw out some Tagalog for you (pronounced Ta-ga-log, not Tag-a-log). Salamat sa pagbabasa!

P.S. Did you catch the joke in the title? I actually made that joke before in my Political Theory class. We were talking about nationalism and in turn each countries' "-ness" or history/heritage/pride. The funniest part was when my teacher did not catch the joke. So he gave a serious lecture about the pride of the Philippines, and by then the entire class was laughing. He caught on eventually, but it had to be one of the best moments of my high school career.