I understand that nobody who lives in a legitimately hot part of the world is going to want to hear my weather-related tale of woe, so all the readers who do live in legitimately hot parts of the world should proceed directly to The Onion without passing Go or collecting two hundred dollars, because I aim to tell my tale of woe regardless. Ready?

Once upon a time, it wasn’t the heat, it was the humidity. Um…the end.

For those of you fortunate enough not to live in the northeast, New York City is apparently trapped in a weather system inspired by Groundhog Day, because the weather is exactly the same every day, and not in a happy, sunny, dry, Los Angeles way, either. It’s muggy. It’s sticky. It’s like living on the deck of a fishing boat, except a lot less comfortable and pleasant-smelling, and it’s starting to get to people.

Seriously. And the weather isn’t particularly severe; it’s just weird, and it’s putting everyone in a bad mood. The air doesn’t move. At all. It can’t. It’s not even air, technically; it’s water, with the occasional oxygen molecule backstroking around in a flowered bathing cap. Exhale a lungful of cigarette smoke, and it just sits there in front of you like a malign genie; go across the street for an ice cream, come back, and it’s still there, the ghost of nicotine past. It isn’t hot out; it isn’t even close. In fact, when you sit still, you feel kind of clammy and cold, but the minute you move a muscle — any muscle at all, including your tongue, in the service of forming the words “I think I need a sweater” — the effort prompts a sheen of sweat to break out all over your body, and the sweat isn’t refreshing. It smells of sullen defeat, and it will not evaporate. Ever. You have to physically wipe it off with a paper towel.

Or shower. Again. Which you dread doing, because your towels haven’t dried from the last shower you took, and even if the last shower you took occurred at the end of July, your towels still haven’t dried. Your towels do nothing but stir the moisture around on your skin. Well, that’s not entirely true. Your towels also contribute to your daily ration of exercise, because your towels weigh approximately fifty pounds. You wind your wet hair up in one, and the weight will snap your neck like a straw. So, you take your towels to the laundry room to run them through the dryer — the thought of the laundry room is anathema, but you spend a lot of time there because you go through three shirts a day — and you bring them back to your apartment all fluffy and light and dry, and you hang them up, and the ambient moisture senses an imbalance in the room and settles into the towels again within ten minutes.

If you feel a breeze anywhere on the island of Manhattan, it’s exhaust from a passing car, or the doorway of a hyper-air-conditioned store, or a fellow citizen stomping past in a huff even she herself is at a loss to explain — or it’s from one of the daily thunderstorms, which turn the sky a cinematic shade of grayish-yellow and do a lot of stage business with lightning bolts and power surges that ring telephones randomly at two in the morning, but which do exactly nothing to relieve the unrelenting humidity. In theory, you admire the thunderstorms’ uncanny ability to sense when you have to go out of the house and their patience in waiting until that time to strike, but in practice, you have said the words “fuck right off, Nature” out loud, because you have had the same low-grade barometric-pressure headache for a fortnight and it has hastened your descent into madness.

You have not looked sexy — or cute, or presentable, or not like a frizzy junkie dipped in lanolin — since around Bastille Day. In fact, you look like Sadie Flood in that scene in Georgia where she’s trying to get on a plane to go to rehab and she’s screaming that she needs a pair of shoes. Your skin is a Super Fund site; particulate matter suspended in the watery air sticks to your face like gnats to flypaper. Oh, wait. It’s not “like gnats.” It is gnats. You have actual gnats stuck to your actual forehead. You would evict them using apricot scrub, but the high-pitched shrieking doesn’t help your headache, and also, you can’t lift your washcloth without a spotter. And you don’t see much point anyway, with your hair looking the way it does. And how does your hair look? Well, that depends. At the moment, it looks like Michael Landon on one side of your head and Outsiders-era Patrick Swayze on the other side, but look again in five minutes — in five minutes, your entire head will look like a malevolent drain clog removed from the shower at the Bedford-Stuyvesant YMCA. In another five minutes, it will look perfectly serviceable on one side and disgustingly limp and greasy on the other, and five minutes after that, it will appear as though someone coated your head in bacon grease and then dropped a rabid Pomeranian on it from ten stories up.

