last night omeng and i met up at sarah’s to  plan our outfits for the
palanca awarding ceremony. omeng won third prize in the maikling kwento
category, and i won first prize in the  essay category. i intend to
come in a suit, but omeng wants something more laid back. he’s thinking
of wearing a long sleeved shirt. i want to wear a suit because i want
to live it up; i’m not sure i’d ever win again. haha. omeng, on the
other hand, only wants to go to the ceremony for the raffle.

as
for our dates, i’m going with my aunt (my late mother’s only surviving
sibling who closed the deal when she said that if i take her to the
awarding i can have whatever i want. haha). omeng has yet to decide who
to bring. right now it’s a toss up between his best friend roland t and
his sister carol b. because of this, omeng gets to have more fun at the
awarding. he gets to drink all the wine he wants since he doesn’t have
to behave. me, since my aunt will be beside me the whole night, i will
have to be a proper boy. oh well.

i’m really glad omeng and i
won. we both didn’t take joining the  contest very seriously. i almost
didn’t push through with my application on the day of the deadline
because it was such a hassle looking for a notary public. if anna s and
jessel d didn’t bully me into doing it, i would’ve just headed off to
sarah’s to drink instead of going to taguig to hand in my entry. omeng
didn’t want to bother with looking for the new palanca office in
taguig, so he mailed his entry and forgot to send his cv with it. it
was sometime july that he received a call from the palanca people
asking him to send them his cv asap.

what makes me glad we won,
aside from the obvious reasons, is that omeng and i go a long way back.
we’ve known each other since we were undergraduates in up diliman. we
worked together in the college of arts and letters student council. in
1997 i was chair and omeng was the filipino department representative.
we didn’t get along quite well then because i think he found me too
apolitical and frivolous. haha. who would have thought that through the
years we’d develop a friendship and, ten years after graduation, end up
at sarah’s on a rainy saturday night to drink and plan outfits for the
palancas.

congrats, omeng!