I'm the eldest in a brood of three, and the only girl. My parents, Roel and Marivel, have been married for 21 years now. I'm 20 years old, Justin is 17, and Jyle is 15.

I love my family very much. We're certainly not perfect, and we do experience troubles on the homefront, but we're a crazy, happy family. Among the things we love doing together are eating and travelling. Thanks to the wi-fi in our house (Dad set up a router using our DSL connection), we now spend our evenings holed up in our respective rooms, glued to our respective laptops. Occasionally we talk to each other briefly through Yahoo! messenger.

My best friend Daryl is also my oldest friend -- among the few people I hold close to my heart, he's the one I became friends with the earliest. I met him on the first week of school in freshman high, and we pretty much hit it off right away, even though I was a new student and he wasn't -- in fact, he belonged to a solid, years-old clique. It has been a crazy ride with him since then. Our high school journey includes growing close in freshman and sophomore year (our colleagues in the student council started thinking there was something going on between us), becoming classmates and best friends in junior year, pretending to be a couple, ending up being a couple, breaking up and slowly transitioning back to being best friends, and finishing senior year with a renewed closeness and a deeper friendship. Our relationship has evolved and matured as we have since high school, and even though we rarely see each other now, in some inexplicable way, we're closer than ever.

Among the craziest things Daryl and I ever did were pranking our friends and batchmates in high school by telling them we were together (and almost all of them believed it, we were actually taken aback), making fun of one of our teachers (well, it was more Daryl than me) that he stopped talking to us for the rest of the year, and listing down our teachers' grammatical errors in a secret notebook!

In freshman high, Chico and I belonged to the same barkada. Come second year, I was disappointed to find that in our circle, she was my classmate -- I was jealous that my two close friends in the group were the ones in the same section. But Chico and I grew close throughout the year, and she became my best girl friend. College has made us both busy, and it doesn't help that she goes to a different school, she takes up Advertising, and she stays in a dorm, but even with minimal communication, we both agree that our friendship has not changed.

Some of my favorite memories with Chico were the various choral competitions that we participated in, the many malling days (we were limited to two malls because she wasn't allowed to go to farther places), and the homemade lunches we shared in high school -- her mom considered me as an extra daughter and never asked for a single penny from me!

On our very first day of classes in UP, Rocel and I left the freshmen and block orientations together after discovering we were classmates in Math 2. We bravely set out in the rain to search for the Math building, aided by what Rocel called her �super mapa� (of the UP campus). We didn�t grow very close in our first few semesters, but we were �reunited� when I joined the UP Journalism Club (UPJC) in my sophomore year. It was largely thanks to being orgmates that we got to spend much time together and develop a real relationship. It is indeed fitting that the girl who could well be called my first friend in UP is one of the best, closest friends I gained in college.

My fondest memories of Rocel include the UPJC Christmas party in 2006, where we both shed tears over our unconsciously shared plans of being thesis partners (I was to leave for a semester in Singapore, which meant I would be delayed in my academics); the early afternoon of 2007�s Lantern Parade day, when we hung out at the Sunken Garden and became witness to the murder of a poor, innocent frog (he died from repeatedly being tossed high into the air by merciless little boys); and an impromptu dinner at Grill Queen along Maginhawa Street one evening in March, thanks to personal matters that a five-minute drive (Rocel was hitching to Krus na Ligas) could not do justice to.

I met Peps in our Journalism 100 (History of the Press) class way back in freshman year -- I even sat next to her, though for some reason, the whole time I thought she was a batch higher and called her Ate! We later applied to the UP Journalism Club in the second semester of our second year, and from the start we got along pretty well. She is one of my closest friends in UP, and is my thesis partner.

Peps and I recently discovered that we have so many similarities, from basic principles to boy standards, and we also have, more or less, the same personality. We find it hilarious that people actually mistake us for each other all the time -- people even mistakenly call us by each other's names -- even though we don't look alike. Rocel says it's because we have the same aura.

One of my batchmates when I applied to UPJC, Misha had always struck me as a talkative goofball. He still is one, but I recently discovered that there was much more to him than all his commentaries. The last person I thought I would ever really get along with is now one of my closest college friends, with whom I�m able to connect on certain matters such as wanderlust, nationalism, and life goals of making a difference in the world.

My favorite memories of Misha include convoys where he (the leader) drives slowly for me, which exasperates me because we could go so much faster; entertaining SMS rants from him on Econ 100.1 mornings (our class was early and he�d always be running late); and impromptu trips to his house, where I'd get treated to the best homecooked food in Pasig!

Oh, and finding out how he (or whoever named him Misha) got his monicker from Jann Mikhail is still on my list of things to do before I graduate.

I have no memory of Ivy from 2006, except our induction together (we weren't batchmates in the application process, I had applied a semester earlier). Then again, that was a long time ago. We have since gradually become close after becoming classmates in a few major classes, and also after being Rocel's sidekicks (I'm Rocel's right hand and Ivy is the left). It also helped a lot that we came from the same high school, thus giving us topics for conversation apart from completely random things like call centers and the boy band Westlife.

One of these days Ivy will probably kill me for always laughing at her dog. (Seriously, how can one not laugh at a dog named Abundant Riches Alex, Alex for short?!) Rocel insists that Ivy doesn't have anyone to talk to (her siblings are much older than her) so her dog is apparently her only companion. Man's best friend, indeed.

Lau and I were inducted to the UP Journalism Club at the same time, but we weren't batchmates during the application process (I was a probee member then and she was inducted "on time") so I didn't really know her well. The semester after our induction, I went on Leave of Absence to study in Singapore, and even after I returned to UP, I had few encounters with her. It wasn't until my fourth year (a full year after our induction) that I really got to know Lau better. She has become of my mst cherished friends in college.

I bond with Lau over perky songs from perky musicals (such as Wicked and Legally Blonde). One song from Wicked that I'd love to sing to her is "For Good," where the main characters affirm their friendship and agree that meeting each other had changed them for good.

I first met Pastor Mike Gayatao in 2004, right before I became a born-again Christian. From the very start of my spiritual journey, he has been a mentor, father and friend, and I was terribly saddened when he was was assigned to pastor a new church. It sucked that I was in Singapore when he gave his last sermon as the youth pastor of Victory Alabang! Though we seldom see each other nowadays, I still look up to Mike as one of the most influential people in my life, and his guidance and counsel are more important to me than ever.

I will never forget how Mike drove like a madman through SLEX just to get me home from a camp as early as possible so that my parents wouldn't get mad, how, in recent times, he would call me just to assure me that 'boys will be the least of [my] problems,' and most of all, how he never stopped believing in me and kept pushing me to use my leadership potential in the VCF Alabang youth group.

The first time I met Leanne was at Rodic's -- she was to be my big sister of sorts in church because we both went to UP, and we were both from Mass Comm. It was an instant connection, as we had so many similarities that we often got mistaken for sisters. People had always insisted that we looked quite alike, which we always disagreed with.

In July 2007, a few months after she graduated from college, Leanne moved to Singapore. I'm thrilled that she is there, and I look forward to making many Singapore memories with her when I move there as well in a few years.