I don’t like air conditioning.
Silly, I know, given my antipathy to summer, and it must be admitted that this dislike does not get in the way of my using my own a.c. (purchased for me by T. and P. some summers ago) or my gratitude for it on the train or at work.
Yes, I’m a hypocrite—sue me.
My friend J., who grew up in Arizona and went to school in Minnesota, didn’t like central heat, something which I, the as-yet-had-never-lived-anywhere-outside-of-the-midwest, found unfathomable. Don’t like indoor heat? Why it’s the greatest: You come in from a snowy day and peel off your jacket and mittens and hat and scarf, kick off your boots, and you feel the warmth seep into you.
That made sense: You bundled up for outside, and when the bundle was no longer enough, you escaped back into cozy warmth. How could that not be good?
But J., I think, looked at winter much as I look at summer: That was a season when you were supposed to be able to roam free, and not be trapped indoors. Arizona in July was like Minnesota in January—brutal—so when the opposite (winter for her, summer for me) doesn’t bring relief, you go after the proxy, that which makes the brutal bearable.
Hm, that wasn’t clear. J. doesn’t hate summer and I don’t hate winter. Neither of us likes our respective brutalities, but we’ve each found a way to deal with them; what we have not found a way to deal with are the seasons which are supposed to be “better”. (Yes, I still think winter is easier to deal with than summer, what with the possibilities of bundling-up versus the limits to stripping down, but that’s another argument.) Summer for me and winter for her is supposed to be a time of weather-liberation, and when it is not, well, we hate the things that keep us penned up, trapped indoors by the sun or the snow. Thus: I hate a/c, she hates central heat.
J. is long back in Arizona, so I hope she’s got her winter mojo back; regardless, she’s likely as calm facing summer as I am facing winter.
I just wish Brooklyn summers were as mild as those Arizona winters.
AbsurdBeats 