after all these years

i just came home from dinner and coffee with college friends and incidentally our college professor way back who could still pass for an older brother. it feels weird having to call him now by his first name when you've been conditioned to call him "sir" during college but calling him like you used to feels way more awkward. we had dinner at Silk at Serendra where luckily on a friday night we managed to snag a very comfortable table. The food was quite good and expectedly more expensive than your usual fare. i liked the soft shell crab even though it felt a little salty after a while, pandan chicken and the tom yum soup. one of my staple favorite thai dish, pad thai, was neatly presented and i probably should've eaten it ahead of the bagoong rice and other dishes because i couldn't really distinguish its taste right after. still the best pad thai for me is from malee's down scottsdale road in arizona. hands down, that is something i always have to partake on when i'm in town.

we spent the rest of the evening chatting about almost anything that has happened in the last fifteen years. at our age, reminiscing about the old days is a staple during conversations and seeing richard, who used to give us grief back in college, now feels a whole lot different. thirteen years of employment changes you - it makes you and your professor sort of equal. four years age difference i guess isn't much so richard felt more like an older brother than a relic from our past (lol!). he still looks much like he used to back in college, a bit older perhaps but i wouldn't be surprised if his students are still crushing over him. it was flattering when he said i was a smart student (uhmmm oh yeah!) and that we were a select few who managed to finish the course on time. it was a bit surprising when he said that in engineering, failing a few subjects is expected in industrial engineering. i actually never thought of it that way back then. tuition was expensive and failing was a letdown i couldn't really afford. richard taught some of the more difficult math subjects - difficult in the sense that grades during course card distribution ranged between 0 to 1.5 (4.0 being the highest). if you get 1.5, you were awfully pretty smart and 1.0 was passing. getting a 1.0 in his subjects was enough reason to celebrate.

its always nice to spend time with people from way back. there's common things to talk about and there is history there - whether good or bad. i think one of the most fun things is to talk about all those silly things you did back then and just laugh at your own naivete.

college was one of the best years of my life. it never fails to make me smile.