A few days ago, my roommates and I were relaxing in our lovely four-bedroom flat, basking in the joy of college life in 21st century America, when the unthinkable happened.
You guessed it'the power went out.
OK, maybe that's not the whole truth. Maybe, just maybe, a George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine my roommate absolutely needed to use was the straw that blew the fuse's back.
Or maybe, just maybe, the Foreman only knocked power halfway out, and a certain Daily Cardinal columnist delivered the coup de grace, in a temporary fit of primitive selfishness, by plugging in an air conditioner and a computer into one of the remaining outlets.
Either way, I'm not here to point fingers.
The nut of the story is that we had no idea what to do. We called the rental company. As it was 7 p.m., we received no live audience. But there was hope, in the form of an emergency number listed right below the business number on the card of important numbers given to us by the rental company.
This was a big emergency. We called, and to our surprise were greeted by the same answering machine message. We looked at our important numbers and saw something offensive and damaging to our collective logic comprehension abilities. We looked from the business number to the emergency number a few times before we could right our thinking.
It was the same damn number.
Still shaken by our experience with the rental company, we attempted to locate the fuse box on our own. We found it, behind a locked door.
We could do nothing but sit on the couch and despair that the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, in concert with the fickle gods of grilling and portable air conditioning, had knocked out our power.
I felt like a caveman. I wanted to strip to my underwear and paint a buffalo on the side of the house.
Gone was TV. No ESPN Classic. No reruns of \Saturday Night Live."" No hilarious, lisping Lifetime Sex advice lady with her funny sex puppets and enormous double-headed dildos. All gone.
Gone was the computer. No funny Web sites. No pornography.
Everything was gone, and I can't explain how much I missed it. I was ashamed. I consider my roommates and myself intelligent guys. We should be able to sit down and make conversation or read.
But it's hard to make conversation when you aren't sure when the power is going to come back on. The stress of thinking about not having power overloaded our brains like so many burnt-out fuses.
I couldn't take a shower, lest I should go in there with a flashlight. I like showering, but I don't like to do a hard-target, bit-by-bit search of my entire frame.
So I gave up, and went and slept on a friend's couch. I took a smart, pretentious book just to make myself feel better, and after everyone else had gone to bed I laid awake reading.
What it is about electricity that makes me comfortable, even if I'm just laying on someone else's couch, reading by a lamplight equal to that of a flashlight? Maybe it's comforting to know that when there isn't much to say, our devices do the talking we never learned to do.
