Wifi, bumming, green-rice-and-shiomai, and Virgin Labfest V

I became aware of  a very funny thing this morning when I was in my usual contemplative, almost trance-like state doing my routine morning writing exercise. I’ve been rambling about the world lying supine on the stairway, my laptop on top of my belly. And I only realized I was in this unflattering pose when my housemate arrived from his night shift work at a call center company located in a building nearby. He reminded me that I looked like I’ve been raped by 10 devils. His use of that hyperbole was too much, but the way I look might have been something close to that. I’ve been doing my writing in all the parts of the house depending on the location of available sources of wifi signals.

I am too tired to walk to the mall across EDSA to avail of the free wifi connection. The thought of using the very slow elevator down to the ground floor, bumping on people who are waiting for buses going to Baclaran or Ayala in front the building, climbing up the steep stairs going to Boni MRT station, then dodging the aggressively pushy real estates agents who are distributing badly written leaflets and selling units in a condominium yet to be built on a vacant lot adjacent Robinsons Pioneer is already too discouraging. Instead, I stayed inside my room and waited for divine providence to shower me with a wifi connection faster than 5.5 mbps.

I feel like I am already starting to master the art of bumming with grace and perfection. I steamed the rice and shark’s fin shiomai I bought last night for dinner but which I totally forgot because I was too tired from my whole day work and my travel to Cubao for a talk with a professor who was supposed to help me in my graduate school application but then called to postpone the meeting while I was already inside the train in Ortigas. When I arrived home, I collapsed to my bed and slept like a dead man.

So here I am eating a goosebumps-inducing green colored rice that is as tough as dried coagulated blood that forms just outside a wound we collected with so much gusto when we were seven years old, and the shiomai that tastes like rubber drenched in oil.

But not everything is lost to bumming and the chilling green-rice-and shiomai boxed inside a purple polystyrene.

At least I have Garcia-Marquez to entertain me and divert my attention from my troubling food to a love story that is a bit popish but is a truly evocative romantic love story that unfailingly provides generous literary visions in every line. I am reading the saga of love involving three interesting characters – Fermina Daza, Florentino Ariza and Dr. Juvenal Urbino – set during a time of cholera.

My review of the three plays in the recently concluded Virgin Labfest 5 is one of the honorable mention in the competition organized by Gibbs Cadiz, a theater reviewer for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. My attempts paid off as I will be receiving an anthology of essays as prize. I watched four sets out of five, and the Virgin Labfest was a good venue to introduce myself to the theater which I never really though that it could be that fun.

Now I need to continue eating lunch. Lose some, win some.