Do you know what is quite possibly the most miserable thing out of all of the things? Cold showers. They are a special kind of torture.

My advice for cold-shower-taking is to begin frantic humming before you actually direct the water onto your body. That way, you are already warmed up for the squeal-like noise that will escape your body in response to the special torture of that cold shower.

Last Thursday I came home to discover that my electricity was out. After flipping switches and pushing buttons and calling my mother a millionty times, I finally accepted that I was going to have to call an electrician. When I say “finally accepted” I actually mean to say, “My mom told me to.”

I call my mom for advice in all situations because she usually has some sort of DIY fix for everything and if ever there is an option that doesn’t require dealing with other people, I will probably take it.

Anyway, when my mom said, “I really don’t want you to get electrocuted. Or burn the building down,” I knew it was advice that needed to be taken seriously.

This is the part of my story where I remind you that I don’t really speak French. All of my stories in Paris seem to have such a point. You’d think that by now I would have just dropped out of school to dedicate myself to learning French, but then what kind of stories would I have?

Fortunately, one of my favoritefavorite people here is both my neighbor and fluent in French. I called him and he eagerly put his paper-writing on hold to look up electricians and translations for important things that they just don’t cover in Elementary French, like “fuse box.”

We sat around my apartment for what felt like forever before the electrician finally showed up. After poking around and performing his electrician wizardry, he concluded that my water heater was the problem, and also that I owed him three hundred Euros for turning my electricity back on and informing me that my water heater was the problem. So that was super cool. Also super cool was him telling me that he could come back the next day to fix my water heater for another eight-hundred. To which I replied, “LOLWUT?”

Through all of this, I also made approximately nine-hundred (or maybe more like fifteen) phone calls to my landlord, who did not answer. The next day I had to go into the housing office at my school and have a fun little chat about all of this, and receive some awesome paperwork for an insurance claim, so that in about six years, I will get that three hundred euros back.

My landlord finally returned my calls on Monday; apparently she was on vacation. Fine. I’ll try not to be too bitter/annoyed.

However, I get the sense that she took her sweet time in placing calls to the various people that needed to be called. I’ve been checking in with her all week, and she has been rather evasive. I found out this morning that what I actually need is a plumber, not an electrician (whatever, I don’t care) and somehow this is sufficient explanation for why this is not going to be taken care of until Monday morning.

MONDAY. MORNING. A week and a half without hot water.

Given that with each cold shower I took, the thought of having to take another one whittled away pieces of my spirit, I knew that something had to be done. Just talking about these miserable showers now kind of makes me want to cry.

I recalled that there was a brief period in my life when I kind of appreciated cold showers. This was the time in which I lived on the equator and began sweating within minutes of drying off. I tried to apply this logic to my current predicament. I have braved them thus far with the help of endless complaining and blasting the heat in my apartment, even though the weather outside has finally become comfortable after terminal winter.

Still, this was insufficient. In an attempt to further apply the lessons of my semester abroad, I invested five euros in a bucket. Yes, that’s right. A bucket.

I am now riding out my remaining days of sad hot-water-free times by boiling water and filling a bucket, so that I may take lukewarm bucket showers. I may be a chronic complainer, but at least I am resourceful too.