In other news, you smell. You smell because odors have taken semi-solid form, and if you walk through, past, or near an odor, that odor is now your odor too. Standing next to a guy eating a chicken wing at a red light? You smell like chicken. Walking by a garbage pile? You smell like garbage. Wedged into a subway car with the Right-Guard-ally challenged? You smell like an armpit. Of course, you already smell like an armpit — your own. You put on an inch of Secret. You change your t-shirt on the hour. You spritz, you splash, nothing helps. Every time you reach for something, you die a little inside, knowing that if only you had more money than Midas, you could run the AC all day, and if only you could run the AC all day, you wouldn’t have to turn the fan on, and if only you didn’t have to turn the fan on, you wouldn’t work up a sweat chasing paperwork and receipts and dollar bills as they eddy damply around the room, or slamming makeshift paperweights down all over your apartment, or turning cat ears right side out again, because damn, if that’s the fan on the low setting, you don’t even want to know what happens on the high setting. Did I mention that you have tinnitus now?

You have tinnitus now. Your fan is cheap. Therefore, your fan is loud. A plane taking off is a whiter noise than your fan, which failed to mention in the warranty literature that it had Melissa Rivers stuck in the blades. Your cats hate the fan. Your cats hate Melissa Rivers. Your cats hate everything, not least you, and you’ve apologized seventeen times for chasing them around the living room with a bottle of L’Oreal Studio Spray Gel, but they just looked so miserably frizzy, like stripy little sheep, and you really only wanted to help. Your cats hate the weather most of all, which means they squabble and hiss and wrestle constantly, which makes them hotter and frizzier, which means they squabble and hiss and wrestle even more, and you wish they’d knock it off, because between the caterwauling and the fan and the sound of a murder of mold spores popping out of a loaf of bread you bought not five minutes ago and failed to escort directly into the refrigerator, you can’t hear the television. And you store everything in the refrigerator now — everything. Bread. Coffee. Your shorts. Can’t find your Filofax? Check the crisper. Need a pen? Butter dish, my friend…butter dish.

It is so humid. It is just. So. Humid. Yesterday, you put a bottle of Amstel Light down on a table, and the sweat from the bottle formed a vacuum seal, and when you picked up the bottle, the whole table came with it. Everything sweats — glasses of water, cans of Diet Coke, pieces of cheese, lipsticks, your scalp. Clothes never dry. Shower steam never disperses. Puddles never evaporate; they just get greener and more toxic, and you could swear you saw a scaly arm shoot out of one and snatch a poodle right off the curb the other day. You eat an ice-cream sandwich at your desk, your monitor fogs up. Your keyboard feels all tacky. You don’t sleep well; the cool spot has completely abandoned your pillow, and you keep having disturbing dreams about glue and saunas. Your whole world looks, smells, and feels like an overcooked vegetable. You think wandering the Sahara sounds pretty good right about now.

You go to the movies. You go shopping even though you don’t need anything, because it’s freezing in the stores. You loiter in the frozen foods aisle, pretending to admire the peas and onions. You know it’s wrong, but you hope an enterprising civil-disobedience type cracks open a fire hydrant for you to walk through; if you have to walk around damp all the time, you might as well go all the way with it. You walk past the Gap and you see all the sheepskin linings and the corduroy, and you feel a sharp pang of longing, an urgent need to go into the morgue-cooled dressing room and put on a pair of pants, just for a few minutes. But then you see a kid skipping down the street with an energy you don’t think you ever had, and you remember that when it’s pants weather again, that kid will have to go back to school instead of kicking back on his fire escape with a library book and a popsicle like that’s his job, because basically that is his job — to that kid, the humidity means sweet freedom.

So, you get a popsicle of your own at the corner deli and try to look at the bright side. It’s a damn good popsicle. You find a book to read, and you decide to live a little and crank the AC before bedtime. Only a few more weeks. Then you and your corduroys can skip all the way to Jersey.

August 11, 2003

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