Day 26 of One Zentangle a Day. Today’s tangles are…well, they are uninspiring. One (Poke Leaf) I picked up from an ebook a while back and have been using ever since; the other (Growth) is the author’s creation and uncomfortable to my hand, though I have tried to recreate it a number of times over the past two days. It should be easy, but I cannot attain the effect the author intends. It may not be that the tangle motifs are the problem. In fact, it is probably that I am having a day that is more off than usual. 

Picking through my mini tiles (small-scale samples of the patterns used to select tonal effects), I found several patterns that might work well with today’s lesson. So, with the mini tiles in front of me and forgetting to draw a string (pattern boundaries) first, I started working. It was only when I noticed how busy the tangle was getting that I remembered about the string. By then, it was clearly time to stop working before I further overworked the tangle. 

Putting down my pen, I began shading, and was struck by my inability to make sense out of what I drew. I kept going with the pencil, hoping all along that I could make this tile work. At last, I simply stopped working. 

At the precise moment I put down the pencil, the power went out–yes, again (daily). All I could do was turn on my hotspot (which has enough bandwidth for typing but not for uploading). So here I am, writing today’s post. While I am waiting for power and the wired wifi system, I’ll keep writing. As of this moment, we have been out of power for two hours. 

Oh, wait–it just came back on! Unbelievable! Tomorrow’s newspaper will tell me that we were powerless for only 15 minutes. It’s just as believable as the story that money given to the government-owned utility company by Parliament to purchase and install new equipment was “misplaced, ” instead of that it went into someone’s pocket. And the two hours–that’s the outside limit the company reported in last week’s press release. 

Stop. Just stop telling us lies. No one living on this island believes corruption does not exist here. No one believes the money intended for new equipment was not directed (or redirected) to a personal bank account on another island or in another country. It’s gone and GEBE (the utilities company (don’t ask me what the Dutch acronym stands for, please)) won’t see it again–ever. The only thing residents can do is complain, mostly to each other. The country is only 45,000 strong, and there is only one utility company on this side of the island (Dutch, as opposed to French on “the other side”). We are stuck, and there is nothing we can do but complain and live with the status quo. 

In last week’s weekend press release, we were told that GEBE is servicing all its relays, one or two at a time. They deliberately shut down power to selected residential areas to redistribute the load while they work. The power is redirected from residences to businesses. OK. I get that. And I am so pleased to be one of the selected, though that was not the intent behind the wording. But we have been losing power every day–for at least an hour to an hour and a half–for the past six weeks. And today marks the first, I am certain, of weeks of two-hour outages. How long does it take to service these relays? And why can’t we just be put on notice that every weekday until such-and-such a date we will be without power from 10:00 AM until noon, instead of using the variable schedule that seems like turning power on and off is an afterthought? We can plan around scheduled times. If a scheduled outage does not occur, think of how happy your customers will be, even if the power goes off again the next day. 

Geez. Listen to me. I sound as though I have been living on this island all my life. We all know complaining only allows us to release our frustration. We all know that the power will be on or off depending on when the technicians get around to flipping a switch. It’s like a game. All of it is part of the Caribbean way. And the island of St Martin will always be Caribbean first and Dutch or French second. Just relax and let it wash over you. Kind of like perpetual meditation. 

Yeah. It’s one of those uninspired and uninspiring days. I should have practiced the meditation aspect of Zentangle when I began working today instead of letting the local powers force me there. At least then I would have felt my “American right” to some personal control over an otherwise uncontrollable day… 

Stop!

Happy tangling!

##

#educ_dr