I have hot water again. The water heater in my apartment completely shit the bed on me this past Thursday and I have been living like Bear Grylls up until noon today. My landlord is awesome and I’m pretty sure he thinks the same of me too, and he was right on top of his game with getting me some steamy H2O. The girls living upstairs were the first to bitch about it. I realized that there was no hot water on Thursday, so I climbed back into the hellish nook where the water heater dwells and I thoroughly read the label on the side of the thing. Then I turned off the pilot (aka flame) and restarted it. I then took a cold shower expecting that I would have hot water after I returned home from work and one act rehearsal. When I checked in the morning the water was still colder than the shadows of hell.
Jerry, my landlord, came over to check on it Friday. He had zero fucking clues as to what to do about it. I crawled back into the dingy nook and restarted the water heater right in front of him and he looked at me with amazement as if he were a child at a magic show. On Saturday he sent over two plumbers that banged around on some shit with sticks or tipped something over and then they left. I had hot water for about an hour and then about 2 minutes into a shower it went cold again. My water heater was being a slutty cock tease by giving me random seconds of warmth in the shower but overall it was ultimately cold. I was angry.

Sunday was Easter, so what the fuck? I wasn’t going to bother Jerry with fixing my water heater on Easter. That’s the day that a giant rabbit hides pastel colored chicken eggs and families eat preserved ham together in celebration of Jesus Christ becoming a zombie, and I’m not the kind of asshole to disturb a party as awesome as that. So Jerry sent over a plumber this Monday morning and the guy showed up at about 8:45 AM, which is early in my book. I answered the door shirtless with my guns out of their holsters and let him in. He was holding a piece of cardboard and a drill. After ten minutes of hearing him drill and it sounded like he tipped something over again, he said he was done. He left with his drill but he wasn’t holding the piece of cardboard anymore. As soon as the door closed behind him I immediately ran to the water cranny to scope out the heater. I have no idea where that piece of cardboard went but I now have a seemingly endless supply of hot water. Apparently Jerry didn’t send me a plumber to fix the heater, he sent me a wizard.

Bitching about my water heater is what I call a “first world problem”. There are people in second, third, and fourth world countries that have far worse problems than not having hot water for a few days. I do know the definitions of second, third, and fourth world countries but I’m not going into that shit here. Right now at this very moment there is someone in this world experiencing the greatest love, the greatest feeling of his or her life. And at the same time there is someone experiencing the most horrible and unimaginable suffering that will unfairly lead to his or her death at this moment as well. And nothing I do will have any effect on any of those people. Yet here I am bitching about hot water. Right now I am sitting in my semi-comfortable half ass Lazy Boy sipping on some over priced yuppie Pinot Grigio that my brother didn’t take back to Denver with him. I need to go to bed early enough that I can wake up and go to a college acting class tomorrow, go to work, and then have enough energy to go to a play rehearsal at night. The problems that my friends and I complain about are nothing compared to the majority of the people that are suffering throughout the world. Anyway, I’m getting far to drunk and dreary to process this right now, so I’m going to sleep on my lumpy mattress that I bought in Miami for $500 and think about my petty problems. I’ll have to write more about this tomorrow night before I drink too much.