The Importance of Plastic Rings on Circuit-Breaker Boxes

Some creep opened my circuit-breaker box outside at 7:00 p.m. last night and shut off my electricity. I looked outside and saw that the electricity was still on at all the neighboring apartments and knew instantly that was what had happened, because it happened once before. I dialed the emergency pager number of the apartment complex maintenance guy, and paged him three times, but he never called back. So I decided to take matters into my own hands, except that I didn't know exactly where my circuit-breaker box was, so I had to hunt around for my flashlight (which took a while) and then fumble around in the bushes outside looking for a box. Eventually I found a box that looked like it might have a circuit-breaker behind it, but it was bolted closed and I didn't have the right size pliers. So I got in the car and drove to buy pliers, and also new flashlight batteries in case I didn't succeed in getting the electricity back on for a while, and also a great big new French Vanilla scented candle as extra backup lighting - oh yes, and a big packet of matches; I finally figured out which grocery store aisle the matches are in. Then I went home and unbolted the box - but it turned out to be a telephone box, not a circuit-breaker box, so that was no help at all. I re-bolted it and circled my building twice with a flashlight searching for any other box that might potentially have a circuit-breaker behind it, but I couldn't find a thing. Eventually I went back inside and resigned myself to a night of reading by flashlight.

My apartment complex is not known for having its rental office open very often, so I was afraid they'd be closed for Martin Luther King Day today, and I foresaw another 24 hours of calling the emergency pager number and getting no response. But by some miracle the rental office was actually open this morning, and the repair guy even happened to be in there, and when I said my electricity was off, he said yes, someone went around last night shutting it off at random apartments throughout the complex. He showed me where my circuit-breaker box is, so in the future I can correct the problem myself - but I also see why mine was chosen to be shut off, because there's a group of four boxes there and the other three all have little clear plastic rings around the closures so that you can't open the box unless you cut through the ring first, which can't be done with bare hands. My box has no ring on it, which makes it the most convenient one to open up and shut off.

I just spent 15 and a half hours with no electricity, all because I don't have a simple one-inch long ring of clear plastic around my circuit-breaker box. The universe has revealed to me today that a plastic ring is the key to achieving all peace in life. I want a plastic ring.

Survey Fun!

My Idea Of Hell
*On the radio: Mariah Carey and Celine Dion.
*On the TV: I don't know; I don't turn on my TV often enough to know what bad programs are there.
*On the VCR: Arnold Schwarzenegger.
*Your spouse/partner: Any of the Symbionese Liberation Army members who kidnapped Patty Hearst and kept her locked in a closet for two months while they raped her and told her she was consenting to it and yelled at her every two minutes that she'd better not dare to even think anything bad about them because they didn't want the FBI to be able to pick up any "negative emotional vibes" in the air that might supposedly enable them to track her down.
*Your dinner: Spinach, green beans, anything green at all.
*Your clothes: Grey, black, brown, or hideously clashing colors; V-necks; stupid teenage-girl-trying-desperately-to-keep-up-with-the-latest-fads designs; skirts too tight to walk in, or which tear into pieces when I insist upon taking long strides in them; shoes with no arch supports (OOUCHHH!!!), and not being allowed to wear a watch.
*Your hair: A horrible gigantic tangled mess with angry stinging insects trapped in it.
*Your library: Completely empty.
*Your dwelling: Muddy-floored, freezing cold and covered with a wide variety of exotic bugs I don't recognize.
*Your neighborhood: A bunch of people who HATE me with intense passion.
*Your job: They'd offer me an extremely high-paying jobs as a gas oven cook at Auschwitz, but I'd betray them so they'd just have to make me a prisoner there, and refuse to kill me.
*Having a conversation with: A bunch of religious fanatics.

My Idea of Heaven
*On the radio: The same stuff I play on my CD player already.
*On the TV: Take everybody I know online, give them all their own TV stations and an infinite amount of time and money to make any kind of shows they're inspired to make.
*On the VCR: Just give me the time and money to write and fund some films of my own.
*Your spouse/partner: Somebody exactly like me, except with a library full of extra information in their head that I don't have, so I can learn something new from them all the time.
*Your dinner: An endless supply of chocolate eclairs. And yeah, occasional other things when I need variety. Lots of bread and cereal and fruit.
*Your clothes: Long brightly colored dresses with huge circle skirts and square-cut necklines. Oh, and the fabric needs to be virtually intangible, because I hatee how the textures of most fabrics irritate my skin.
*Your hair: Exactly the way it is when it's just dried after being washed. Except I'd like it to grow about three feet longer.
*Your library: The Library of Congress.
*Your dwelling: The Library of Congress, with meals and all other necessary supplies special-delivered to the front door so I never have to go shopping.
*Your neighborhood: I don't care, because I'm unlikely to leave the Library of Congress more than once or twice a year.
*Your job: None. I'll just do whatever I'm inspired to do and get money automatically.
*Having a conversation with: The same people I already have conversations with.

Last Things
LAST TIME YOU KISSED SOMEONE? December 1997.
LAST TIME YOU HUGGED SOMEONE? I don't know. It's probably been somewhere between six months and two years.
LAST THING YOU READ? The Broken Bridge, by Philip Pullman.
LAST MOVIE YOU SAW ON THE BIG SCREEN? Ummmmm . . . . it's been at least four or five years since then. It was probably the last Star Trek movie that came out. Whatever it was called.
LAST PHONE NUMBER YOU CALLED? The emergency pager number for my apartment complex maintenance guy.
LAST SHOW YOU WATCHED ON TV? Enterprise.
LAST SONG YOU HEARD? Hmm. The last one I remember is "How You Remind Me" by Nickelback.
LAST THING YOU HAD TO DRINK? Tampico "Orange Mango Tangerine" flavored punch.
LAST THING YOU ATE? Chocolate eclairs.

No Labels, No Limits?

I find it ironic - not to mention depressing - that the RainbowNetwork.com website, which advertises itself in its title line as "Rainbow Network.com - No labels, no limits," divides its member sections into compartments labeled "men's room" and "dyke's domain," offering no section at all whose labels are sufficiently unlimited to make me (as a bisexual who does not identify with the label "dyke" and does not wish to be gender-segregated) feel at all included.

Cardboard Cutout People and the Nature of My Relationships with Toasters

I hate that habit that food has of spoiling when the electricity goes out.

But while I was out gathering new food, I also bought myself a nice submissive new toaster, one that agrees with all my own decisions about how long bread should be toasted for.

Never let it be said, though, that I never make any compromises to try to save a relationship. I had been putting up with the bossy old toaster's decision-making for most of a year.

Oh, and this delighted me so much that it needs to be shared:

"you know those life-size cardboard cutouts of people that they put up in stores sometimes? i -hate- those things. argh. i was just at the grocery store, and they had one up.. and you know how it is.. i come up from behind it, so all i see is a brown cardboard thing which doesn't register in my mind as anything, then i turn around and AHHRGH, a shiny two-dimensional stalker person!! it scared me. i always think they're real people who have snuck up on me before i realize that they're those damned cardboard things. and the non-cardboard people in the grocery store looked at me funny when i told the cutout girl that i hated her nonexistant guts. bah."
from the journal of groovycat, whose birthday is today

P.S. (after obeying the microwave) Don't you just hate it when you walk outside in the rain and a huge giant puddle of water which had been collecting on the leaf of a tree above you suddenly reaches the weight required to bend the leaf and slide off, and it somehow manages to fall right into the tiny space between your glasses and your face and glops wetly right into your left eye?