Finding "the one" in (cyber)Promised Land

The Promised Land seemed so near—an MRT ride and a hundred or so steps away from our Mandaluyong office. Initially, I wasn’t sure if it held what it seemed to promise for me but I was hopeful. There was bound to be “the one” for me somehow. You see, it was my first time to buy a brand new computer, a laptop, and a thousand butterflies were dancing in my stomach.

My six-footer technical guru Aleks (who multitasks and acts as my voice coach and pianist in some instances) and I trekked to Cyberzone in SM Megamall. It was a Friday night and there was a midnight sale ongoing. We expected the two-kilometer mall to be bursting at the seams. Thankfully, we arrived before the people frenzy began.

All I wanted was for it to be white. I didn’t care if it had an expandable memory or if it could write DVDs or if it could accommodate multiple USB ports. Sounds Greek to me, really. Call me simplistic, or better yet, call me naïve who is fixated on a color [At least I still had enough sense to ask somebody else to act as my common sense!]. Aleks would laugh at me when he would see me obliviously walking past the non-white laptops which didn’t deserve a nanosecond of my time. In retrospect, it was like me looking for shoes: “I need brown shoes,” which eliminates all the other hues in the color spectrum. Going back to the laptop, we finally found the one I liked—a Taiwan-made Twinhead 12.1” notebook with features that seem excellent for its price. And needless to say but I’ll say it anyway: It’s white, shiny pearl white. I’m one happy camper.

Over dinner, Aleks asks me what name I’ll give my newly-purchased gadget. I laugh and answer, “I haven’t named any of my things before.” But then again, why not? I’ll be spending days and nights with this piece of machine I might as well humanize it. “Do you want it to be a boy or a girl?” he asks. “A boy,” I answer. I mull it over and after a quick trip to the restroom I confidently state my laptop’s name: “April Boy.” With a silly grin on my face I explain, “Well, it’s a boy and I bought it in the month of April.”

And so the next time I hear “Di Ko Kayang Tanggapin” over the radio, you know why I’ll be smiling.