When the Lights go Out

On a Saturday night I was meant to do some organizing, some cleaning, some writing and some reading. I was also looking forward to watching SNL, as I knew that Ben Affleck was hosting and he’s usually pretty great and that John McCain himself was going to make an appearance. As a side note to John: Do you really think it’s appropriate to be appearing on a comedy sketch show when you should be addressing the people of this country? I mean first Sarah Palin and now you? Cut the gimmicks. If this didn’t make it clear that the McCain-Palin ticket is literally on a bridge to nowhere, I don’t know what will.

Anyway, now that I’ve gotten that obligatory message out of the way, let me tell you what happened to hinder my plans. I was almost finished watching my newest favorite show, “Stylista,” and drinking tea when the unthinkable happened. The electricity went out. I panicked. Jason, one of the wannabe junior fashion editors had just has a nervous breakdown coupled with a panic attack that led to an ambulance hauling him away from the Elle headquarters. I was waiting to see what Anne Slowey, Elle’s fashion news director and Anna Wintour wannabe (noticed the to n’s in both their names, ha!) had to say about all this hulabaloo, but the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had other plans for me.

It seems like this city cannot handle weather below 75 degrees. Can. not. compute. The rain that came down yesterday (and trust me, it was just a smidgen, coupled with some thunder) apparently wreaked enough havoc on L.A that power lines were down and for five hours, I sat in the dark, bored to death.

After half an hour of waiting, I called DWP to report the outage and was connected with a operator who told me they knew of the problem and that crews were on their way to repair it, whatever it was, she didn’t know, but she estimated that the time of restoration would be 7:30 a.m. the next day. Oh dear God.

At first, I thought, this is going to be so fun! I can light candles! Then, when we ran out of candles to light, boredom began to set in. There was absolutely nothing to do. I began to wonder how people lived centuries ago. I am telling you right now, I am all for going back to a simpler way of life, just as long as I can take my laptop along. I really can’t survive without it. This is not a joke. My world would crumble if I didn’t have it around. Stress would set in, I’d have anxiety attacks and then I’d eventually fall over and die.

At one point I got so bored that I started to play with wax and made a mess of the glass table. Oh well. Then, we decided to do a couple crosswords using a flashlight, and that only lasted about 45 minutes, because under the stress of having no electricity and trying to figure out the mysterious clues that are ever present in a New York magazine puzzle, I succumbed to a deep slumber on the couch, which led me to giving up hope that the lights would ever come back on and stumbling to bed.

Then, the minute I had fallen asleep, they decided to miraculously appear again! How convenient. By that time, I couldn’t function, so I went to sleep anyway. There goes another wasted Saturday night.