If It Ain't Broke...Never Mind. It's Broke.

How's this for a silver lining:
Everything I own is currently broken, so there's nothing else to worry about.

Okay, maybe not everything. But my truck and our air conditioner walked off into the sunset together a couple of days ago; and last night I came home to find that we had no water. It was a balmy 1,000 degrees in the house, we were out of ice AND beer, and our water was shut off by the city because the previous owners failed to pay their final bill.

The first thing I did this morning is haul my sweaty self down to the City Hall and stinkily inquire as to the status of my water service. Whoops! We shut off the wrong people!

It took less than 10 minutes for the guys to come back out and turn it back on, but I had visions of retribution dancing merrily in my head. Perhaps something from the artillery group. Where does a person even get a Howitzer around here, anyway? And does it come with instructions?

Is there anything crankier than a girlfriend with no air conditioning? How about a girlfriend with no air conditioning AND no shower! If my girlfriend dumps me in a fit of hysterical hyperthermia, I'm coming after YOU, Ms. Water Department Lady! As soon as I read the Howitzer manual, you're going down!

But things are looking up. The A/C man will be here with the new blower motor soon, the water is flowing freely, and I'm steeling myself up for the truck project. And tonight I get to make another run at the burn pile, and nothing cheers me up like a nice conflagration.

And I'm on vacation until Monday. By then I ought to have spent enough time puttering around in the yard to have restored myself to the state of zen-like serenity that I'm so famous for. By then I think it'll be safe for the Water Department Lady to check out of the witness protection program. Maybe.

Water

Once again, we owe a debt of gratitude (and the monthly service fee) to NetFlix for delivering the gift of "Water" right to our door. It's a beautiful film, cinematically, and it will touch your heart. Even though you'll need a tissue or several at the end, we recommend it wholeheartedly.

An Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Film, "Water" deals with the life of forced self-denial that awaits Indian widows, from the perspective of Shuiya, widowed at 8 years old and doomed to spend the remainder of her days in a "widow house." There, she's befriended by the elderly women and the young, beautiful widow Kalyani who has been turned into a prostitute by the mean, nasty, evil, greedy Didi Madhu who runs the ashram/brothel.

The film winds the story of the widows around the story of colonial India in 1938, as Mohandas Gandhi is opening the eyes of the world to the dream of freedom for India, the widows are opening their eyes to the dream of freedom for themselves. These dreams come together at the point in the film where a holy man tells one of the widows that the law would allow women to remarry and leave the life of self-denial and shame, but "we don't pay attention to the laws that don't suit us."

As always, when we watch films that illuminate the dark, hidden places in cultures far from ours, the most shocking moment is found at the end of the film, when we learn how little has changed between the promise of freedom in 1938 and the reality of life for the Indian widows today.

Rent this film. You'll be happy ... and sad ... and happy again ... and enlightened.

Kwach