When bulbs burn out

I'm not saying that our apartment is falling apart, but things have ways of leaking, clogging, sticking, breaking and malfunctioning like you wouldn't believe. The lights in my room flicker so often that I once had to ask my flatmate if I was having seizures or if she could see the flashes too. During the summer, the generator in the apartment upstairs exploded and the residual water dripped liquid into our bathroom for a week (so don't even get me started on the multi-colored mold that has since taken root on our ceiling). As if our bathroom couldn't take any more, its only bulb burnt out and the plastic shell that covered it refused to come off. It's been showers by candlelight and pee-time in the dark.

While searching for a replacement bulb, however, we did stumble across an old Christmas tin, filled to the brim with gaudy holiday decorations. Plastic snowflakes covered in gold sparkles, cartoon drawings of baby Jesus, a few rotting pine cones, fake poinsettia flowers and a flashy red sign that read, "Buone Feste," Or Happy Holidays in Italian. Suddenly, with the excitement of children, we abandoned the light bulb quest and set about with decorating our meager flat. Virgin Mary here, plastic ornaments there and that tacky "Buone Feste" sign to be hung and taped to the front of our door.

I grabbed my scratch paper and threw it on the kitchen counter, declaring the next ten minutes to be paper snowflake crafting time. Annika and I set to work, trying to remember just precisely how to fold those things in the first place. The first few came out square, like babies born to paper box fish, and the most horrific ended up accompanying the Buone Feste sign outside. The hilarity the snowflakes created distracted us for long minutes until I finally had to ask, "is something burning?"

During our arts and crafts, Annika forgot her pot of lentils on the stove and the fumes wafted up and out our windows smelling strangely identical to marijuana. The boy who lives upstairs caught me laughing in the hallway and I invited him to our entrance to admire the new decor. He commented on the smell and left, to which I shouted after him, "Eh, Buone Feste!" And closed that pathetic door behind me.