The Power Is... Not On

One of my favorite pep-myself-up-for-impending-doom songs is The Go! Team's "The Power is On." Despite the fact that a good portion of the lyrics are incomprehensible, I find the rhythm and energy of the song invigorating. And with the coming apocalypse -- be it a hard test or an all-nighter to write a paper -- who needs lyrics, anyway? Babel babel blah.

Today, I was reminded of "The Power is On" at about 4:00 p.m., when the all of the electrical appliances in my house decided to be anything but on. My computer tower emitted a mournful whine and turned itself off. Strange, I thought. Then it became very obvious that nothing in my house was functioning properly.

Turns out that I had witnessed the beginning of a power outage that lasted at least a quarter-hour. During this time, my dependence on electricity and electricity-hungry devices became astonishingly clear. No power meant no computer, no cable modem, no television. "Ha!" I thought. I had my laptop, which has a nice 9-cell battery. But as I looked for a wireless network on which to piggyback, I realized that the power outage was neighborhood-wide. No "NETGEAR," no "linksys" -- not even any annoyingly WEP-protected ones ("Anthem" -- not quite sure where they got this one).

So I turned to delightfully low-tech entertainment. I decided to read a book. I picked up Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, flipped to the first short story ("A Temporary Matter"), and started reading:

The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight p.m. A line had gone down in the last snowstorm....

Talk about verisimilitude.