Bottled ※ Brain

YOU'VE SEEN the first video . Well . . . we've made another one. Shot in clandestine locations at the Philippine General Hospital, the video shows how old we've grown these past years. I hope you enjoy the video as much as we've had fun making it. My favorites include:

MACARTHUR by Filipino writer Bob Ong is a short, powerful novel about four boys raised in Manila's slums. I read it early this morning and finished the rest of it after Sunday service.

AFTER FOUR YEARS our uniforms already possess the dirty patina of time, some remnants of dried blood and smelly bodily fluids which I shall not enumerate here lest you vomit—oops, I just named one. Naturally we welcomed the opportunity to wear something decent other than our uniforms for the topic conference on placenta previa. The consultant was curious why we looked so good, Pinggoy breezed through the slides like a pro—so I take it that we did well that morning. We had brunch after the conference and before the public health lecture. The restaurant's lighting was perfect for a photo shoot. Like ignorant, noisy high schoolers we took random shots of each other. Thankfully there weren't too many people around. I'm sharing some of the photos. Some men from my block: Pinggoy Dañguilan, Jegar Catindig, Casti Castillo, myself, and Bryan de Gracia. My friends tell me I looked like an English schoolboy. Meanwhile, look for Crisostomo Ibarra!

I DON'T KNOW where my copy of Oswald Chambers' My Utmost For His Highest is—a friend must have borrowed and forgot to return it. That book has radically changed me. I read it in 2004, the most memorable and transformative year of my life , for that was when I came to know Jesus Christ personally. Imagine the excitement I had—a baby Christian—as I studied the Bible, relishing every word of it, and making sense of hard concepts like faith and justification and forgiveness. It was exhilarating, not unlike the way a man gets preoccupied with the woman of his dreams—but the experience was so much more.

HOW TO KEY in é, ñ, and other such special characters had been a problem for me until I discovered the use of AltGr keys in Ubuntu. Go to System > Preferences > Keyboard. You'll see something like this. Click Layouts.

YOU HAVE EXEMPLIFIED Christ's love, as you have loved each other and as you have loved us. For that we will be eternally grateful. Happy Valentine's Day, Tatay and Nanay! We couldn't think two people more in love than you. Love, your sons.

THESE PAST WEEKS I've been wrestling with a decision can impact my internship year significantly. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say that it involves me being given an extraordinary opportunity I do not deserve, something I owe to God's overflowing goodness. Taking that opportunity means I may have to give up on the other good things I've come to cherish these past four years.

Excerpt from the paper I submitted for my rotation at the Supportive, Hospice, and Palliative Medicine of the Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of the Philippines - Philippine General Hospital. I READ Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' book, On Death and Dying , two summers ago. The stages of grief that Dr. Kubler-Ross proposed took on a new light as I read about patients in denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The images on my head of people suffering and dying and of the doctors telling them they don't have too long to live were distant, impersonal vignettes. At the time my hospital exposure was limited to short interview sessions with patients assigned to me, so I didn't know what the situation really was at the Philippine General Hospital. I was both inspired and challenged, of course. Taking care of the dying seemed like the sort of thing great doctors did well. I wanted to be a compassionate doctor, and, idealistic as this may sound, to

I MIGHT buy new glasses any time soon. That's been on my checklist for the longest time. The last time I bought a pair was in September 2011 . Incidentally Manong Ralph got new ones last week. I tried the glasses on, and they fit me well. I shall implore him to hand them to me once he gets sick of them—which I hope will happen very soon.