Like in most days, I've been idle for the past three hours or so. I've been seated here jumping from website to website, answering emails and snubbing people. Maybe dragging and dropping a few things on the computer, or taking quick peeks at the window outside to see if it's raining. Which is pretty moot, because obviously it is raining.

There've been a few odd things going on today. Not with the change of assignments or my predictable amazement at myself, but with the number of toilet visits I've done today. It's been so long but I still don't feel comfortable with leaving my desk and having to pass all those people, but today, it's more of a what-the-heck attitude. I think I've been drinking too much water, too, which explains the many trips to the toilet and to the water dispenser.

And there's this email going around the company - the usual reminders about taking care of your belongings, since apparently there's been a spate of thefts in the office. Guessing it's the night shift. I remembered that when I left for another one of those toilet breaks, because I left my iPod charging on my desk.

The odd thing is, I brought my iPod charger to work, when I usually would just let it die when it has to. Well, it hasn't, but it could.

All of a sudden I'm not used to these rains. Well, it's been raining for a while now, and my third umbrella's been put to good use, made more enjoyable by its smaller size and its one-button operation. (The second's disintegrated despite all my efforts.) I guess it's all because of yesterday, and the way I found myself stuck at the mall, eating dinner at McDonald's because my mom was concerned I'd go home to nobody, because they're stranded too, because the only way home is flooded and packed with vehicles.

More of a precautionary measure, actually. If I get stuck in traffic, at least I have my iPod for company, falling asleep but not, because there'd be theft, most definitely. And it'd be worse if the perpetrator's not one who I can catch.

And it feels eternally gloomy where I am right now. I've been here for nine hours and the lights on my row of desks are still turned off. Well, light's still sufficient. Guess the back row's ain't. So I don't know what's going on, and it's dark outside and inside. And I'm just dragging items across windows, trying to make things sound a little better. Maybe consider Kevin's invitation to some get-together in Cubao. I heard Ariane and Icka's going.

So I remove my iPod and charge my phone. I need my communication more than my music, as you very well know.

And then something Twilight-related comes to me and I get on it.

I know Kat had a figurative nose bleed when we first encountered this term during cultural studies class, but I'll launch it again, partly because it's slightly amusing to see Kat have a figurative nose bleed. Oh, please, don't make it a literal one.

Reification, according to Sir Bayot, began during the Industrial Revolution. Before that, we were something special. We had our own little abilities, and it's something we developed over time. With those abilities, we learned a lot of things, discovered a lot of others, and invented even a lot more. Thus, we found coal, we created the assembly line, and our productivity increased tenfold, maybe more. Well, there's something ironic with that statement, really: we produced more stuff, but we felt less productive, because we lost our jobs. As processes were streamlined, less people were needed to do certain things, and it became a cat fight of sorts. We became commodities.

Okay, Kat, here's your tissue if you need it.

I've learned not to be surprised with my conversations with Les. These things usually happen in the morning, preferably when I've finished most of my tasks waaay earlier than I should be. We'd talk about the deep stuff, the frustrating stuff, and occasionally wondered about where Steph has been. But, more usually, it's stuff about work. Or not specifically, but somewhere around that.

"I just hate the pressure, especially of the working world and how people you judge you based on your resume," she said, as I began watching True Blood for work. "If I quit my job and I don't get another one in a month, it's like a big sin!"

"This world is a slave driver," I answered. "They don't give a fuck about you, at all, despite 'corporate social responsibility' and 'employee motivation' and 'personal development' and all those buzzwords bullshit."

"Everything is bull," she simply replied.

Yesterday, I told her I apparently got a letter from DLSU, slightly excited that it's something that only a few people get. She told me she got a letter too, and then shattered my bubble: it's just the ITEO sending everyone a letter one year after our graduation, essentially asking us what we were up to since the beginning of the end of our lives. It's exactly what they do: survey after survey. Or, as I called it, "another way to shove down our asses the fact that life sucks after college."

Not exactly. I read that letter when I got home last night, and it was the usual questions. Did you go to work? Did you study again? Did you establish a business? It essentially went that way. The details weren't any special: just questions on where you went, how long you waited, and so on. But it still feels like another way to shove something down our something the something that something is something.

After all, life revolves around numbers. Sure, we wanted to return to comfortable college territory, but we all reached out for that 4.0 - or a 1.0, if you're deliberately aiming very low. When we worked on our resumes, we struggled with what to put where - "naaalala mo ba yung mga speakers sa Media Speakers Series?" - and striking that compromise between listing down all the impressive things we've done and keeping the whole thing to a maximum of three not-so-intimidating pages.

