...and one more

Every now and then, not very often, I wish I could write something profound and deep and reflective and moving, other than the chronicling of the parties that I've attended or the food groups that I've eaten. But more often than not, the wish remains a wish as it's hard to squeeze something out that isn't there in the first place, right? Maybe being deep is a gift that I don't have, or maybe treading on the shallow end is a protective mechanism as plumbing deep might unearth monsters and whatnots, or worse, nothingness.

Having said that, may I just jump right in and proceed to tell you about yet another gettogether last night, the Batch '78 Christmas/New Year Party. It was a spur of the moment decision and we didn't spend a lot of time planning about it. The only preparation we made was to find a funny gift worth 50 pesos and to bring a dish for the potluck. Ingrid donated the lechon, Marites brought dessert, and host Rommel provided the drinks and the karaoke. We all forgot about the rice but no problem, there were a lot of puso in the tiangge.

"puso" aka "hanging rice"

While I'm at this, let me enumerate the food that we had: dinuguan, kinilaw na super fresh isda from Bayawan, pancit canton, siomai, lechon baboy and lechon manok, isol ng manok (chicken ass), mango float, black sambo, and baye-baye (Bayawan's specialty) which in Manila is called espasol.

During dinner, Abbe played the video coverage of our weeklong August reunion. This was made by a professional videographer we especially hired for the event. It's quite a long video (seven days worth!) and computer wiz Tatoy is assigned to chop it up and upload it to Youtube for all batchmates to see.

After dinner we had a riot playing games like charades, hep-hep-hurray, black magic and the zany baseball-bat/volleyball-spike/basketball-shoot game. It was such fun as everybody "participated" which means before we could start a game there was a lot of discussion about the rules and regulations because everybody had their own input about how the games should be played, much to the consternation of gamemasters Zenovia, Leolyn and me.

Then we had the exchanging of funny gifts where we sang Love my Manito/Manita. It wasn't the ordinary manito/manita though because we had to explain our gift and why or how it would be useful for the recipient, whose names we just picked that night from folded paper. These are some of the gifts we got: balatong, efficacent oil, sanitary balm, stuffed toy, diaper, talong, joke book, toothbrush holder, an almost empty bottle of lotion and dish towels.

It was way past midnight already and some of us had to go home so our president, Abbe, made a little speech to officially close the party then we all held hands in a circle as Zenovia lead us in a group prayer. Then we had group singing of Christmas carols followed by individual-pass-the-mike karaoke singing. I so love Mitch's singing voice so I stayed to listen to him for a while. He is basically a bass (Basso Profundo) but can also sub for baritone. He used to be a member of the SU Men's Glee Club and is presently with the Ellinwood Chancel Choir, Psalm Ensemble and Joyous Voices Chorale.

Oh, one last thing. This is probably the rainiest, windiest Christmas break that I can remember. It's been raining on and off, especially this last week of December and beginning of January. Most of us were in hooded jackets in Rommel's windy terrace.

The pictures are in Bong R.'s amazing new iPhone but he is at the golf course now so the pictures will have to be for later.