[To Eat (Politely) or Not to Eat (Politely)]
by YBLalat

All day long I have barricaded myself within my humble basement-level abode, seeking the kind refuge of the air-conditioner from the scorching heat outside. Tucked nicely in my roommate’s stolen airline blanket, my eyes perused through the latest edition of The Atlantic magazine, enjoying Mark Twain’s most recently unpublished novelette ‘A Murder, a Mystery and a Marriage’. Halfway through the piece, my consciousness succumbed to the seduction of tranquil repose and it explored on into an escapade world of Freudian humor and mismatched high school lovers. In other words, I fell asleep and had a bizarre dream, okay?

That’s basically the whole agenda of the day. I didn’t do much other than that mentioned above. I am still in my joyous mood of celebrating the handing in of my first (of three) writing assignment. Hurrah! Feeling relieved of a trivial burden, I decided to do the mounting laundry. It is very rare of me to do the laundry in the middle of the week. Since I have the sufficient amount of quarters in hand and have got nothing else to do but lay around and watch reruns of the Jerry Springer Show; I convinced myself that doing laundry was the best chore to do next to nothing at all. I sung and dance to the tune of a Gap commercial in the celebration of a successful decision-making process all the way to the laundry room. Like a drunk Mary Poppins, I did that and in a jiffy, I was back where I started: bored and hungry.

The second one was easy to solve. I ate last night’s leftovers after re-heating them in the microwave. A combination of half-frozen chicken curry with the slight twist of my breakfast’s tuna salad dressing added to it a pinch of fried onions and Indonesian chili sauce; all eaten with rice in a bowl. The microwave heated only the upper part of the bowl and this left the lower part as cold as the curry was when it was in the fridge. "How weird this is", I remember telling myself. I heated it again longer the second time and still the lower part of the bowl stayed cold as it was before. Desperately wanting, I poured in hot water into the bowl (not many, just enough to submerge it) and waited for the bowl’s temperature to equalize itself to that of the hot water.

This was the daily application of the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics, my fellow scholars. At last, I have found the benefits of going to my Physical Chemistry class. Never again would I make fun of my Italian lecturer’s eccentric accent!

About a few minutes later, I got out of the restroom ferociously like a cowboy out of a bar, finishing the daily shaving of my luscious moustache [rubs own moustache while smiling] and bopped to the kitchen as if on cue to a jazz trumpeter’s blow. To my amazement, the bowl was ready to be served: its color was red and green and yellow, its smell was spicy and tangy and sweet and its presence there in the room would make heads of kings and queens turn. Oh, you did it again! You did it again! You are so good with fixing up meals out of nothing. You are the epitome of crisis cooking; you are the paragon of bachelor homemade meals. Oh, if only they could see you now, with all your glory and fame among the bottles of ketchup and seasonings and knives and forks and pots!

[Cough] Let me say that I was really proud of myself then [Cough].

Apprehensively, I took a gentle but guilty sniff out of the bowl’s jumbled up concoction, with both my hands caressing the curvaceous sides of it so lovingly, with my head still not believing the miracle of God that had happened to my makeshift lunch. The smell grabbed me by the neck. Oh the smell! The odor of the fried onions and the sight of the floating chicken drumstick still haunt me now as I write to you this wonder of cookery. Oh, please do not force me to rush! They were lying there like a lover’s thigh on a bed filled with red roses: tantalizing and sensuous. The warmth of the food comforted my cold and crass fingers. How they long for the affection of a warm touch. I sensed the rush of a raging army deep within each blood vessel, marching to the beat of the heart towards the palace of taste. My lips were wet from drool. My stomach churns the anthem of survival. My appetite has been aroused.

"Here I come, baby!"

Slurp by slurp and bite by bite, I ravaged the purity of the bowl and forcing its beauty and innocence to the raucous mouth and the savage lips. Licking and kissing and poking and throbbing, my tongue had the mind of its own. I was drunk with the food’s pleasure and driven by the lust of such a tasty meal. The vegetables I bite them to the smallest pieces and the chicken and the potatoes I munched them until a gooey pulp of saliva and rice flowed incessantly from the edge of my mouth. My face was literally inside the bowl, rubbing my nose against the wet walls of it, not letting the minute pieces of food escaping the molestation of my throat. The cheeks and the eyelids were soiled with gravy and the shirt and the pants were stained with drips of spit. As the bowl became emptier, my appetite became more uncontrollable like the animal that it is. Roars and grunts of hunger and of the burning desire of wanting more and more echoed the room to a horrific effect. If the birds were to hear them in their nests, they might have flown to the farthest corners of the sky, vowing not to return, not to return.

Then, there entered silence with a gust of cold breeze from the air-conditioner. Petrified, time stopped as it felt the impending thumping of a great big entity. The world looked around to see this mighty character. From the deep bottomless pit of the stomach comes a thunderous bellow of ease, forcing its hideous and foul being through the crooked path of the throat and from the tip of the tongue, it jumped to a great big presence of vanity.

"Burp! Alhamdulillah"

Then I cordially solved the first problem of today with the main agenda I stated in the first paragraph of this post and the cycle repeated itself until somebody woke me up to the call of The Simpsons on TV.