Right now? The set-up is, we all have to do a certain amount of articles in a day, which isn't a good idea if it's a particularly slow news day during the American summer. Then again, it doesn't make sense considering I finish most of them before lunch - and the rest I leave behind are commentaries. Thankfully, the folks at Seattle seem more impressed than usual with me, and have given me some degree of flexibility; it would've been worse if this was a year ago.

Bottom line is, our lives revolve around numbers, more so once we have to fend for ourselves, so we find ourselves strategizing with those numbers in mind. Act fast, never slow. My dad told me, a year ago, that it looks better on a resume if I got work closer to my graduation. I guess prospective employers will not buy it when you claim you traveled around the world after graduation, as a gift for yourself: you didn't find a job and that means you're a bad apple. It's worse if you have nothing to present - say, I didn't write for anything official until I got my present job, which doesn't look good if you're a media company looking for those who have "writing chops".

In a world powered by numbers, have slacked through the big wigs matters more than having slaved yourself for small fry.

So much for quality over quantity, for showing rather than telling, for all those things we learned back then, perhaps in an effort to make us feel good about our inability to do so many things. I think I should apologize for rushing this blog entry's ending - in the middle of writing this, some pretty big news broke out and I had to write it down for work. I was up for seven articles today. I did six because I took on something else. I ended up doing seven. I must look good now.

Believe it or not, I'm never comfortable with spending money.

I never really learned budgeting, but for some reason it's an innate skill. Or maybe not. Maybe it's more of a painful feeling when I spend too much money than my gut says I should spend. Maybe it's because it happens all in one blow - say, me spending P400 for that lunch at Pepper Lunch, which is a hundred bucks over my ideal budget for the entire day - or maybe it's because I just want to feel that comfort I have in seeing I have some leverage when I check my ATM.

Well, it must be a good thing, right? The one lesson everybody's told me the moment I took this job a year ago is simple: save, save, save. My aunt, who works for an insurance company, once gave me an impromptu lecture on keeping money in multiple bank accounts, apart from the one in my ATM and the one I have in hand. Perhaps exaggerated, but I think I got the whole idea down pat.

But the thing with having money is, once in a while, you can spend on yourself. You know, buy something you've always wanted to have. Relatives would even say I'm in a lucky position, because my dad is still earning very well, and technically is still capable of supporting the whole family. (I pitch in now and then. Right now I'm dooting the family's broadband bill.) But still, I like that feeling of leverage, the idea of having space to wiggle yourself in when things happen unexpectedly.

The past few weeks have been quite uncomfortable. I think I've spent too much. I bought Daniel Merriwether's album three weeks back, not anticipating that I'll be treating my sister (who's money-crazy, for lack of a better term) to lunch the day we watched the second Transformers film. That, plus the unusual string of expensive-than-usual lunches I had at work, which happened because either I wanted something new, or I wanted to get away.

Earlier this week my mother asked me if I wanted to buy a new watch. Not that my old watch - which I've had for six years or so - isn't working for me: in fact, the sentimental in me didn't like the idea of abandoning that tattered-but-working watch for something that looks more chic. It took me three days to get convinced - I half-heartedly agreed when my mom texted me, saying that I'd pay for it with the money I've been saving ever since I began working - and got home realizing that I'm getting a digital watch. I thought they're buying an analog watch.

So, right now, I'm wearing this sporty watch with temperature and UV sensors, which is obviously a step up from those watches we wore when we were young. Only, I'm not sporty. And that beeping sound, oh.

To make things worse, my Nike pair somehow decided to finally give up two days ago, which means I'm left with no pair of sneakers to use during rainy days. (My Adidas pair, which I bought over the holidays and cost me around five thousand bucks, isn't good for rainy days. You know, holes for air circulation.) So, right now, I'm seriously considering buying myself a new pair of shoes, after I bought myself a relatively expensive set of earphones to replace my recently-deceased ones, and I sketched out plans to upgrade my computer's memory and buy it a burner to replace that quick-to-die old one.

And I thought I told myself I'll buy a Converse pair. Not Chucks. The other one.

Worrying too much? Well, it's money, and at these times you should strike the balance between stimulating the economy and giving yourself some breathing space. Or, I've been working here for a year and I've yet to receive some incentive. Stupid management and their inability to give me my long-overdue appraisal...

But at least I'm not wearing an obviously expensive watch that doesn't work, like that girl on the shuttle that I saw this morning. That is something.

In my usual fits of office boredom, my mind wandered towards one of those nights on my way home.

Traffic at SLEX back then was still bad. I was leaning against the window, looking out at the gas station outside. It was dark, but I can see a girl come out of the shop and chase after a dog, Silhouettes, of course.

I remembered connecting that with what Katia told me a few months back. Since she left her job as a flight attendant, she said, she began working at a gas station. Since she was busy working then, I never got to ask what exactly she was doing there, although I presume it's a fairly significant position.

