Roughing it.

As I was taking a shower last night, after a particularly humid run, the power went out. Sure, I was running my A/C while having a few lights on, but I didn't think I could have overloaded the fuse (is that even the proper terminology? See, this is how often things like this happen to me). I then realized that, perhaps I had run out of electricity.

"Run out of electricity," you say? "What, like one goes to a supermarket or a poorly-lit alley and buys a sack of electricity?"

No, no. Instead, in this magical land, one puts money onto a "power stick," which looks like a jump drive, and then plugs it into a power box in one's apartment to "recharge" the electricity meter. One goes to a special bank to do this. Photos to follow.

After discussing with my boss this possibility (after trying all other logical options), we decided this was probably the case. Of course, nothing could be done about it at 7:00PM on a Friday night, so I spent the evening in darkness (and at Starbucks, where I am currently for reasons which will become known below).

This morning, I picked up a new stick for my electricity box from school. But, of course, each box has its own stick, and this mysterious stick I was given belonged to someone else's box. So, that was a wasted trip for me and, later, the repair person from my school. Finally, magically, my landlady came over and gave me the real stick (after I wrote out a makeshift contract expressing that I now had possession of the stick). We put it into the box, and the power came on. Apparently the fuse had blown, and one needs to put the stick into the power box to replace the fuse or something.

I hate that I often feel like I can't be trusted with things. Like, the electricity stick for my box, so that I can have electricity after I blow a fuse. So much information has been parsed out to me sparingly and infrequently, as if knowing everything at once would either be too much for my feeble brain, or give me too much freedom to live like a normal adult.

Whatever the case, I had no electricity for 24 hours. And I'm cranky. And I've been stood up for dinner this evening. And I also have no internet right now because my modem is broken (I spent another hour on the phone with the Internet people, trying to get them to come to my house and fix it, to no avail) (and there's no information on the internet to tell me what to do to fix it).

What a waste of a weekend. Oh well--I still have 45 left or something. And I'm hanging out with my favorite students tomorrow, so it'll end on a middle note.