Tumblr won’t play any songs. And Grooveshark’s search doesn’t work. How the hell am I supposed to listen to this song that keeps playing in my head?

I used to love making playlists for my friends — the 21st-century version of giving out mix tapes in the ’90s — back in college. I pulled songs in my iTunes, named a playlist after the person I’m making it for, and burned them right there. To this day, what I have is an iPod with names of my friends for playlists.

One of these playlists, which is possibly the most comprehensive, was for my good friend Samboy. I asked him what music he wanted, and he said anything that I like and think is good. So I spent the most part of one evening shuffling through songs in my library. The end result is a collection ranging from Alice In Chains to Milky, Siakol to Color It Red, Moonpools and Caterpillars to Oasis, Rivermaya to Yano to Eraserheads, Sound Garden to Collective Soul, from The Script to Black Sabbath to the Dave Matthews Band, from Bob Marley to Radiohead, from Alison Krauss to Rage Against The Machine to, of course, The Beatles, and so on.

It’s this playlist that I’ve been listening to since morning. More than 500 songs, each taking me back to a memory or two whenever I listen to it. I remember listening to house music with my high school friends, I remember commuting to the office where I worked for my internship while listening to Tool, I remember listening to All Saints’ “Pure Shores” when I smoked pot in my room and imagining I was Leonardo Dicaprio in The Beach. I remember when my Mom asked me to download songs from Train (way before Hey, Soul Sister), Eric Johnson, Steve Vai, and Deep Purple’s “Smoke On The Water” and I loved all of them.

I’m grateful to Samboy. Instead of an autobiography, I have a playlist that can narrate my life.