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The prospect of sleeping tonight is again a dismal thought to ponder.

While power is restored to more than 80% of Meralco’s customers, sadly our little abode located in an apartment compound belongs to the 20% who still have yet to taste again the benefits of electricity.

Since Thursday, our little apartment is blanketed in gloom as power has not yet been returned even though most of the establishments on our street – my former office, the web services firm, the studio, the film editing agency, the open garage, and a couple of residences – already have had electricity back since Sunday noon.

Dialling 16211, the Meralco hotline, is to no avail. After about 20 minutes or so of receiving “Sorry, all lines are busy now” messages, you get into the PABX cue where they treat you to non-stop playing of their corporate jingle -- … mas masaya, mas maganda ‘pag may liwanag ang buhay … Then after 20 more minutes of the sickening jingle (the jingle’s good, but when you listen to it for something like 30 times while enduring heat, anxiety, and hopelessness, it does get sickening), interspersed with “All our customer service representatives are busy entertaining other calls. Please hold or call later …”, you get in touch with a real person on the other end of the line who tells you that they’ve received your complaints, your report, your plea and that she has forwarded it to their Ortigas office to be cued. No promise of when they can attend to it … no idea of when you will get power back.

For the past five nights, I’ve been sleeping badly. I wake up every several hours or so because of the heat and because I’m sweaty all over. Not only that, my side of the bed is also drenched, not to mention foul-smelling, because of the gallons of sweat I’ve poured onto it. Changing sheets is not practical as well because I’ll only end up soaking the new one in just a night.

Last night, I think I slept sitting up for over an hour just to give time for my side of the bed to dry up a bit. After this blackout episode, I believe our bed deserves a sunbathing.

Forget the weekend. It was a waste as I wasn’t able to do anything substantial. The only highlight of the weekend was when my wife and I went to the malls to pass away the humid afternoon only to find out upon reaching home that power had been restored on our street except in our apartment.

Laundry remained unlaundered because water pressure wasn’t strong enough. What water came out of the tap was saved for other purposes. In fact, out of need, I stayed until midnight last night washing some of my clothes because I literally had nothing left to wear.

Since Sunday, I’ve been wearing un-ironed clothes. Yesterday and today I managed to get by because I still had some passable clothes that somehow showed little trace of wrinkles and crinkles. Tomorrow, I’ve got no more ironed clothes. What a great prospect to look forward to.

Storing food has also been a problem. For three straight days we had adobo. While adobo is one of my favorites, I think making it a staple viand for three days is ridiculous. But left with no choice, adobo is just one of those dishes that can last several days without need of refrigeration.

No power, no cold drinks, not even cold water. Our water refilling station was also powerless for several days and as a result they were not able to fulfill their refilling obligations. We had to boil kettles upon kettles of tap water, cool these overnight and use them as drinking water.

While I was able to play the guitar these past few days (which resulted in new calluses), I already miss watching TV and using my computer. In the evenings, I had to content myself with plugging earphones and listening to the radio via my old Aiwa walkman.

Reading has also been a problem. While eating under candle lights is fine, reading is not. And reporting to the office for the past two days has resulted in my eyes getting hurt. Being used in the dark for the past several days, it has been a strain to my eyes to perpetually be glued to a monitor screen. My eyes have been red all day long.

But the worst idea of still not having power back is sleeping.

Eh kasi walang kuryente, brownout, walang kuryente,
Wala, wala, walang kuryente … wala, walang kuryente,

Eh kasi walang kuryente, blackout, walang kuryente
Wala, wala, wala, wala, WALA!!!

- lifted from the song Kaka by Yano from the self-titled album released in 1994