I am not a summer girl. My idea of enjoying the warm summer air is sitting at least one closed window away from it. Send me off to dreamland with the hum of a 22,000 BTU air conditioner a few yards away.
Don’t let me interfere with your summer night’s dreams, but please count me indoors and artificially cooled. My idea of nirvana is existing under the protection of a thermostat set at least 20 degrees below that of the real world.
I am an air conditioning addict.
Understanding of course that such energy inefficiency is politically incorrect, I admit to my addiction with the counter that I also keep my heat turned down very low in the winter.
The fact is, I really hate to be hot, no matter what time of year. And I will avoid any home, office, hotel, school, church, synagogue, museum or public building from June through September if they lack my favorite two letters of the alphabet: AC.
I love the goose bumps that erupt on my skin when I arrive inside a hyper-air-conditioned office building, the chills up my spine entering a home set at 70 degrees. It’s a power thing with me, a conquering nature thing, overcoming the adversity of the elements with ingenuity and, of course, an enormous electrical bill to go with it.
This is the same way I felt when the anesthesiologists offered an epidural during labor for each of my three boys. Basically I’m a natural coward.
I predict I will not absorb hot flashes very well.
I haven’t always been able to live in the luxury of a temperature-altered state. In college, the ramshackle apartment in which I lived with my best friend, Dana, was on the third floor of an air-conditionless building where I mastered firsthand the law of physics that heat rises.
Then there were the beginning-career, lean years when I lived in an apartment–facing west, no less–that had two windows and no window unit. I took cold showers before bed, and when I awoke my pores were as large as my walk-in closet.
I spent a lot of time at the office back then, my bosses convinced that I was conscientious. I was just hot.
I also lived near Washington one summer, in Alexandria. Va., a city appropriately named after its torrid desert sister city in Egypt. I learned to soak my sheets in ice water before bed and that the first person off to work in the frozen-aired Metro wins.
I would decide every morning what to wear by what required the fewest layers of material. Anything that needed a slip was out, and jackets were a joke. I ended up wearing the same sleeveless linen dress most days. I changed earrings and shoes.
I lived in Texas for five years, which is actually one of a few places on Earth under the mercy of a cosmic blow dryer on hot–and high–for an unforgiving five months of the year. But it was manageable because Texans pioneered and perfected the art of over-air conditioning.
Most building thermostats were likely set at 65 degrees, if not less, and one friend of mine actually kept her house so cold you needed hot chocolate and a blanket around you to watch TV.
As we all know, Chicago summers, however sudden, are no less relentless, although the over-air-conditioning attitude is not nearly as pervasive. People actually eat at outdoor cafes, take long walks in August and intentionally sunbathe on tarred rooftops. I am not one of them.
I am a heat wimp, a sweat sissy, because no sooner does the outside temperature turn 80 degrees than my internal temperature reaches 103. I perspire profusely walking through a kitchen with the oven set on warm, and I feel like I’m suffocating in a hot shower.
I can lose 5 pounds of water weight if I am forced to stand in line at a movie theater in August. My eyeliner runs, my shirts get stained and the soles of my feet are damp if I can’t get myself inside to an artificially cooled sanctuary.
So I am not a woman of summer. I once had my season diagnosed (it’s a fashion step up from getting your colors done) and was told I was an autumn. That explains it. Give me blazers and corduroy, kneesocks and wool scarves, nights when the temperature dips to 50. Then, and only then, will I open the window.
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