I hate it when you wake up and you know that bad joss will hit you today. That was how I woke up this morning. I tried to shake the feeling off with leftover steak and eggs over rice, but it just didn’t work. The bad feeling refused to go.

As soon as I got to work, I got fired. Bad joss confirmed.

My super said I was simply just a bad employee. Said I was too slow or something like that. I can only guess he must mean the six deadlines that I’ve missed.

It's not my fault I got dumped by my girl at the same time the entire staff from my division chose to resign. They got mad because I was screwing around -- literally on everyone's desk with the new intern. I really don't know why they were upset; I took great pains to clean up after I did the deed. I guess I should've looked at the valuable company contracts I was using to clean up.

Hey, I'm sorry if they've got a problem with my overtime work with the new girl. Just doing my job. The boss'll screw her later anyway. Might as well be first. Conservative bastards. At least I got that project done way before the deadline.

Of course my girl found out and I lost my office, my workmates, my girl, and the new intern (who's probably getting nailed -- not screwed -- by the boss as we speak).

When shitty things like that happen to you after a fantastic run it may be possible to develop a craving for furniture football. Furniture football is played by kicking heavy inanimate objects, like say a sofa, for example, as far as humanly possible. Let's face it: whenever you get into a bad rut, you only remember the bad rut and forget the delightful sins that earned you the bad karma coming your way. This only adds to the force that one applies to your foot as it pounds the furniture in your flat.

It’s easy to forget the laws of physics when playing furniture football. Let’s take a sofa. The sofa is probably the softest piece of furniture you can think of, yet a sofa – any sofa, by definition, is big and heavy. Its base is probably made of solid hardwood. If you’re unlucky and one of those art deco types, it’s made of steel. A sofa like that weighs a lot. Your foot, on the other hand, is soft, pliable, and made up mostly of muscle, fatty tissue, and circular bones. It also doesn’t weigh a lot.

If you add one and one together, you’re going to come to the quick and logical conclusion that feet and furniture do not mix. However, this is lost to people fighting a bad rut, and being a person fighting a bad rut, I don’t really need to tell you what happened.

Did I tell you I have an ingrown toenail in my big toe? The one I just recently used to play furniture football?

Alas, the poor little, wretched thing did bleed profusely. Unable to walk, I limped my way to the nearest emergency room, where the attendant doctor brusquely told me without minced words that they would have to pull out my entire nail to stop the bleeding and possible infection.

That being said (and painfully done), I've never been fond of pulled nails. When I was in kindergarten I had this teacher whose feet were probably the worst I had ever seen. That is, until today.

Whether my preschool teacher had bad feet because of bad shoes, really nasty ingrowns, or by playing a lot of furniture football, I'll probably never know. I don't think I remember her name, or what happened to her anymore. All I remember are her toenails, those on her right foot. On that foot, she had three nails almost completely pulled off her feet. I imagine they must have hurt really badly.

If you tap your nails right now, you’ll be aware that there are a LOT of nerve endings just underneath that hard layer of cuticle. I mean, one can only imagine the pain involved in causing pain sensors to fire all over that many nerve endings. However, one must be brave enough to face these fears, or at least that’s what the nurse told me.

Turns out I was right. The pain was way beyond pain, even with eight shots of painkillers. With eight industrial strength, legally administered dope, chances are you're either as high as a kite or dead. Luckily for me, I wasn't dead, just really damn close.

What a fucking trip.

If you look at it that way, I guess, then stubbing a big toe on the sofa, losing my girl, or losing my job doesn’t seem so bad. In fact, it doesn’t seem like bad luck at all.

I wish I can say that I got the girl in the end, but that ending doesn't really happen in real life. In real life, the jock gets the girl in high school and you wonder for the rest of your life whether or not you'll ever measure up to her standards.

Problem is, by the time you finally grow up and become a man, you realize that she wasn't who you thought she was after all.

