TGDF becomes GDF

#106: Goodbye Dear Friend



This month seems to be a month of goodbyes. I spent my Friday night with Tin (a girl-friend who's leaving for Seattle to take additional units for early childhood education/development and do her internship), plus Francis and Gerard - the two engineering goons we take turns bullying (or maybe it's the other way around. They bully us.) Francis calls us "TGDF" which stands for either Tin-Gerard-Dikya-Francis, or "Thank God DIS Friday." I told him to stick with engineering and leave Marketing to the creative ones (i.e., me). Haha.

Dinner was at Brazil, Brazil. For Php545++ you get non-stop grilled beef, pork, chicken, sausages, corn, bananas and pineapples which they bring to your table at intervals that follow no predictable pattern PLUS buffet which we no longer found a use for after one round because we found it much better to just have the food tossed straight to our plates. Drinks are set on two price points: Php70 for the normal stuff (softdrinks, teas) and Php130ish for the fancy ones. Go for the fancy ones. "Brazilian Dream" is a heavenly mix of pineapple, bananas, strawberry and milk.

After dinner, I was so stuffed (with grilled pineapples, I think) that I needed to take a walk to make the food go down. (Or else I will have a heart attack.) We decided to do our 'walking' inside the mega-bookstore that just opened. "Fully-Booked" to me is what "Toy Kingdom" is to a kid. The new layout is more confusing than the old straightforward one. It's now full of diagonal shelves with receding ceilings, weird ramps and stairs. It's like entering a shop designed by Dr. Seuss. But it's still Fully-Booked - the bookstore with the most up-to-date inventory of books and the best selection of notebooks/journals/ticklers around - so I still love it. If Tin hadn't threatened to go home and leave me there, I would've stayed till closing time. I left with a new book, a new notebook and a big grin. We then headed to Starbucks to try and solve all of Globe Telecoms' problems. (All four of us were Globe Management Trainees so we foolishly think we can do that.)

Now if there's no Coffee Bean around, you ask yourselves whether you want good dessert or just a good place to lounge around. Seattle's Best has a better range of desserts - from their lemon squares to their rum cakes to everything. Starbucks has horrible stuff. You might as well eat pillow stuffing. But see, related to pillows and stuffing, Starbucks has better interiors and couches so for our particular purpose, Starbucks was the best choice.

When it was time to end the night, there was nothing special with the goodbyes. There were no promises to keep in touch or to meet up again soon. It was almost as if we were expecting to see each other in the next Globe project meeting the following workday or bump into each other down Globe's halls. It was as if we were all holding on to the illusion that we were still in the same place in life...and that we were still the same people we were 4 years ago when we all crossed paths.