Todd Stadler's blog

Tarzan couldn't take this kind of hot

It's days like yesterday that make me not want to talk to people from Texas, even if that excludes a good chunk of my family.

Fig. A: Hot town, summer in the city

The problem is the part of the conversation that inevitably goes as follows:

Me: Hi, Mom, I'm dying of heat exhaustion and/or possibly simply melting.

Mom: Hi, Son! It's hot here, too!

Me: Yeah, but it's 100 degrees here ...

Mom: Oh, we've already had several 100-degree days this year, starting in April! And, of course, there was that one year where we had twenty days in a row of triple-digit temperatures and ...

Me: Mom! You have air conditioning! In your car! At home! At work! There is no container for people in Texas that is not air-conditioned! Even the outhouses! And while I appreciate that you might break a sweat walking from the car to the door, it's the soothingly subarctic blast you get once inside that makes me stop feeling sorry for you. I, on the other hand, am currently trying to cool off by lying in a pool ... of my own sweat! We've opened all the windows, turned on all the fans, stripped off all unncessary clothing — with vigorous discussions on whether contact lenses are, in fact, necessary — and I am currently lying here on the couch, trying to devise a system that will allow my skin to come in as little contact as possible with anything before I am forced to stop thinking due to my brain having melted and thus oozing onto the couch which is already saturated with my sweat, forming a nice repository for my DNA should they ever perfect human cloning.

Mom: Well, would you consider moving back to Texas, then?

Fig. B: Back of my neck gettin' dirty an' gritty!

You see, people in the southern states have no appreciation for how to actually cope with hot days. They are much more adept at denying that they live in a hot part of the world, choosing to live in structures that are cool inside because they have machines that add even more to the heat outside (curse you, second law of thermodynamics!).

Meanwhile, we of a more northerly disposition are made of much sturdier, if possibly whinier, stuff. Except you there, in the air-conditioned suburbs.

So it was that Julia and I had a dinner at which the attire could only be described as immodest (unless sweat counts as clothing, which, in a way, it should have), eating items that required no cooking whatsoever, and lamenting the fact that my skin was now one with the chair.

Fig. C: Hey, the heat's turned off! So why does it read over 90 degrees?

And then we whimpered until we decided to go see a movie. Any movie. Doesn't matter — I don't even know what's playing these days, just pick one.

We briefly considered seeing An Inconvenient Truth just to revel in the irony (global warming? would that be unpleasant?) but decided to go for more lighthearted fare that the still-unmelted parts of our brains would enjoy, settling on Wordplay.

But as we are still fans of climate-related irony, we decided to drive, thus ensuring that while we remained cool 'n' crisp on the trip to the theater, we would simultaneously contribute to global warming. If only there were a movie that could convince us to have taken the bus! (Parenthetical confidential to TriMet: why is it only on 100-degree days that your buses' air conditioning breaks?)

We got to the theater so early before the showing that the lady in the ticket office wasn't sure if we wanted to try to make it to the previous showing of Wordplay or not. Yeah, that's right, we're not just getting 94 minutes of air-conditioned Spellbound-with-adults, we're also getting over an hour of air-conditioned hanging out in your lobby for free! And you'll like it, because we're ... unobtrusive.

The movie over, we made our way back home, where it was a pleasant 85 degrees indoors by midnight! Minty fresh! Practically sweater weather!

And people thought we were crazy to plan our summer vacation in Scotland! How are those 50-degree nights looking now, eh?