Sunday

Sometimes there are little electrical blackouts around this city. I see them happen out the windows. I barely notice them in the house, though. I'm surprised they don't happen more often than they do. You might be surprised too, if you were to see the tangled and impromptu surreality of dubious electrical madness scribbled between the feeble-looking short iron towers lining these sidewalks. Picture it like this: it's as if the second floor of all Saigon has been sloppily underlined in black marker by a particularly aggressive inmate. When there's a scooter accident, say, or a fallen construction crane,* or maybe just a gecko at the wrong time and place, a couple blocks might go dark for a while. I'm certain the city twinkles in this way. In our apartment, when the power fades, back-up generators make it hardly noticeable. It's been happening more lately. Sometimes the lights will dim for a second, but power returns almost immediately without any extra complication. Our internet suffers, however. When the power goes out on the provider's end, my internet goes out too. When the power is coming and going on our block, the internet often never manages to connect the five minutes in a row necessary to navigate its series of protocols. So even though I have power, I’m unable to get online. What does this have to do with the long and engrossing book I read this weekend? Well, usually, I have no trouble just waiting a lapsed connection out. But this weekend I was distracted. Whenever I checked on the blinking router lights and saw that I couldn't connect, well, I went back to reading for another five hours. Apparently, these two things never harmoniously aligned, because I was unable to ever even post this Update until today. [Cavin]