(Itago na lang natin siya sa pangalang) Pink Ranger tells me about something weird that happened to her just this afternoon. It was a pretty busy lunch hour and she was at Jollibee. There weren't any other free tables so there was this other girl who came up to her and asked if they could share a table. Since she was on her own and it was a bigger table, the Pink Ranger figured it would be okay. Sure, she answered. The girl thanked her and for a while they sat across each other, just finishing their Champs and fries in silence, but all the while she couldn't shake off the feeling that she had met this girl somewhere before. Finally, the other girl said, "Oh, wow. I thought you looked familiar." Turns out, they shared an ex-boyfriend.

"She dated him after he broke up with the girl he dated after we broke up. I think. I didn't really know what to say." she explains to me later, pausing every once in a while to make sure she wasn't mixing things up. They had only met once before, years ago, and it was just a passing introduction. "But here's what was really weird; because we had dated the same guy, it was like we had an automatic common ground. Like we could commiserate with each other at having seen the same guy naked and things not working out. On the other hand, we had seen the same guy naked. It was comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time."

It is weird how that works. Once you're an ex-girlfriend or an ex-boyfriend, you become part of a group of people you may  or may not have ever met, may or may not know absolutely nothing about or may or may not have absolutely nothing in common with, a group made up of old memories, good intentions, ill-fated chemistry and promises that didn't quite pull through; a group of people marked by an emphasis on "ex", signifying nothing but the past - and only the kind that is for forgetting.

And here is John Oliver, cementing his place in the list of People I Want to Marry Someday (the top five of which seems now to be mostly composed of Englishmen).