I've been sick the past few days. Colds, coughing, muscle pain, the works. Reading gives me headaches and sleeping is starting to get boring. I miss my friends.

When my hard drive crashed, I lost my downloaded files, ebooks, music, movies. I also lost a lot of poetry drafts but I'm not going to pretend some are worth anything. Anyway, I've been rebuilding my downloads list starting with music files. In the meantime, here's a song meme I got tagged in Facebook: Once you have been tagged, you are supposed to write down 25/30 songs you cannot live without. You know, the ones you can listen to over and over and never get tired of. They don't have to be in any particular order. These are the songs that make you laugh, cry, think of an old friend, whatever the reason.

1. Carry Me, Ohio - Sun Kil Moon
2. Driftwood - Travis
3. Hummingbird - Wilco
4. Don't Look Back in Anger - Oasis
5. Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out of - U2
6. Have You Forgotten - Red House Painters
7. You Are My Joy - The Reindeer Section
8. How To Fight Loneliness - Wilco
9. Love on the Rocks - Sara Bareilles
10. Drunken Angel - Lucinda Williams
11. Blackbird - Sarah Mclachlan cover
12. Some Bartenders Have the Gift of Pardon - Mark Etzel
13. I Don't Wanna Wait - Paula Cole
14. Dance Me to the End of Love - Leonard Cohen
15. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds - Beatles
16. Stop Crying Your Heart Out - Oasis
17. World Spins Madly on - The Weepies
18. The Freshmen - The Verve Pipe
19. Never Let You Go - Third Eye Blind
20. Lately - Stevie Wonder
21. Another Little Hole - Aqualung
22. Delicate - Damien Rice
23. She - Elvis Costello
24. Building a Mystery - Sarah Mclachlan
25. Harbor - Vienna Teng
26. Love - John Lennon
27. Painting by Chagal - The Weepies
28. August and Everything After - Counting Crows
29. All I want is You - U2
30. Be be your Love - Rachael Yamagata

Jumped from the boat to the open sea with no life vest, jumped from a waterfall (somewhere during in that millisecond fall, I changed my mind), went on a safari tour and fed a giraffe, watched the mating of the calamian deer. I loved it - from the chasing of the female in heat to the violence in the act. (The male suddenly thrust himself into her, once. The female jolted then sprinted away. Done. Parang flu shot lang, Soki said.)

And I wore a dress!

Now back to reality: Work deadlines, other-stuff deadlines and I have to stop delaying having to decide about graduate school. Like, tomorrow. Argh. Just thinking about it makes me crave Jollibee and an instant eight hour sleep.

Once again I could find myself quite stunned at the process of having to process. There's also the part that thinks maybe I'm being too hard on someone who is so clearly desperate to be forgiven. But despite this past year and how it changed me, I know I still believe in some things, people for instance, and trying to do good (which makes me an unfit Darwinist in a sense). And in childhood, despite its cruelties. So when you ask why a continuum of sorrys is not enough, it's because I still refuse to process the fact that things have changed you in ways I cannot recognize. For me, you were always the good guy.

In perkier news, Chris says she has learned to fry food, I have eaten my dose of spicy chicken Yakisoba and I love Kris Allen.

Comment ni Edrie: And you emo-posted again. Haha.

Favorite Stephen Dunn poem

Tenderness

Back then when so much was clear
    and I hadn't learned
young men learn from women

what it feels like to feel just right,
    I was twenty-three,
she thirty-four, two children, and husband

in prison for breaking someone's head.
    Yelled at, slapped
around, all she knew of tenderness

was how much she wanted it, and all
    I knew
were backseats and a night or two

in a sleeping bag in the furtive dark.
    We worked
in the same office, banter and loneliness

leading to the shared secret
    that to help
National Biscuit sell biscuits

was wildly comic, which lead to my body
    existing with hers
like rain that's found its way underground

to water it naturally joins.
    I can't remember
ever saying the word, tenderness,

though she did.  It's a word I see now
    you must be older to use,
you must have experienced the absence of it

often enough to know what silk and deep balm
    it is
when at last it comes. I think it was terror

at first that drove me to touch her
    so softly,
then selfishness, the clear benefit

of doing something that would come back
    to me twofold,
and finally, sometime later, it became

reflective and motiveless in the high
    ignorance of love.
Oh abstractions are just abstract

until they have an ache in them. I met
    a woman never touched
gently, and when it ended between us

I had new hands and new sorrow,
    everything it mean
to be a man changed, unheroic, floating.

