When You’re Hot, You’re Hot, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise

July 10, 2010 Martha Thomases 1 Comment

It’s hot out.

It’s July.  We expect it to be hot, at least if we live in the Northern Hemisphere.

But it’s really hot.

I just spent most of a week in south Florida, where it is not only hot in July, but incredibly humid as well.  The local weather report includes the temperature, and then goes on to add the heat index.  For example, if it 100 degrees, with 40 percent humidity, it feels like it’s 108 degrees.  I guess this is what they do with all the time they save by not reporting on the wind chill factor during the winter.

In south Florida, they know how to do heat.  Every single place you go is air-conditioned.  You go from your air-conditioned house to your air-conditioned car to your air-conditioned office, or maybe to some air-conditioned shops.  If you don’t choose to eat at home, you can go to a multitude of air-conditioned restaurants.

At least, you can do those things if you have a certain amount of money.  If you’re a working stiff, the kind who toils at construction or gardening or maybe you walk a beat, then you have to deal with the heat.

Here in New York, we expect it to be hot, but not this hot.  Temperatures have been in the triple digits most of this week.  Without a heat index, I don’t know what that feels like, but a heat index in New York would be a more complicated calculation.  There are so many gigantic office towers, and they all have air-conditioning.  This is great for the people who work there, but not so great for the people who happen to walk by the vents, which spew out all the heat from the gigantic office tower.

The subways are so hot they are like ovens.  Perhaps they were designed by Hitler, since the majority of the riders are non-Aryans – Jews and  swarthy people – as well as gypsies, homosexuals and Catholics.  A Final Solution that costs $2.25 each way.

It’s not much better to stand at a bus stop.  Taxis are haphazardly air-conditioned.  Walking, the true New Yorker’s transportation method of choice, is enough to cause a stroke.

This morning on C-SPAN, I heard a caller insist that this heat wave is not proof of global warming.  He asserted that there was a stretch of time in the 1400s when it was just as hot as it is now.

I don’t care.

Whichever Higher Power is involved in making it cooler (God?  Cthulhu?  The Jet Stream?), I’m begging you to do what you can to break this cycle of pain.

And if that’s not possible, please arrange longer and better movies at my local multi-plex.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, knows there are lots of more important things happening in the world, but she’s sweating too much to think about them.  And not just because she is over 50.