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I would like to develop a new skill. Unlike writing or cooking, this new skill I have in mind doesn’t have any practical purpose at all. I’m not even sure if I can call it a skill, really, but at the very least it makes for an interesting topic for those awkward social situations where you need to keep the conversation going but can’t quite think of anything to say.

Yesterday morning, Elliott Smith’s cover of “Because” came up on the random playlist at the exact same moment I happened to be thinking of a particular friend. I literally dropped whatever I was doing and stood completely dumbstruck by the freakish coincidence and by the discovery that the lyrics of the song was an almost exact reflection on his views on life, love, and beauty. “Because” is his favorite Beatles song. (Not long after the song ended, I received a text message from that friend. Life is full of strange coincidences.)

I immediately started forming a haphazard theory that maybe there’s a lot you can tell about a person by his or her favorite Beatles song. A song, in the most basic sense, is a poem set into music. Let’s assume that poetry (lyrics) is a reflection of universal human experiences, thoughts, attitudes, etc. Let’s also assume that a person loves a particular song because he or she feels a strong, personal connection to its message - the song could either reflect certain beliefs, philosophies, behaviors, or ways in which he/she perceives the self. Why The Beatles? Because you’d be hard-pressed to find a person who has absolutely no clue who the Beatles are and because I’m so out of the loop with pop culture that I’d be like, “Who? What?” if another song or artist was mentioned.

Testing out my theory was something that happened by accident. All it took was a single Tweet on Twitter*, and soon my friends were asking me what I have to say about their favorite Beatles song in 140 characters. It was a Friday morning and I guess nobody was in the mood to do anything productive.

FRITZ

Fritz started off the whole conversation when he said:

Fritz: Mine’s “I Got a Feeling”, tell me what you think.
Me: You work hard and party even harder. Also, you keep missing the jeepney and are usually almost late for work.
Fritz: WTF? You can tell that from a Beatles song?! Your reading powerz can kick Nostradamus’ butt anytime!

What a sarcastic, this Fritz. =P

ADE

Then there was Ade, who is probably the biggest Beatles fan among my friends.

Ade: My faves, as you know, are “In My Life”, “Come Together”, “I Am The Walrus”, and “A Day In The Life”. What does that say?
Me: That’s a lot of songs! Which one’s the ultimate favorite? My Beatles Song Personality Reading Abilities can only handle one.
Ade: “A Day in the Life”
Me: You can’t decide if you love and hate your routine and it drives you nuts. You’re also too afraid to go for what you really want.

Over Y!M, Ade confirmed that my Beatles song reading is in fact correct. w00t!

KLASSY

Klassy saw what was going on through Facebook and decided to join in.

Klassy: My favorite Beatles song is “Helter Skelter”.
Me: You try your best to depend on no one but yourself when you hit very low points in your life, but deep down you want someone who will help pull you back up.
Klassy: HUHLOLZ. Spot-on. You read me well :p

COCO

Coco: Butting in on this Beatles action before I go to sleep with “HelloGoodbye.” Also, “We Can Work It Out” and “Eleanor Rigby.” K.
Me: Based on Hello Goodbye, you like being around people who have more differences than similarities with you. Amirite?

Coco hasn’t gone online since yesterday so I guess I won’t know if I was indeed right.

MARCO

Marco: My favorite Beatles Song is “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”
Ade: Um, you like circuses?
Me: You treat life or social situations as one big performance. You’re very guarded and put on different masks around people.
Marco: BLASPHEMY!

PAU

I know that reading sounds like a lot of bull, but what I really meant to say was that just like Come Together (which sounds like a safe pop song unless you pay attention to the whacked-out lyrics), Pau seems completely normal and harmless - at first. Then you get to know him and realize that he’s perfectly capable of running through a crowded street wearing nothing but boxers while screaming something really random like, “PROTECT YOUR VAGINAS!” Except I couldn’t say that in less than 140 characters.

Throughout the duration of Twitter Beatles reading, I realized two things. First, the less I know about the person, the more my reading sounds like a fortune cookie fortune. They’re not as specific as I’d like them to be, and I’ve got no clue if I hit the mark or missed completely (seriously - did I come anywhere near at all?). Second, the readings I gave to friends I know well (Fritz, Ade, Klassy) came not so much from their Beatles song as from the things I already know about them. Which got me thinking that maybe it works the other way around. Maybe I can only make a more or less accurate connection between personality and favorite Beatles song when I’ve achieved a certain degree of knowledge about that person.

Before going to bed last night, I asked Ale the favorite Beatles song question. To my surprise, he told me that he doesn’t really listen to the Beatles and that the closest thing he has to a favorite song is John Lennon’s “Imagine” - or rather, A Perfect Circle’s cover of “Imagine”. I said that if he could be a Beatles song, he’d definitely be “I Am A Walrus” - crazy, unpredictable, and scatterbrained. Sometimes I have trouble keeping up with him because he likes to jump from one thought to another totally unrelated one.

Was I correct? Well yes, but not in the way I expected.

