Willis Haviland Carrier Deserves a Medal

Today's topic: air conditioning. It is a very, very good thing.

Currently, it's 90 degrees out and 'feels like 96,' according to Wunderground.* This is not exactly a normal temperature for June in Wisconsin. Not unexpected, and not completely abnormal, but still. The mid-eighties is the normal max, and therefore the state is unprepared for this heat wave. When it's that hot outside, your body practically doesn't even need to do anything. You can hibernate. You just lie there, preferably not in the sun, and try to keep your body's processes from raising your internal temperature more than six to eight degrees above the air temperature. It is not a temperature for having to actually do anything in, because sheer friction will cause your skin to start combusting  in a relatively short period of time.

So it's just my luck that I have to go work out at the YMCA for roughly two hours three times a week. The local one is having some issues with the heat, and so I show up and discover it is literally hotter in the lobby than it is outside - at least there's air moving outside.** My prognosis: death by heat stroke within an hour.

Even more unfortunately for myself, the cardio room is on the third floor, and heat rises. As I go up, so does the temperature, until I'm becoming seriously worried about both my health and whether the paint on the wall is going to start melting and getting me and my stuff all drippy. By the time I hit the landing at the top floor, it feels like I'm in an oven, and I'm relatively sure that the dust bunnies in the corners of the floor are actually the ashes of other patrons, who've spontaneously combusted. The paint is definitely beginning to look drippy.

And then I open the door to the cardio room, and it's like stepping into an ice bath. I can breath, the rubber soles of my tennis shoes solidify, and I swear I can hear angels singing in the background.*** I then proceed to work out for the allotted two hours without any death by heatstroke or spontaneous combustion at all. And that is why air conditioning is awesome.****




*And according to every living thing outside, except the ones complaining it feels way hotter than that.

**Blowing at 18 mph, no less. Weird, weird weather.

***Turns out it was just Freddie Mercury. Same difference.

****Then I had to leave the air conditioning and walk eight blocks to the library, of course, but the point still stands.