What Do You Do When Things Go Wrong?

I just washed my hands with Evian!

There is no water in my apartment. Over the holiday weekend, while we and our downstairs neighbors were out of town, the water heater in our flat decided to give up the ghost and leak hot water into the apartment below ours. The good news is that though the water destroyed part of the ceiling, it largely leaked into a shower and went right down the drain. The bad news is that the woman downstairs did not see the fortunate part of this and returned our apologies with insults.

In an unrelated incident, the batteries in our rechargeable cordless phones are all dying at once, so when the plumber called back, the phone I used to answer his call went dead as soon as I started to speak.

I grabbed my cell phone, though The World Health Organization says it could cause cancer, and called him back. I got his answering service. He is in New York. I am in New York When did all the plumbers in the United States decide to hire an answering service in Virginia?

“Screw it. I will ignore all this tsouris, and write my blog,” I said to myself. I had such a great topic. I was going to call it “Creating False Identities.” It was to be based on a favorite Radio Lab broadcast that posited that we get our whole sense of identity from the stories we tell about ourselves. So I tried to log on to the Radio Lab website to listen to the podcast once more—to be sure I had my facts straight. But the Radio Lab website must have crashed because it gave error messages no matter how I try to access it.

Now I am going to take a dance class that is supposed to reduce my stress. If the sound system goes down, I am going to bed until the gremlins get tired of listening to me snore and go torture someone else.

Picture of Annamaria's Nerve Endings

Wish me luck. See you next week.

Annamaria Alfieri