Ode to Light

I'm experiencing a inevitable setback for a few weeks now.

I bought a few books this week to replenish my already dwindling reading list. I was about to start reading one of these books when suddenly someone took my picture. I knew someone did, there was a flash of light. One thought hit me: I HAVE STALKERS IN MY ROOM!!!

Then, it happened again, a flash of light. Then again, and again. Now I felt like my room turned into a dance floor with the flashing lights. These couldn't be stalkers unless they have ultra super fast but super small SLR cameras, which would be very impossible.

The culprit was none other than my reading light. I closed my book and went to sleep. Tomorrow I'll try to find out what's wrong with my light.

That was two weeks ago. My bedroom light had a busted florescent lamp - a 15 Watt lamp. It's still broken. 

When I asked my brother to buy a replacement lamp, he found out that they didn't sell any of those any more. They never ordered one of those for a long time. How convenient! Did I also mention that he tried all of the hardware stores in our vicinity (J.P. Rizal Street in Makati has more or less 10 hardware stores).

What's frustrating is that I could understand why. I received this bedroom reading lamp when I was still in high school. My parents discovered that I was slowly occupying the whole bookshelf with my own books and I was about to exhaust all the books in our school library, so they gave me a reading lamp they won from some promo. I couldn't remember the details. It was that long ago. All I know was that my complaint then was that staying on the lower deck of a double decker, you don't get enough light to read anything.

For the record, the lamp has been replaced less than 5 times in span of almost 9 years. It's that economical. I have used it to read more than a hundred books and has been a great help when I was writing those long articles we used to submit before our journalist teacher. It has seen a lot of action. In fact, it has the battle scars to prove it. It has a busted outlet where I used to plug in my charger. How it got busted was long forgotten.

I like that lamp. I hope to find a replacement lamp or I won't be able to read any book, which is really scary.