So, you don’t have central air to pump through your home or a pool to jump into, but you want to stay cool this summer. When it gets hot, it gets too hot to think and you’ll need to do a lot of thinking. About things like how you screwed your life up so bad that you can’t even afford an air conditioner. Seriously, they’re like a hundred and fifty bucks.
But we’re not here to debate your terrible life choices, I’ll leave those to internally torment you in oppressive solitude, as mine do me. What I can do for you, however, is give you a few tips to help you beat the heat. Because you need them, but mostly because writing them down will give me a few precious moments of reprieve from the nagging self-doubts and painful memories haunting me, which I made mention of earlier in the paragraph.
1. Turn on your oven. I know this sounds counterintuitive, but it really works, and it’s really simple. It won’t reduce the heat drastically, but it will lower it by a few degrees. I don’t fully know how it works, I’m not a sciencetist, but if you turn it on to bake and crank it up as high as it will go, it creates a sort of “heat vacuum” that sucks in heat molecules from the air around it.
Your kitchen will be pretty hot, but other rooms around your home will be marginally more tolerable because of the heat migration. I’m not sure if turning on all the stove elements increases the effect, but you might as well, it can’t hurt. If you don’t have an oven in addition to not having an air conditioner, then you need to stop reading this right now and seriously look at your life.
2. Drugs. Just do lots of drugs. Like, all summer long. Just keep doing them. It won’t actually do anything about the temperature, but you won’t really care about it anymore, or anything else for that matter. Though these crippling issues you seem so obsessed with might overwhelm you if amplified with mind-altering substances.
3. Owls. Owls are creatures of the night, and they bring the night’s chill with them wherever they go. In addition to the potent magic they possess, they are also cold-blooded, and the constant flapping of their wings in an enclosed area creates a cooling breeze.
This requires a little bit more effort than other tips on this list, because of the owls’ befouling of your home with their excrement and pellets, and you have to feed them. Though, if you already have a mouse problem this has the added bonus of solving that as well.
In any given summer I usually have five or six owls in my apartment at all times. Though not usually the same ones the whole time, when you account for all the deaths when they repeatedly try to fly out the closed windows and they tend to kill each other often. And, making a good thing even better, their loud screeching makes for a great distraction from inner turmoil.
4. Get rid of some of your blood! We humans, unlike owls, are warm-blooded animals. So what the heck do you think the effect is when you’ve got all that hot blood rushing around inside you? It makes you warmer!
So get a bit of it out of there. Don’t go nuts, obviously you need blood inside you to live, but you don’t really need all of it.
Be warned, though, that blood letting can be especially dangerous when you are wrestling with intense personal demons. Drain about enough to fill a pint glass and you’ll feel noticeably cooler almost immediately. About two pint glasses full will really take the edge off when you’re going to something like a wedding or a wine mixer where you have to be out in the sun and dress up. Don’t exceed that, though, and don’t drain yourself more than once a week, or you run the risk of passing out and maybe even dying, which would be really embarrassing at a wedding, and, come on, it’s the bride’s day, don’t steal focus.
I hope these tips will bring you some much needed cooling down this summer and for summers to come. And I’ll leave you with one last piece of advice, on the subject of appearing cool, which is perhaps the most important of all. Nothing projects that overall look of cool quite like smoking cigarettes. A lot of cigarettes.
Photo by davedehetre via Flickr
