Back To Basic

There is a time in one’s life when one ends up with a group of people who become more than just friends or org mates or officemates. Usually this is the time when one is still trying to find oneself post-college, when one engages the world and finds out that the theories in school do not look at all like the realities one encounters every day.

But then these people come along. You end up touching each other’s live so much you actually become family. You may not even realize it at that time. But you do sense that there is something more going on, that one day, when your lives diverge, you will look back at those days, with those people, and remember only the hilarious, the crazy, the bizarre—and marvel at how much you’ve grown so much because of them.

I was lucky to have had two: my Tanghalang Ateneo org mates, and East Division of Basic Advertising.

I was lucky to get into advertising, luckier still that I got into Basic. Advertising didn’t feel like work; it felt more like a sitcom. You had a crazy, noisy, gossipy group of talented individuals who weren’t pushovers except in their love lives, which were usually tumultuous and contained more revisions than a print ad with vague directions. We had impossible deadlines. We had brownouts. We had drama. We had an unfortunate photocopy machine that bore the brunt of an account supervisor’s rage. We had profit sharing. We had 19 months pay (shet, I wasn’t in Basic yet when they had 21 months pay). We had wins. We had losses. We had births, and we had deaths.

And we all eventually moved on.

Some have become award-winning directors. Some have become heads of agencies themselves. Others went into other fields, related or far removed from advertising.

Tonight for the first time ever, we are having a major reunion. It feels more like coming home.