"Seaoil Merville," she said. Wasn't that the very gas station I was looking at that night?

Just yesterday did I finally tell her that; sometimes I get too bored to remember things that I should be doing. As always, she's busy, so the chat didn't exactly help me get rid of my boredom.

"Depends if the girl is wearing [a] Seaoil uniform or not," she said.

Of course, it didn't help. It was dark. But at least I got the gas station's location right: somewhere along the West Service Road, rather than being further towards the subdivision. (I should know. I have relatives and friends there.)

"Coolness," she responded. "That might've been me chasing Pepper, my dog."

"You have a dog!" I said. "Scary I almost got it right."

"My avatar has a dog," she pointed out.

There is a dog on the avatar. Black, furry, or however you describe it. It was, more or less, the same dog whose silhouette I saw that night. Could it be? Yes, I thought.

"Cool. That's pepper."

It's not as if I didn't know her anymore. We never really talked much since she graduated from UST, found herself flying to Seoul to train, and started going around the world in search of photographs and Manila quickturns. Maybe I just wasn't used to her saying "cool" a lot. Or at least that's not how I remembered her.

Still bored, my mind went to my email. Katia was responsible for giving me a GMail account, and I remembered our email exchanged about stuff. She was working at a call center then; I was a college freshman still crazy over Kizia. Incidentally, we were talking about her, more as a way to help her get past her own office boredom. Topics would change and the next thing we knew, we were discussing call centers, and her constantly clicking on "report phishing" rather than "reply".

Quite conveniently, all our emails to each other were compiled. There it was. An email on Valentine's Day two years ago, with her talking about some stupid guy. ("And that, is the end," she wrote on that long blog entry of sorts.) There were lots of blog entries from me, the stuff she wouldn't otherwise see, but I figured she'd be interested in reading while in between flights. Stuff about Sarah, mostly. And there was this one blog entry about Neobie, too, and Katia said she liked the entry.

What's most amusing was this one email she sent me, way back when we first met, sort of. It was another one of those Kizia-related emails - a "monologue", as she called it - where she talked about the big reveal and geeks and me being a normal kid after all, but still being "the male counterpart of man-haters".

I openly wondered if she remembered writing that email. She laughed - this was Christmas eve last year - and asked, "are you still a geek?"

I was listening to RockEd Radio yesterday, and there was this interesting tidbit from Gang Badoy. "We Filipinos have short term memory," she said, obviously going more political, although I was thinking of how quickly we forgot about these little stories that make us who we are, and how often we don't realize its impact on the things we do at this moment. I don't know. Short attention span? Wham-bam distraction feeds? Something else?

"I wish I could turn back time to those times where I really am so carefree and just floating and all I really have to think about is something as minor as Niko's thoughts on Kizia," she said six months ago.

Maybe there's life getting in the way, too.

"And to think I was not at the service road, but along SLEX," I said yesterday, still surprised that I somehow deduced it was Katia chasing after a dog that night. "Inside a tinted van."

"Coolness!" she merely answered.

I can't get used to it.

Is it bad to feel that urge? I mean, that urge?

I don't mean to be dirty, but you all know the classic story of society's pressures on a 20-year-old man like me. Perhaps it's precisely because I'm that age. I was reading through old blog entries yesterday, since I was finished early again, when I chanced upon something that Issa said two years ago: "date a nice girl na kasi."

I've been complaining about this for the longest time - the past year, the same subject - but I never really addressed the feeling. And, as time passes by, it gets more and more confusing. Consider that people consider physical contact as something unnecessary, and consider that it's something I actually need. It's a tug of war, literally.

And then there are the reminders. I guess this should be the subject of whatever newspaper contribution I'm thinking of, but in a nutshell, I feel torn by my age. Surrounded by younger people and older people, and feeling that no one is meant for you, just as you are surrounded by carefree college students noodling in their restaurant tables.

The past twenty-four hours, Issa's words have been echoing on my head - although not in her familiar-but-unusual deep voice, since we still have yet to meet personally - and, well, it's getting a little annoying. Oh, if only I'd stop entertaining that thought and start thinking that you don't really need that noodle factor to get through this world. And then everything that I've written before comes to mind. For one, it always seems easier when others do it. Or, I just don't like admitting my feelings, perhaps some ditty about weakness, perhaps about having to stick to it, whatever. I did tell you it was complicated.

That's just the emotional part. Wait till you hear me talk about the other things. Considering my history with discussing that kind of urge, well, I'll struggle with the idea that this is normal, and the idea that it is socially taboo. And with that, I have nothing else to say.

Oh, there's a reason for all those celebrity crushes.