malae bulak

See, I almost burned my house down on Monday night. In a fit of divine retribution reminiscent of scenes from a bad horror movie, I leave my room (newly painted, much slaved-over room that requires a different, and much less interesting story) to get a cold cheese sandwich (mmm, dinner) and return to watch my curtains, chair and Dad's stolen button-down (sorry about that, Dad) go up in flames. Yes, IN FLAMES.

Ok, I guess I need to give a bit of a backstory here. Dili is a city that doesn't quite run well enough to have constant electricity. Thus, the more remote parts, and the part where the less affluent live, aka where I live, are usually without power for at least some portion of the day. If ema boot (lit. big people) have their power go out they complain to their friends in political power and the power gets, ahem, rerouted. Trust me, this is as good as it gets here. Anyways, our neighborhood has the unfortunate timeslot of 7-9 pm . . .as in the time when I am actually home and wanting a bit of R&R and maybe a hot cheese sandwich instead of a cold one . . . and thus I have begun the laborious task of finding candleholders in this massive city. When I say they are hard to come by, I am only half-lying. I could easily find ones in pastel flower-shapes, but so far my standards haven't sunk quite that low yet. So, having created a nice array of candles, I come home one night to no power, light my candles as normal, and wander to my lovely cheese sandwich.

. . . and return to flames. Well, more specifically my house-mate noticed the flames and gave an admirable shriek. I put out the fire. Everything went back to normal but my nerves. Those went back to normal after I ejected from the house (and an ashy/soaked room) to hang in the local Australian ex-pat bar and did my personal fire-control with a beer and a scotch.

Now I wish I could say the story ended there. I wish it did, and it would have except for the most enormous bug I have ever seen, which happened to be a massive flying cockroach, that decided that after a house burned it was a perfect time to check out our bathroom. But whatever. Life sucked anyways, so I wasn't really all that surprised.

So, that's the story. I'm going to stop now without analysis, because really I don't give a damn anymore. Psychoanalysis is worthless here. I'm a freak anyways so it wouldn't really be worth a damn anyways. Well, I hope someone reads this and gets a kick out of it. I sure did (a beer and scotch later). Perhaps you will take pity on me. If you do, send me a decent scotch. That's harder to find here than a normal-looking candleholder.