Mad dogs and Englishmen (and me)

When the kids were quite young, we took them to southern Spain in the hottest hotness ever recorded in the history of heat in Spain.

It was all anyone talked about. It was literally the only topic of conversation, no matter where you went.

It is exactly like this in DC right now.

Except the thing is, I live here.

And apparently every single human to whom I have ever spoken in my neighborhood or in the course of my daily life knows my proclivity for the heat.

Which is all well and good except for the fact that it's as hot as the surface of the sun in DC.

The Capital Weather Gang—whose profession is WEATHER—actually described DC as hell. Read the first line of the photo below.

And while the current heat is in fact Stygian, and I don't prefer it, I still take it over cold. Yes, my ideal is probably 95 degrees and dry. 

In the 90s to 100s and humid is not pleasant.

I do a lot of coming home and immediately swooning onto the sofa like a consumptive Victorian.

And still, I do not complain, because I fervently believe that you get to complain about one season. This is what I tell my kids, who completely ignore me and whine about both excessive heat and cold.

But since I complain bitterly all winter, longing for summer, I just suck it up in summer.

Yesterday I needed to pick up a prescription in the afternoon, so I biked to K Street and back, which is a little over three miles roundtrip, with the return trip almost completely uphill.

By the time I got home I just wanted to drink cool water and lie on the floor. Wanda and I have been hanging out like this a lot.

But the point of my story is this: everyone knows that I prefer heat. And when I run into them, almost to a person, the conversation goes as follows:

Me: Hi! How are you?
Them: It's so hot. It's too much.
Me: Yeah, it's really hot.
Them: I know you like this heat.

They have a tone. As if I'd willed this upon us with my love of summer heat.

I've had to stifle the urge to apologize.  

The first couple times it happened, I actually felt guilty, as if by loving the heat I'd somehow invited this discomfort on others.

So now I am all, "Gosh, even for me, this is too much!"

Reader, it is not too much for me. I would like it to cool down. I'm hoping for a thunderstorm that breaks the heat.

But I would not trade it for cold.

And then I started thinking that it wouldn't be my chosen superpower—I think I'd pick flying or breathing underwater—but lacking a superpower, I wouldn't turn it down.

Like, if I could direct a heatwave, and concentrate it on one person, that would be kind of amazing.

Basically, I could be like, here, have a big wallop of perimenopause. This hot flash, however, is going to last three days straight. Maybe a week.

Depends on how I'm feeling towards you.

That I might find immensely satisfying. What I'm saying is, if someone offered me this superpower, I would not turn it down.

But let's be clear. I don't control the weather. I can barely get my kids to clean their rooms.

In the immortal words of Power Station, “Some like it hot and some sweat when the heat is on.”

Indeed.