I miss the green scent of his cologne.

And how holding his hand makes my own feel small and delicate.

I miss the comfortable silences on long car rides, and marathon snacking sessions over movies. I miss being able to call him anytime I want to. I miss poking his nose.

I even miss arguing with him sometimes, because it would mean that we’re running at a normal pace again, instead of tiptoeing on eggshells in a long distance relationship that needs to be handled with care. When you’re thousands of miles away, there are no impulsive house visits with a boxful of pastries—just emails, Blackberry messages, and occasional video chats. I love New York and can’t bear to leave it anytime soon, but I do miss my boyfriend.

It hasn’t even been a month, and the ugly pangs of distance are starting to needle their way into my relationship with J. The thing with long distance relationships is that you get to go over only the major, necessary details when you tell someone about your day—that is, if you get to talk at all. I’m grateful for the invention of Skype and the Blackberry, but even those aren’t of much help when what you want to share is all mundane.

So far, my life here is on the dorky side. I’d never been much of a clubber and I can actually be quite shy sometimes; add the fact that I’m basically supporting myself for my living expenses, and you’ll understand why I can’t hit the bars as much as many of my classmates do. I felt really lame when J started telling me about his day while he was nursing a hangover. Everyone seemed to want a piece of him last night; I got a text message from him at 4.30am telling me that he was just on the way home. I spent half the day online, waiting for him to call, and when that failed, I headed out to Marshall’s and Staples. The trains took ages to arrive. On the way home, I dropped by the grocery and got a couple of pints of Ben & Jerry’s because it was the last day they were going to be on sale.

Today, I barely recognized myself. If you had read that last paragraph without having an idea of who I am, or what I do, or what I look like, your mental image of me must be this: a fat, lonely girl waiting by the phone (or laptop), gorging on ice cream and aimlessly flipping through TV channels, going to bargain emporiums and office supply stores.

The thing is, I live in New York. I go to grad school in one of the best universities in the world. I hop from dress size 2-4, depending on the brand. I have fantastic family and friends who love me. My boyfriend loves me.

That’s what I’d like to think.

Being in a long distance relationship can shake your core and make you doubt a lot of things you value and believe in, because you’re no longer physically—and sometimes, emotionally—close to the person who is supposed to be nestled in the center of your being.

Starr the Slytherin and Bianca the Gryffindor

This is a shot from the 2007 launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Starr, a good friend of mine since the sixth grade, worked for the Buensalido PR firm and made sure that I got an invite to the event, where they transformed the bookstore into the Great Hall. They even had ‘floating’ candles and a live snake contained inside a glass cage (I refused to go near it). I lost the trivia game because I couldn’t remember the address of Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes—93 Diagon Alley, I had put in 91—but I had a pretty good time. I got to keep the robe too, so it’s somewhere in my cabinet.

This was also the night that my boyfriend James first brought me home. Of course, he wasn’t my boyfriend back then; I was single at that time, and I could barely remember his name because for several months, I was calling him Sam for some reason. My siblings and I hitched a ride with a friend, who met up with him at the mall and asked him to take the wheel. He thought I was a geek for being nuts about the Harry Potter series, but a couple of years ago, I managed to get him to enjoy reading all the books. In return, I do my best to pay attention to basketball games and literature. I’m still working on that last aspect.

10 days to New York, and I’m wondering if I should get an iPad just so I could read more ebooks as I can’t haul hard copies in my luggage. Not just Harry Potter, mind you. I do try to read whatever I can get my hands on because I rarely watch TV; I still remember those book-deprived months in Berlin when I had nothing but Lonely Planet Central Europe and a battered copy of Pygmalion to read! I had a laptop and plenty of literary websites at my disposal, but articles just aren’t the same as an interesting book. Once a bookworm, always a bookworm.

Bonsai from The Karate Kid

Damn, this game is addictive. J pointed me to this after I told him about Doodle Movie, a similar name-that-film app on the iPhone that keeps you guessing movie titles after being shown a particular scene—but drawn in stick figures. This one, on the other hand, is a hangman-style game where you have to guess the film based on an object that appears prominently in it.

If you haven't guessed what this is, it's the Swedish-made penis-enlarger pump from the first movie

I’m actually not so good with films because there are a lot of classic movies I haven’t seen, but it was fun to try to identify them. Here are a few more of my favorites:

Another classic: The Godfather

Who can ever miss out on the iconic cigarette holder from Breakfast at Tiffany's?