We've started calling X OPM for Oh-Promise-Me, because of his tendency to promise marriage and other things to people. Which one time ended in genuine disaster. The few times R and I have cornered him, we've managed to ask the most important questions.

"So if she says, you ruined her life, do you think she might have a point?"

"I guess..." he said, looking sad. That made us sad too.

We seem to have reached quite a comfy connection, the kind which drove him to ask earlier, "May date ka na naman?" in that sort of judgmental tone and I said "Ikaw, may bago kang pakakasalan?"

And what I still won't forgive was when Z dropped by sometime last year to deliver me food and he looked at him, at me and then asked "FB mo?" He would later describe it as "nag-iba yung mukha mo, promise." And then this older officemate asked, "What's an FB?"

And he said, "Fucking buddy."

And I laughed so hard.

The last day, we went to the cloistered nuns' monastery. We were prohibited to go there, but I wanted to sneak in and see the nuns, or their eyes at least. He thought it was silly but he came anyway. We sat on the lawn, waiting. Then I pulled some grass and threw it at him. He looked at me, puzzled.

"You're stupid for taking drugs. And stopping school. " I said. He said nothing. "And for wanting to die."

He was still quiet so I pressed on. "And for thinking the world can revolve around someone, and for being stubborn." I knew what I was doing. He had trusted me, showed me his paintings while he told me this story, but I couldn't help it.

"I can't believe how stupid that was." I pressed my knees to my chest, hid my face.

"You're crying," he said finally. "I don't get you."

"You're stupid."

He had tried to teach me how to play the guitar, sat beside me during meals, shared his dreams of painting the world. That time the bus made an unexpected u-turn across the grass where I was and almost hit me, he had pulled me out in time. Then a kid had yelled "Kuya ____ has a crush on Ate Joy!" I had a flight back to Manila in a few nights. It was just one of those things that had no future and for the first time in weeks, I was angry again.

The nuns never came out. Or maybe we hadn't been looking. If someone had peered on a window, they would have seen nothing very interesting anyway, just two trespassers on the lawn, barely touching, just a hand over another pressed on the grass.

Or in the words of Conor Oberst, there's nothing the road cannot heal. Off for a while with vintage Oliver Sacks, clothes straight out of the drier, and a pack of antihistamine.

Must find some place to land this anger, some place for takeoff.

And leaving you a remnant of Salvatore Quasimodo in the meantime: Everyone stands alone at the heart of the earth / Pierced by a ray of sunlight / And suddenly it is evening.

Dreaming at the Ballet
Jack Gilbert

The truth is, goddesses are lousy in bed.
They will do anything it’s true.
And the skin is beautifully cared for.
But they have no sense of it. They are
all manner and amazing technique.
I lie with them thinking of your
foolish excess, of you panting
and sweating, and your eyes after.

Over in Youtube, people are disparaging or defending Marian Rivera with a passion akin to angry sex. I'm actually afraid I might recognize one of the Marian fans as my friend Lara. She's hardcore - Hindi buntis si Marian! Hindi niya inagaw si Dingdong! Hindi siya palengkera!

I couldn't care less right now actually. This is my day's cheap thrill (and it is cheap), except for the fact that I feel kinda like a lesbian laughing over this (not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with feeling like a lesbian or being a lesbian for that matter).

Suddenly everyone's getting married - Ruth, then Ai, then Riza and Darwin has a half naked picture on Facebook. I don't get the future so I tell Darwin his picture is photoshopped. He used to be fatter. He says that's very very stupid.

And before all these, sometime back, we used to sprawl on the green smelly carpet after a late night FGD thinking about everything we would do if we didn't have to dissect the growing problems of milk sales, food preservatives and why children don't like sour mayonnaise. And yet, enjoying the perks that came with that - Starbucks, free food, free travel, bonuses, movies in the viewing room during project downtimes, which was really the only rebellion we could manage.

I don't know when the "All You Need is Love" fascination came up. For the Bollywood-themed Christmas party, we cut out hearts and sang that before an audience of annoyed people. After a tired day, you could expect Darwin to come to you, hug you and say, hey... don't worry, all you need is love. We called him sunshine, despite the fact that when he wrote about life (or anything at all), it made us feel sadder and more trapped than ever. It was Patty who said he had a kind of intelligence that was a bit too dangerous for this world. Years later, holding different jobs, most of us would still keep in touch, remind one another of market research borne dreams (which had absolutely nothing to do with market research).

I told Darwin that Feb 12 was Darwin Day, after Charles Darwin, and he said "why need that Darwin when I'm here?" It felt like one of those "All you need is love" moments, it was completely untrue, but for the moment you wanted to believe it.