nomnomnom-ing

I arrived home at around half past two this morning, a full moon smiling with me as I stepped out of the car and into the threshold. I came from an awesome night with old schoolmates from the absolutely amazing college of UP Fine arts. It was great to see them all again, all in one place, all at the same time.


I've been looking forward to a rendezvous such as this. It would be a decade since I last saw most of them (online / television / magazine sightings excluded), so you could imagine how excited I was.

We had dinner and drinks at a really cute, cozy resto in QC owned by 3 other schoolmates. Really, really lovely place. Would you believe it? - It's called Nomnomnom Happy Food. Wonderful healthy gourmet-ish food at fastfood prices. Highly recommended.


Some 60 or so folk came, UP CFA graduates from different departments and various batches of the late '90s. There was a whole lot of us from our block and we filled half the smoking area. Everyone sort of just adapted into the scene, as if simply picking up from where we left off almost a decade ago, like we were never separated by years. Most of them looked just like the way I left them.

A lot of things were pretty much the same ...

R and J were still the fist to arrive and the last to leave.
D still has the nicest camera, and is still married to R.
MB still looks like she did in college.
MD still has her subtle-funny way of telling stories .
G is still nicey and unintrusive.
A is still the pretty girl who has never had a boyfriend.
JP is still on whatever regulated substances those are.
AL is still the weird artist type (with ultraman toy watch to match), still talks like a cool geek and is still a self-proclaimed closet gay.
D is still openly gay and openly flirts with AB. AB is still a sweet-and-sensitive toughie and is still dating C.
H is still a heckler.
L is still his heckle-buddy.
The single girls are still single.
And there was this whole confuddled commotion with paying the bill, like how things usually went when we ate at Mang Jimmy's ten years ago.
And JP hitched a southbound ride home with me like he used to.


... Though there have been a lot of interesting developments:

JP finally graduated (Centennial batch! Woot!) - big news of the evening.
D is a classy sort of sexy-manly gay who does some designing and a bit of modeling.
AB has a lot of uber-cool tatts.
MD just recovered from an operation that revealed she had a parasitic twin (oh yes, she gave us a detailed, descriptive report while everyone was eating).
MB, one of the owners of the resto we were eating at, is now a successful entrepreneur with a couple of businesses.
H is engaged.
D and R have three kids now.
R is a respected teacher at a girls' private school.
D spells his name differently now. He has a studio and does glamour photography; we see his work everywhere.
AL is a filmmaker and has a thing for K-pop.

It felt a lot like college hang-out days all over again - except that people were now more stable (in every sense of the word) and the guys knew how to handle their drinks (i.e., no drunken vomitfests). Too bad a lot of the other friends weren't able to make it.

It was a much-needed trip away from the usual everyday of present life. I'd love to call it a great night of catching up with old friends, but great is an understatement. Hoping and waiting for a second round ...