This, and not Breakfast at Tiffany's, is my ultimate Audrey Hepburn film though. I made sure I went to all the spots featured in the movie when I went to Rome.

This film holds special significance to me, even if it's not my favorite Pixar movie

I was also impressed by the list of old movies in the game. We studied this one in film class; it's widely considered as one of the best films of all time, and is famous for its 'Odessa Steps' sequence

Give it a try—I bet you’ll spend a lot of time on the site, too.

We took an aptitude exam at the office today. Clearly, a lot of us in publishing think alike, because we all hemmed and hawed the moment we realized the test involved a significant amount of math.

“But we chose to work in publishing because there shouldn’t be any math involved,” someone groaned. Several echoed her sentiments, myself included.

But after the initial round of complaining, we settled down to answer the questions, complete with scratch paper. I hadn’t done a serious aptitude test since taking the GRE; the others were even worse, since the last exams they took were college admissions tests. Charmagne our beauty editor wailed, “This is bad for my self-esteem!”

It wasn’t bad at first; there was mostly basic algebra and problem solving. Then maybe a few permutations, and some numerical logic. Then fractions (which I hate with a passion). As I clicked on the key to submit the more difficult math-related portion of the exam, the computer screen went blank—and all my answers were gone. Had I been in an actual entrance exam, I would’ve had a meltdown.

I redid the answers and moved on to vocabulary and word association. Most were easy enough, but I encountered a word I hadn’t read in a while: caudal. It’s not a word you use in everyday matters (by the way, it means ‘near the tail’ or something like that), but there’s no way that I’ll be forgetting that word soon because ‘caudal’ is the last name of the dude I had a crush on in my prepubescent years. It’s a funny, silly story: he was my busmate back in the fourth grade, and that crush stretched on until third year high school. Even when I was sort of going out with someone back then. The ultimate example of unrequited love (though it wasn’t love), I haven’t seen him in over 11 years.

How did his last name help in the exam? Well of course, being the infatuated teenager back them, I Googled him. He didn’t turn up in any valid search engine results (just checked now—he still doesn’t, to be honest), but there were a lot of references about the ‘caudal fin.’ His name appeared in a lot of biology-related charts, like so:

A diagram of a fish depicting the caudal fin

So that was my Slumdog Millionaire moment for the day. Hey K. Caudal*, if ever you read this, don’t worry—I’m not stalking you, and I’m perfectly happy with my boyfriend now. The reason I can blog about that embarrassing crush so casually nowadays is that I’m secure with my past, and I have no hang-ups whatsoever about that particular issue.

It also helps that the boyfriend is cuter than the former crush. Not necessary, but good to know anyway.

* I had initially written his whole name, but a friend pointed out that if he ever does a vanity search on Google, this would be one of the top results. Not that I mind it if he ever sees this, but I’d rather that it wouldn’t be one of the top results (I checked it earlier and it already was).

Somewhere in between Kobe and Manila, June 2010

Although I was thankfully one of the 20 finalists of the KLM My European Dream contest, I didn’t win in the final raffle—and neither did James, my boyfriend who also made it to the final round. The contest attracted thousands of essay entries, and the judges chose the ones they liked best. From there, they chose the ones with the most ‘likes’ and raffled the trip among the top 20 finalists.

In an effort to garner more likes, I promised people on Facebook that I would do a good deed for every additional ‘like’ that I got. I got about 162 votes; I made the good deed promise when I had about 80, so I figure I owe people about 82 for all the additional likes. Of course, it’s easy to go on and count good deeds I had made since writing that, which was right before Christmas, but I think I’ll be cheating myself if I do that. So starting today, I’ll chronicle the good deeds done in the name of that contest and blog about them. I might not have won the top prize—a trip to any KLM destination to Europe—but I’m glad I made it to the finals anyway, and that something good will come out of that contest.

I’ll need suggestions. I want to make each good deed unique, after all. Let me know your thoughts!

Hey, boys and girls. Today’s lecture presents various reasons to not exclusively date someone of the opposite sex and bestow him with the somewhat frightening title of “boyfriend.” There are hundreds of reasons, many of which had already been shown in various weepy chick flicks, but today, we will begin with the basics. As we believe in the principle “show, not tell,” allow us to illustrate our first few points with photos.

Why you shouldn’t get a boyfriend, reason 1:
You don’t know if you’ll end up with the dork who photobombed your otherwise cool, artsy shot several years ago.

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