current music: Quiet - Rachael Yamagata

Okay. Let me tell you a bit of a story.

One ordinary, nondescript day in the life of me and my blockmates, two of my classmates in our practicum class gave me CD's of music they liked. This was on the heels of me playing a burned CD of mixed music in the FA Theater's sound system, and thus inspiring varied conversation among us on our musical tastes.

I learned about certain 'signature tastes' to the Block E people: Anna loved Brit rock, characterized by Bloc Party. Geopet loved Pinoy indie rock. Benny was a metal fan. Chino, the blockmate who left Ateneo, loved classic rock (Led Zeppelin, et al). Yumi loved classical piano, especially from the old maestros (Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin). Edlyn was the one who had scores of musicals in her iPod, Jason liked pop music, and Jihan liked Hale. I happened to be the only true fan of hip-hop, even if I listened to practically anything and everything else (be it the 70's, the 80's, OPM, grunge, disco, liturgical, video game soundtracks...you name it).

Those two I mentioned gave me CD's for different reasons. One, Denrocs, a girl who liked to talk to me about life, movies, music, and palmistry, handed me a mix of electronica, her favorite kind of music, in hopes of 'expanding my horizons'. It showed on the CD - she wrote on the thing itself a note:

Aug. 30, '05
Dearest Raph,
Expand your horizons. Electronic music is not so bad! Take care! ü *heart* Denrocs


And for the most part, I liked it. It had Bonnie Bailey, Benny Benassi and Felix da Housecat, to name a few. Mostly, they were upbeat, party music you'd be playing while twirling glowsticks in a club with friends. Although I confess I wish she'd given me a CD of more easy-going sounds - man does not live on trance alone. I wished she picked out the Chill Out music selections for me. But her choices and my biases didn't stop my "growth"; I ended up taking to Faithless and Timo Maas really quickly.

Then there was Monette.

I had my reasons to try and be 'closer' to Monette back in the day - she was the girl who sat behind me in the first class I took with Block E, an Economics class where I sat in front, but made few friends. I had often found her to be quite pretty, and even once or twice contemplated asking her out for coffee or something, but I was *kind of* involved with somebody else at the time (this was 2nd year, in the heat of a troubled...well, nevermind). At the few times we talked, I found her to be sweet. But it pretty much ended there, as the other 'core group blockmates' in Yumi, Cerz, Jason, Edlyn and the like tended to absorb my attention more, them being really very welcoming to me, a future shiftee.

It never happened, this being friendly with that girl. I had never quite gotten around being 'closer' to Monette for reasons that elude me. Maybe it was because I was busy making friends (or being friends, I couldn't tell which) with the others that I hardly ever got to chat with her. Or it could have been how I had me some of her old friends from high school, some she still kept close ties to, and whom I personally didn't find too pleasant for company (there are airs, you see). Or maybe it was how, whenever I'd try to strike conversation, she'd be so quiet, or that we'd have so little to really chat about. It'd be idle small talk, and we'd hardly ever get around anything more playful, or more personal; only to a certain friendly but noncommital kind of cordiality.

When I played music, I told her I had a fondness (among many fondnesses) to acoustic, adult-contemporary sounding music. Damien Rice being my current poster-child at the time, was what was playing in the background. She offered to make me a mixtape of music, and she did. It didn't come with a tracklist, and I only recognized James Blunt's "You're Beautiful", at the time a really big, brand-new hit. I asked for a track list, and she said she'd give it if I returned the CD. I ended up misplacing the disk for a spell of months, and since then, us two went back to our happy silence/non-committal chatter, all the way to the Graduation Day march just a few weeks ago. I haven't heard from her since.

I found the CD just this evening, and decided to decipher the tracklist on my own, an act I should have done months ago. I played the song, and typed lyrics on Google as they raced across my head. One song at a time, and I was done. And I listened. And I love the music, and...well.

The whole thing reminds me of High Fidelity. Now, I feel like I've known Monette a WHOLE LOT DEEPER. After all, mixtapes say a lot about a person's taste, and more importantly, about the way a person thinks, feels, hopes and dreams.

Maybe if I had better listened, maybe I'd have learned to know Monette a whole lot better. And maybe I'd be able to understand her gift of song for me.