The Heat Is On

It has started, the fabled intense, hot and humid summer here in the Land of the Rising Sun. Man that bugger is blazing…when it’s out. With the rainy season mingling with the humidity it has made for some extremely uncomfortable weather. Walking outside is like walking into a wall of fire. It just hits you and attacks you and by the time you make it to the corner you are glistening with enough sweat to fill a few Slurpee cups. I don’t know what’s worse, the heat or the mugginess or the dampness or the rain. At home I can do what any logical man would do in this situation: purchase a few bags of ice, a few Popsicles, pile them up in front of the laptop, strip down to nothing but skin, baby, and sit down on a mountain of frigid goodness. The inside of this apartment is oven hot and cold showers only work for so long. Damn, I wish I could read the remote control for the air conditioner. Any of you out there that can understand Japanese and can work some translation magic I have a case of Pepsi Ice Cucumber with your name on it. I have made numerous attempts in the last week to crack the intricate coding of this remote. Seriously, it’s like trying to figure out the damn Rubik’s Cube and note just the regular square version, no sir, uh-uh, but the mind boggling Professor's Cube. Christ, you needed to part of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics to solve that thing. Al, I admit it now for the world to see, I’m no genius as I claimed to be when I was 10. I simply pealed off the stickers and stuck them back on in the correct spots. I know, I know…I’m a disgrace to the cubing profession. Oh, and that time I won Operation without setting of the nose…well, the game wasn’t plugged in. So, not being able to use my air conditioner I am a puddle when I am home. This has made sleeping very hard. Due to the mugginess I cannot seem to get comfortable and I lay there in a river of sweat for the better part of the evening. I had not been opening the big, sliding window in my living room for fear of letting in even more bugs to nibble away at me. It was only today, when retiring Nostrodamus for the summer, that I realized that tucked to the far end of the window was a screen. It had been there all along, just retracted and ready to be pulled out. Sometimes the Gods smile on us, friends. I pulled the screen across, tossed open the curtains and tossed them closed again when I realized that I was still naked. I have a similar screen on my kitchen window so the interior of the apartment has been a lot easier to bear this evening. Of course, I don’t sleep with the screen door as, being on the ground floor, this leaves me vulnerable to crazy dwarf kamikaze purple painted rapists. Oh, laugh it up fuzzballs but I maintain my stance on their existence. So I have purchased an inner tube which I will wear to bed every night to prevent drowning in my own sweat. The screens and the nakedness helps at home but in the classroom it is a different story. In two of my four classrooms I have managed to figure out how to use the air conditioner and the other two are now called The Inferno Rooms. When I am there alone I can open all the windows to air out the room but I need to close them when the kids arrive because these children seem to not comprehend that they do no have the powers of levitation. After spending a day running around an oven with 12 rambunctious children I am a mess. My hair is matted, my face dripping and my clothes are drenched. It would really be nice to be able to dry them but here comes the rain again. No dryer and no nearing laundry-mat which may have a dryer leaves me hoping for breaks in the days of downpours before I run out of clothing. The options are dwindling as the bin in my closet begins to smell like rotting hamburger. I really should take the rotting hamburger out of the closet, huh? So here I sit naked in my mildly cool apartment after a day of being baked, my clothes stink, I stink and it’s raining outside. There is no better time then this for a marathon of Bugs Bunny cartoons! That’s all folks!