Artificial Cheese

There’s nothing like a power outage to expose just how much we take things for granted; its even worse when it’s a daytime power outage because there is no darkness to constantly remind you that the power is out. At about 2:30pm today, Bucks County, Pa. experienced a power outage. As soon as it happened, it was as if an airplane turned off its engines in my basement. Who knew that there was so much ambient trash entering our ears? Its no wonder that I couldn’t learn French, my brain was busy filtering out humming 24 hours a day.

I was cooking at the time, and since our house has gas-powered stoves, I was acting like the power outage was never going to disturb my plans.

It was pasta I was cooking, and I realized that I didn’t go through my usual sauce warming routine. Once I drained the pasta, I poured some Bertolli’s Five Cheese sauce into a bowl and stuck it into the microwave. “Strange,” I thought, “there’s no clock on th…” I smacked myself in the head for even putting the bowl into the microwave and settled for room temperature pasta sauce.

I go to sit down at the table, grab the remote and start pressing buttons. Now I’m beginning to feel a bit mentally challenged, or like my sister puts it, “like a mouse eating electric cheese.” For those of you who don’t understand what that means, don’t worry.

So I ate my slightly warm pasta as I waited for the engine to turn back on and the beeping to commence. But it didn’t. Its times like this when checking the mail becomes entertainment. So I threw on my sandals and made my way outside, where the scattered tsunami had subsided.

As I stand in front of the mailbox, a nearby car’s engine turns on. I turned to see who was leaving, and I caught a glimpse of the headlights turning on. For a split second, even a microsecond, I was filled with excitement as I thought, “The power’s back!” I stood there for a few seconds and began to consider the fact that my disoriented powerless state was quickly becoming a liability.

As I walked slowly and carefully back to the house, I noticed that a few of my dad’s plants were tipped over and bleeding dirt. I quickly uprighted them and scooped as much dirt as I could back into the pot. When I was done, I instinctively wiped my hands on my t-shirt, which is stupid and has nothing to do with the power outage.

When I got inside my house, the first thing I did was run to the bathroom to wash my hands. I opened the door, flicked the switch, and turned on the water. Yeah, that’s right, I flicked the switch on. I even turned it off when I left. The disorientation continued as I briefly considered that the toilet wouldn’t flush due to the power outage.

As I was leaving the bathroom, I could hear a faint humming coming from down the hall. It wasn’t an airplane engine, but it sounded very attractive. I found that my laptop was still chugging along with 5 hours of sweet power left in the batteries. So I sat down and immediately clicked on the one thing that wouldn’t work, Internet Explorer. I can go on for days on my reliance on an Internet connection, but this sums it up pretty good.

If you need more proof of my confusion without the Internet, I started this blog entry with the unconfirmed assumption that I would be able to post it. But I can’t because the power is out. Sigh…I’m just going to crawl under my bed and hope this goes away.