It’s really hot…. too hot….whine, whine, whine….
A cute article in the Vancouver Sun today summed it up nicely…
Hell hath no fury like 34 degrees in Vancouver
By Shelley Fralic, Vancouver Sun columnist
July 29, 2009
I have little in common with Marilyn Monroe (like, no kidding) except this.
She once said, in that memorable film The Seven Year Itch,
“I’m just not made for the heat.”
I hear ya, sister.
Not this kind of heat, anyway. Not this energy-sapping, oppressive hotness that’s plaguing our metropolis and that starts in the dew-less morning and sucks the life out of every living thing before the sun sets.
Not 35-degree heat, which before it was called Celsius was 95 degrees Fahrenheit and which really is hot enough to poach an egg on the sidewalk.
We born-and-bred Metro Vancouverites are simply not meant for the heat, and this you will know by our reaction to the swelter.
We whine. And moan. If we wanted to be roasted alive, we say to anyone who’ll listen, we’d move to the centre of the universe. Or Toronto.
Or we’d exploit the sub-prime mortgage mess and snap up a little desert bungalow in Phoenix, with a pool, for, like, $50,000.
The heat turns us into sloths, and instead of doing things like writing a column for Saturday or cleaning out the basement, we go to the mall.
There, we spend too much money on the new fall sweaters at Old Navy and trip in the aisles over hundreds of others seeking air-conditioned shelter, moms and dads and kids prowling the food court, eyes glazed in a desperate search for any distraction that will keep them from killing each other back home in the hothouse.
We sweat, which we’d rather not do, warm rivulets dripping from our hairline and pooling in our shoes.
And, in sweating, we learn to appreciate the difference between precipitation and perspiration, and how sweat is actually nature’s coolant, and how it helps to drink hot tea, like they do in really blistering countries, which is the stupidest thing we’ve ever heard because we have an ice machine in our fridge and perfectly good tap water.
We take cold showers, screaming with delight under the freezing spray and then traipsing about the house, hair dripping and wearing nothing but a smile until we realize that we’ve left the front door open and the window blinds up.
We betray our eco conscience, positioning an electric fan in every room, pointing one at our faces when we’re watching television, and another at our lumpen clammy bodies thrashing about during the night.
We don’t eat much of anything, unless it’s light like, ugh, a salad. Except ice cream. We eat buckets of it, vanilla bean and double-churned chocolate and coconut gelato and we’ll drive miles just to get it, our thighs thickening with every degree inching up the thermometer.
On the way to get that ice cream, a double scoop, we crank up the air conditioning in the car, smug and grateful to be tootling about town with the windows up, not caring one whit that we’re contributing to global warning which we don’t believe in anyway because how do they explain that 10 feet of snow that was piled against the side of the house just last January.
Mostly, though, we are a cranky sticky lot and we hate hot fun in the summertime, and so we talk, if not look, like Marilyn Monroe, who also said in that movie:
“When it gets hot like this, you know what I do? I keep my undies in the icebox.”