The Sweltering Suite

My apartment is a sauna. I hate saunas.

If you recall, I hate sweating. It makes my skin damp and sticky and immensely uncomfortable. I’m something not meant to sweat– like a Swiss roll. Swiss rolls are chocolatey goodness, but if you put them in heat, they sweat, and that’s just wrong. Swiss rolls should never sweat. I’m a Swiss roll.

My apartment is on the fourth floor of a very old building with poor insulation and facing east. If you recall, the sun rises in the east, so beginning at 5:00 AM or whatever time the sun rises (I’ve never been awake early enough to figure it out), the sun pierces through my window and begins cooking my apartment. As an added bonus, it also laser-points on my face while I’m sleeping, which I hate.

A logical response to that may be, “Why don’t you close the curtains then?” Well, if you recall, my apartment is a sauna. So even at night, it is hot. To combat the heat, I put a fan in the window and have it set to draw in the cold air at night, and having the fan in the window and the curtain closed is counter-productive, so it is left propped open. So every morning, way earlier than I would ever want to wake up, the sun floods into my room and shines all over my face and makes me uncomfortably warm, kinda like that Pink Floyd song, but with unwanted sweat.

Of course, we have air conditioning, but it’s not central, though. If you recall, this is a very old building. So we have one A/C unit randomly stuck in the middle of the wall like Winnie the Pooh stuck in Rabbit’s hole where Rabbit made a beautiful production of Pooh’s butt while he was  there. My A/C unit is Pooh’s butt, which does a mediocre job at cooling the living room and about nowhere else in the apartment.

So, to be fair, the A/C does help, and on extremely hot days I don’t leave the living room, but if you recall, I am also cheap and don’t like paying more than necessary, so on some occasions, I refrain from utilizing the A/C so as to not run up my electric bill. This is the worst sort of torture I inflict upon myself.

It could be worse, though. When we first moved into this apartment, we had a different A/C unit that looked like it was created before grandparents. (I don’t mean my grandparents; I mean all grandparents. Like “grandparents” as a concept.) It was brown and black and could recite what it was like to witness the founding fathers sign the Declaration of Independence, which, if you recall, is a very long time ago. But bless its heart, it tried to provide cold air for us, it tried its damnedest, but it couldn’t control its bladder and started leaking all over the floor. So we called the Ghostbusters and got it replaced with a new unit from this century.

In the winter, it’s still pretty toasty in here. If you recall, we are on the fourth floor, and the Rule is that heat rises, so we get three floors’ worth of heat boiling up beneath us before even messing with our thermostat. We still had to sleep with the window cracked even on the coldest nights of winter.

So you can imagine summer is much worse. After a refreshing shower to wash away the poisonous sweat residue, I’m cooled down and ready to face a world, un-sticky. But not even five minutes after I dry off, I’m moist again from sweat, which is such a hideous betrayal because I haven’t even committed any arduous actions! I’ve walked from the bathroom to my bedroom and I’m covered in Satan’s liquid (read: sweat).

And don’t even get me started on cooking. As if I didn’t hate cooking enough to begin with, if you use any faction of our elderly stove-top or oven, it completely cancels out any progress the A/C unit has made. Like a dual between the Snow Miser and Heat Miser in my own apartment! (The Heat Miser has home field advantage here.)

It is my firm belief that no one should ever have to sweat unless they are doing something physical. Nobody should have to encounter sweat unless they expressly summon it by moving. Is it not my right to be able to remain in one position without being dominated by a battalion of sweat? Where does it end?!

I don’t fare well in heat because of the sweat thing. I am a pale woman with pale ancestors and a very strong fair-skinned heritage. My DNA cannot handle heat, yet here I am, living in a hot box of hell, my flesh melting into a hybrid of sweat and tears.

I mean, I’m moving tomorrow, but still. It’s damn hot in here.

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