I bumped into R. the other day while browsing books at the local eccentric bookshop. R. was another old friend from high school (they seem to be popping up everywhere) who just happened to be the cutest high schooler in the Taft Avenue area. She wasn't tall or Castillian or blessed with a supermodel's body, but she did have a smile that sent the hearts of boys in at least three schools aflutter.

I never really got a shot at R. back in high school. She was being courted by my best friend and that meant hands off for reasons I need not explain. Besides, my best friend though not necessarily a jock, was one of those reluctant girl magnets. It was not unusal to see him sending sighs to girls throats every few minutes.

Although R. and my best friend became an item, they split up after a week because R. thought all her friends were pressuring her to get with my best friend. Their breakup was given much hulabaloo by our common friends who thought theirs was a match made in heaven, but R. stood firm in her decision to end, albeit temporarily, my best friend's happiness.

R. was right, of course, because it was high school and because teenage girls and boys have nothing better to do than play matchmaker. My friend eventually got together with the class brain, while she drifted off into the void inhabited by lost friends.

It was R. who recognized me (much to my delight) because I was transfixed on a pamphlet of early Pablo Neruda poems. Within seconds of her hi and hello, my knees, aided by the romanticism of early Neruda, began to fail.

"Do you want to get coffee? There's a good deli just outside the store and I know just what to get."

Long pause.

One of two things: she's blind to how nervous and pink I am, or she's being really cool about it. Either way, I wasn't going to be standing much longer. I hope it happens before that smile is kills me.

"Sure... Whatever."

Turns out she's a dentist now, and she's been dating this guy she met while in college.

The lucky punk had a picture in her wallet, which she showed me posthaste. To my surprise and apparently, to all her girlfriends's, this guy was a nerd who made Bill Gates look like Tom Cruise. They became an item when he stood out in the rain hurling Romeo-like adulatory bullshit outside her window. He spent the next few hours in the slammer and the next three years with her.

She's glowing as she regales me with stories of her and Nerdo, and I'm happy she's happy. I tell her so. She rewards me with a kiss, and I feel elated. In a haze of happy thoughts I obliviously light a cigarette, but it doesn't catch., making me draw harder.

Do you know how hard it is to light a filtered cigarette from the wrong end?

I found a roll of film today.

That happens a lot: me finding a roll of film I forgot to develop for some reason or another It's my fault, really. I hate insisting that someone be in front of the camera whenever I take a shot. That's what my Dad always insists whenever I have to take pictures. Otherwise, he believes, it's just wasting film. I, on the other hand, like to take what everyone calls postcard pictures. Some sights in this world are just simply amazing by themselves. As a result, I take loads of film cans whenever I go out. You just never know when you'll come across that perfect shot. It just happens.

I found the roll while cleaning out a drawer that had been doing nothing but accumulating dust and broken down computer parts. My sister helped me sort through the things because she wanted to see if she can salvage anything from my pile of junk. She was the one who saw the film can.

"You're not going to get anything from that roll, bro. It's probably expired or something. I'll bet everything's a bit yellow, if anything. It's not like you expect HER to be in those prints, right?"

"Of course not," said I, suddenly on the defensive,

Being the stubborn mule that I am, I insisted on getting the film developed today. Finding lost film rolls is like opening a time capsule.-All of a sudden you get memories you thought you had lost a long time ago. The roll looked good to me, but she was right. The roll was bad, and the yellow hue had made some of the better shots turn bad. As I leafed through the yellowish-shitty prints, I froze.

"I told you so," said the tactless one.

I called you today. I just couldn’t resist. We haven’t said a single word to each other just for each other for two, maybe even three months. The only way we’ve been able to talk of late is through posting to a particular mailing list, but I don’t think that really counts for personal correspondence. At any rate, I couldn’t resist not calling you today.

After all, I do owe you a story, and you owe me a story.

It’s hard this, acting as if I’m not desperately in love with you, playing this game of pretend. I can’t call you as much as I want, or ask you how the day goes, or simply just wish you well. Every now and then I find myself calling you, dialing the numbers but stopping a digit short, paralyzed by fear. I hold the phone to my ear, content to wait in silence.

