1. I recently, belatedly discovered the internet radio Pandora, on a tip from a friend, and I am totally impressed. The radio creates an entire “station” out of your favorite song or artist, and the songs it chooses to play on one such “station” are incredibly agreeable. They sound just like what you started with. Indeed, the first five or six songs it played on the first “station” I created, with Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars, I already have MP3s of. And then some. I would never have found all these other songs on my own. I also started a station with Moby’s Porcelain–remember this from the movie The Beach?–and it came up with a song that I can only describe as a satanic ritual, in what I suppose is Latin or Celtic or some other dead language, that is still somehow easy on the ears.
2. I had some sort of a crystallizing moment a few weeks back. For some reason I started to think about a life that might sound absurd or, worse, defeatist to some people, but one that I can nonetheless imagine myself living. I am tempted to write about it, but I’m sure friends and family would have something to say about it, and I’m not prepared at this time to handle the reaction, so perhaps I should just shut up. Ha ha.
3. Ok, maybe I’ll let on just a little. It all started with the realization that wherever I end up in in the future, even back home in the Philippines, I would have to readjust socially–make new friends, and other such rituals, as my old friends are all over the place–and perhaps culturally. In other words, I could pick any random place, and it won’t make much of a difference. I alluded to this on my last phone call to my mom, and she said something about making sure I would be happy there, wherever there is, and I only said that I think can find my own happiness.
4. My Chinese roommate’s massive meat consumption makes me wonder if I should become a vegetarian, if only to cancel out his too-big share of the world’s meat production. I once saw him stick in the oven an impressive slab of pork–if you ask me, it was a quarter of a hog–and two substantial sausage links. He polished off all of it in one sitting. It is unbelievable that not only can he eat so much, he can’t gain weight either.