“You do know what walruses are known for, don’t you?” Ale asked once he was done laughing hysterically.

“Um, no. What?”

“Walruses are the mammals with the biggest penises.”

See how that random bit of information came from out of nowhere?

As for me, my favorite Beatles song is “In My Life”. Explanation in less than 140 characters: I may not be good at showing it, but I love everyone who’s been a part of my life, even the assholes. I wouldn’t be who I am without them.

* Twitter, for those of you who aren’t glued to the Internet like I am, is a live micro-blogging tool where you answer a simple question (”What are you doing?”) in 140 characters or less. It’s great for finding out what your friends are doing or feeling and using that as an excuse to procrastinate.

Despite being hopelessly inept at the kitchen, I found myself at the Center for the Culinary Arts’ Kitchen Discovery Class (KDC) last Friday. The KDC is a six-hour introductory class where you get to cook and bake in a commercial kitchen and figure out which one you’re better at. Not that I need a class to discover that I suck at cooking but I’m all for throwing myself into all sorts of odd situations and learning from them, even when I already have a general idea of how they’ll turn out.

What I ended up discovering at the KDC is not so much any hidden cooking skillz0rz (I seriously don’t have any) as little revelations about myself. I had several of them during the course of six hours:

I’m not a food person.

I don’t have much of an appetite to begin with, and I’m not at all prissy about where my food comes from or how it’s prepared. I rarely ever eat at expensive, trendy restaurants because I’m a total cheapskate - it feels like a waste to spend over 300 bucks on something I’m just going to crap out the next day. Perhaps my lack of culinary appreciation is why I’ve shown little or no interest in cooking the proper way. As far as making my own meals is concerned, cooking should only involve three ingredients: canned food, a can opener, and a microwave oven.

Of course, I kept all those things to myself during the class. Why? Because the chef instructor was absolutely dreamy and I didn’t want to be the only unsophisticated, uncivilized, unappreciative-of-food lout in the room. I hope it wasn’t obvious that I was inwardly freaking out when I glanced at the handout and saw that we were to make caramelized salmon with orange-shoyu glaze, served sauteed mixed vegetables, soba noodles, lemongrass beurre blanc, and balsamic soy reduction. I’m told that I have a very expressive face.

Seriously though, since when did cooking get so complicated? I missed my can opener already.

I like being alone in the kitchen.

In a commercial kitchen, you have to learn to work with other people and make do whatever utensils are available. Making do with resources is easy enough for me, but please don’t make me work with other people - at least, not in a kitchen anyway. I don’t have anything against my classmates, but have you ever tried chopping vegetables with someone hovering over your back? It feels a lot like someone peering at your screen when you’re writing - unnerving, distracting, and downright irritating. Not to mention that a kitchen is already suffocating enough without fourteen people sharing the same small space with you and taking the ingredients right when you need them. I don’t care if I don’t know my ass from my elbow in the kitchen. I like figuring out the recipe and preparing all the ingredients all by myself.

Clearly I’m not going to be a commercial chef anytime in the near future.

If I can’t pronounce it, I sure as hell can’t cook it.

My groupmates asked me to do one simple thing: make the lemongrass beurre blanc sauce for the salmon. It involves throwing a bunch of ingredients together and putting them over a fire - nothing too difficult, even if my cooking experience doesn’t amount to much.

Naturally, I ended up burning the sauce. Don’t ask me how that happened. One minute, it was cooking quite nicely; when it checked up on it again, it turned into this black crusty thing at the bottom of the pan. I blame it on the fact that the sauce contained fancy French words I couldn’t pronounce.

I was hoping that Chef McDreamy wouldn’t chew me out when I sheepishly owned up to burning the sauce. To my surprise, he commended me for my honesty. Most students, he said, would have lied and said that they put the beurre blanc sauce somewhere in there. I wanted to impress him with my wit and intellect by saying something about how lying takes too much effort and that the world would be a far better place if everyone just said what was on their minds, but he moved on to the next group before I could even open my mouth. Damnit.

I’m pretty damn good at making desserts.

There is one thing I’m fairly good at in the kitchen though: baking. Besides the warm childhood memories I associate with raw cookie batter and the scent of bread in the oven, I love the exact, almost-ritualistic rhythm of the baking process. During the afternoon baking session, I insisted that I make the saffron panna cotta - which I did with absolutely no difficulty. I even shaped the almond tuiles that we used to garnish the panna cotta. Of course it took my groupmates and I four times to make the caramel sauce because the damn thing kept burning in the pan. The end result, however, was kick-ass, restaurant-quality panna cotta that tasted just as good as it looked.

I still suck at making sauces, but it’s good to know that there’s one kitchen-y thing I can do right and that I actually enjoy.

The Kitchen Discovery Class is a 6-hour class that takes place every Friday. If you’d like to try it out, call way ahead of time because there’s only a limited number of slots per class. For more information on the Kitchen Discovery Class and other courses, visit the CCA website.

