The Clan

That’s what my college barkada call ourselves. I still recall how our batch got called that. When we got into 3rd year in college, our 4th and 5th year org-mates called us clannish because they felt that we stuck to ourselves too much and didn’t mingle with the other people enough. That piece of feedback got to us somehow and so we started calling ourselves ‘the clan’. A dozen years after the fact, that ‘term of endearment’ stuck.

A dozen years. Amazing when you think about it. We’ve been hanging out for a dozen years. Well okay, some of us have been hanging out with some others for longer than that and we all knew each other since we were freshman, but for the most part it’s been a dozen years since ‘the clan’ has been together.

Over the last several years, we’ve managed to catch up as a group at least a few times each year. The coolest thing though is that we’ve found ourselves hanging out more often recently. This was triggered by the fact that Trixie came home recently along with her new daughter Ianne (short for Isabelle Anne). We set up a welcome dinner for Trixie shortly after she got here, and what was great was that there were a lot of folks who made it – Lala, Anna, Jay and Trina, Letlet and Gosh, Kermin, and myself (and of course Trixie). We had so much fun during dinner that despite it being a Wednesday, we decided to go have coffee after that and wind down until about midnight. It’s not very often that we ‘oldies’ who all have corporate jobs actually stay out ‘til midnight on a weekday.

It was during this get-together that we decided to have a baby shower for Trixie coz we didn’t get to throw her a party while she was pregnant in Canada. So a week and a half later, we all head to Marikina to the Lazo residence. Interestingly enough, it was the exact same group of people that showed up. The only difference being that this time, the clan kids were present too. It was potluck and we all ended up bringing way too much food for 9 clan members + their kids and their yaya – we had barbecue, liempo, spaghetti, lumpiang shanghai, salad, ice cream, and cake. We were initially thinking of having a videoke night like we had during our Christmas party last year but when we got there, we all got so engrossed in our fun conversation that we ended up foregoing the videoke machine. Instead, the Lazos put on some Disney CD that contained, for the most part, the ‘High School Musical’ soundtrack that kept looping the entire night, sending all the kids into a continued dancing frenzy the entire night. Suffice it to say I’m not a fan of the campy music of that show, but I managed to keep hearing it in the background and not go crazy. =)

We set the next clan gimmick, our annual Christmas Party, on the 16th of December before moving to the 23rd so that Val and Louie would have already arrived here from Boston (We've since decided to add another get together to celebrate Christmas with Lala right before her birthdday on the 19th coz she'll be in Quezon on the 23rd and it's rare that she gets to join us during Christmas parties and her bday). Then during the weekend, I get a text from Lala announcing that the December birthday celebrators (i.e. her and Trixie) would like to treat the rest of us to a birthday blowout in Dampa in the Ortigas Home Depot area. So for the third time in the last 4 weeks, we once again hung out over dinner and later on coffee – Trixie, Lala, Letlet and Gosh, Mitch, Jay, Kermin, Jed and me. We disbanded at around 1115, mainly coz Mocha Blends closes at 11pm.

When you take into account Jed’s birthday celebration on the 26th of October, that means we’ve actually gotten together 4 times in the last 6 weeks. All of this truly has to be a post-college graduation record. And all this 12 years after we all got together and decided to call ourselves ‘the clan’. Pretty damn cool if you ask me.