Anyway, here’s my story: since we last talked, I haven’t been able to sleep well, mostly because of you. You keep me awake nights. Sooner or later your voice comes to me while I lie on my bed, talking to me about everything and nothing, asking me about my day, making me feel better, an imaginary friend/lover/everything. I talk to it every night we don’t talk to each other, and sometimes long after you’ve put down the phone.

I seriously doubt you’ll believe that, so I won’t tell it to you. Instead, I’ll use my brain to invent a life I’ve never actually had, or one that I normally would have had were I not thinking of you, a life I used to have before I met you. Ask me again and again I’ll lie to you. I lie because you’ll feel better not knowing the truth. I just know you will.

It’s always easier to believe the lie than to accept the truth.

Alex Garland wrote about it once. The bastard had the cheek to have it set here, of all places. How apt. Tesseracts, he called them.

Tesseracts, if I remember my definitions correctly (mine in particular coming from young adult book of the same name whose author escapes me at the moment), is a gate to the fifth dimension. We need a gate to enter the fifth dimension because we can't actually detect it... yet. We can sense length, width, and height just fine thanks to our senses and we know time exists because some memories fade and others don't (like the first time I saw you).

The fifth dimension, however, is an altogether different story. With five dimensions, you begin to realize that there are an infinite number of other planes of existence out there. The amazing thing is when you realize that those planes are as real as the one you and I are in, anything becomes possible. With a tesseract, you could figuratively create your own world. I would surmise that it would make you a god, after a fashion.

"Somewhere there's somebody who looks just like you do/Acts just like you do - feels the same way" -- Edie Brickell, The Wheel

If only I were a god...

It's 1:15AM. This time last year (and more), I'd sit by my computer, reading my mail. YOUR mail.

If I remember right, there would always be two time stamps on each piece of mail: one to let me (and you) know when you read yours (and I mine), the other to know just how much of your day was spent reading and replying to mail from each other. If anything, you spent less time writing mail than I did. Where a full hour of my day disappears when I talk to you, you take twenty, thirty minutes at most.

"I type faster than you. It's that simple, Kiko. I type at XXX words per minute. :-P"

You see, the reason is much simpler than that. You always take forever to write when you're insane.

Why is it that when we desperately want something to happen, our mind plays its tricks on us? We put words into mouths, meanings into actions, when in truth there is none. We humans, when in love, have this tremendous power to distort reality, especially when you want something -- someone that much. When one looks for what is said in the unsaid when there is really nothing to be said, one does go insane.

You once asked me why I loved you, or at least why I think I love you. And if I remember correctly, at that time, you (someone who does not take the L word lightly) were quite taken aback.

“That’s impossible,” you said. “It’s not like you have a million poems stashed around your room about me. We’ve known each other for years. That would be… strange.”

In fact, I burned the last one the other day. It was about how goddesses like you could never fall for mere mortals like me, filled with the existentialist crap that. I wrote it long ago for a poetry-writing workshop. It was so vile that it was soundly booed but I kept it anyway, mostly because it was about you.

I have no regrets. Most of what I’ve written isn’t worth wiping my ass with, anyway. To paraphrase the oft-quoted saying, love indeed, does make horrible poets out of buffoons.

We’ve been friends, what, seven, eight years. We met at the only high school soirée I ever attended (because it was held at my place), and I’ve been in love with you since then. In those days, I kept my feelings to myself. I liked having secrets, and you were my secret everything.

You were popular. I'd bet you still are. Everyone knew you. You were that rocker chick who wrote endlessly about falling in love and then some, peppered with enough “this world sucks” angst that it set you apart from everyone else. I loved that about you. I loved everything about you. I loved that you would write to me in some strange foreign alphabet that only you and I could understand.

I love that the world seems to be right as long as you're in it. I love the way we fit with each other. I love the way you give meaning to me. I love the way you save me. I could go on and on and it would be pointless. We’d never be together anyway. I’ve lied far too much and far too often for that to happen.

Oo nga pala. Belated Valentine’s.