The house party at Tara's pushed through last night.

I haven't been there in three years and it manifested in how sloppy I was in pinpointing the location of their compound. Getting there was no hardship, it was just that I no longer remembered which white gate was theirs.

When I got there, we pretty much started watching movies. Zeri (who is surprisingly now the girlfriend of Tara's brother Mikey) had slept over, while her sister Zaillah was shuffling the DVD wallets for stuff to watch. Rachel and Tara were doing their post-defense thesis paper with Roman, who had brought along his friend and my batchmate Anton Halagueña (I can't believe how thin he is now). Leia was absent as she was in Hong Kong for 4 days. Kate, Catcat and Denise were absent too. Chabeli and Mao came along and brought nachos and donuts, but ultimately had to leave early at midnight---as Rachel would say, "How sad!" Tantan in contrast arrived at 12:30 am and seemed to go to Tara's just to get some sleep.

We watched "The Pacifier," their thesis film "Simbuyo," and "The Machinist" with a shockingly thin Christian Bale. I brought along some pancit Malabon for chow, which everyone seemed to enjoy. Tantan's cake and Mao's nachos were equally well received too.

Ultimately I thought the house party was boring and a bit of a disappointment, mostly because people left too damn early and not enough of us was around. If there had to be one highlight of the evening though, it was poker.

We played No-limit Hold'em for much of the evening. I first played with Anton and Mikey because we seemed to be the only ones who had experience. Later, after Roman and Anton left, Zeri, Tara and Rachel were interested and so we went at it, and the girls picked up the game quite quickly. After that, Mikey, Rachel and I were the last players.

I kept on winning. It's funny how often I was winning. I was actually getting sick of it, either having good cards very often, or acting on a good bluff---and I'm not kidding. It took Mikey's cards and my voluntarily going all in on a really worthless hand for me to lose and stop playing because I was getting pretty sleepy by 3am. After an hour of trying to sleep and 30 minutes of actual shut-eye, I decided to go home.

It was a nice party, but ultimately it felt a bit hollow. I was disappointed that now that I was finally able to go, not enough people were present. Oh well. That's that.