Air Con, Soy Ice Cream & Lime Perrier

The weather forecast in NYC this week is on the order of "a high of 98 and a low of 80, with 110% humidity." No joke. After freezing my ass off all day in the meat freezer we call work, I dripped buckets of sweat in yoga class only to come home to a sweltering "No we don't have air conditioning in the apartment" situation. I was melting within three seconds.

Luckily I have a nice roommate, nice enough to stay at her boyfriend's place and let me move her air con unit into my room for the rest of the summer. I didn't realize those suckers were so heavy, and to use quite a bit of ingenuity (involving a side table of just the right height) to move the sucker into my room & fit it into the air con 'hole in the wall' that I'd been covering up from non-use until now.

After the work was done and I turned the unit on, I called my friend to see if she wanted to escape the heat with a nice martini in an air conditioned bar. Being the good new yorkers that we are, she and another friend had the same idea - so we whiled away a cool couple of hours at the neighborhoood french bistro Casimir.

Now, am sitting here like 'AL' - Al Bundy minus the hand in crotch that is - sitting on the couch in my, um, underwear & lime green "Chou" wife beater, eating butter pecan soy ice cream out of the carton, drinking Lime Perrier WITH ICE (something about the ice that makes the bubbles THAT much more refreshing), and watching That 70s Show, waiting for the air con to kick in in my room. WOOHOO. AIR CON IN MY ROOM.

I've somehow survived three New York summers WITHOUT air conditioning in the apartment. I KNOW RIGHT. It was either due to some arcane belief - "I don't believe in air conditioning, it's bad for your health and it makes me cough & get sore throats" or the ascetic desire to somehow remain pure and not "give in" to air conditioning. Well I've either become soft or have become more of a New Yorker because I've just about had it with sleepless, humid, stifling nights - simply melting on my tatami bed, getting little red itchy spots from god knows what bugs or plain heat. The first time I experienced air con at night (it was 98% humidity and I couldn't breathe in my room, even with the fan blasting on "3", and my roommate was gone, so I slept in her room & jacked up the air con), I realized what I'd been missing out - a good night's sleep in the sweltering summers of Manhattan.

Alright, gonna go jump into the ice box now and love every minute of it.