Which would you rather be:

a) pretty but constantly depressed (and I’m not talking about the “I’m sad” kind of depression. I mean the sort where you spend hours either crying your eyes out for absolutely no reason at all, or staring into space because you honestly don’t care whether you live or die the next minute) and picking stupid fights with your boyfriend just because you can?

or

b) not-so-pretty, but at least you’re capable of being as happy as a mentally unstable 22 year old can get?

Believe me, this is not an easy question to answer.

I’ve been taking this birth control pill Yasmin for some time now, not so much for the “I’m too young to get knocked up” reasons as the “my skin has been ugly ever since I hit puberty and I’ve done everything to make my skin stop breaking out and for just once in my life I’d like to be pretty” reasons. My mom wasn’t too thrilled about my decision to get on the pill due to our family’s history of breast cancer. She was convinced that the estrogen in the pill would transform my breasts into little tumor farms. To appease her I had my gynecologist run some (rather expensive) tests on me and when everything checked out okay, I made my way to the drug store with my prescription of Yasmin.

Little did my mom or I realize that breast cancer is the least of the more serious side effects to get worried about.

Over the next couple of weeks, not only did my skin do a wonderful job of clearing up - I debunked the myth that the pill fattens you up like crazy. The other positive side effect I got from the pill is that it took my appetite to a place far far away and made me almost skinny like a model. For about two weeks I couldn’t bring myself to eat more than a couple of mouthfuls during every meal, no matter how delicious the food in front of me was. It even came to a point where the only reason why I bothered eating was to make the grumbling noises in my tummy stop. Every time I went out my friends, the first thing they’d tell me was that I looked prettier and skinnier than the last time they saw me. That made me feel damn good - but not good enough to make up for the huge waves of depression that kept hitting me once I started taking the pill.

It started out as me being ten times more cranky and sensitive than I usually am. Random little things that wouldn’t normally have bothered me, like getting lost in a strange city, became disasters of epic proportions - and I would deal with it all like some helpless heroine. (If you had gone with us to Cebu and Bohol, I bet you would have insisted on leaving me on the roadside. I would have done that, if I were another person.) When Ale left the Philippines I cried for hours everyday, but I wasn’t too worried since that was obviously normal reaction. However, the depression didn’t go away once we settled back into our familiar, comfy, long-distance routine. In fact, it got even worse. One minute I’d be okay and the next, I’d either be crying for no reason or picking a fight with Ale for some ridiculous reason or another. Like he’d make some offhand comment that wouldn’t have bothered me on a normal day, but because it’s been a while since I had a normal day I’d end up blowing things completely out of proportion. Really, with the way I’ve been acting up the past few weeks, I’m surprised I’m not single yet.

I can’t decide which is the worst part though - the moments where I’d be staring off into space feeling numb and empty because I pretty much lost the will to do anything (except stay in bed and watch Dexter or Grey’s Anatomy for hours), or the unexplained crying fits like the one I had last night. What frightened me about that episode is that it wasn’t just any kind of crying. It’s the way women cry when they’ve just been dumped or when someone they love has died, except I haven’t been dumped and no one I know died recently. For over an hour, my bed was practically shaking because I was sobbing so hard. I tried to calm myself down and figure out why I was freaking out so badly, but that made me cry even harder because I couldn’t come up with one good reason for that heavy, profound sadness. I wish I could attribute the mood drop to yesterday being my brother’s death anniversary, but that wasn’t even it. I had a similar crying fit just a few days ago, and it was just as unexpected and unexplainable as last night’s.

Getting depressed or crying for no reason is nothing new to me, but it’s never happened this frequently nor this intensely. I did some poking around the internet and discovered that the progestin component in Yasmin (or any other combination birth control pill) wreaks havoc on your serotonin levels by increasing a brain enzyme that inhibits the production serotonin. Serotonin is that neurotransmitter in your brain that affects your mood. If you have too little, you’re probably depressive and not much fun like I am. If you have too much, you’re probably one of those irritatingly chipper people who deserve a bullet in between their eyes. So I guess when you already have too little serotonin to begin with, and you take a pill that kind of kills what little serotonin you already have - it’s amazing I haven’t tried to kill myself yet.

Despite the wonderful things the pill has done to my physical appearance, I stopped taking Yasmin last Sunday. Being prettier and skinnier doesn’t mean anything when I can no longer appreciate the simple fact that I’m alive. Hell, these days it takes a Herculean amount of effort go out and show the world that I’ve gotten prettier and skinnier. I’m a little worried that my mood hasn’t improved yet, but I guess I’ll see how I’m like over the next couple of days.

So have any of you ever tried taking the pill or know someone who did, and had a reaction as bad as mine? How did you or that person deal with it? And do you think I should stop taking the pill, or take it with a combination of serotonin supplements? Really, I should be asking my gyno all these questions instead of consulting random Internet doctors. Unfortunately, her waiting room is always filled with pregnant women, screaming babies, and (for some reason) nuns, and I don’t really feel like surrounding myself with a lot of estrogen right now.