Nerve Endings Firing Away

It is freakishly hot; hot enough to melt chocolate chip cookies. As if the Texas heat wasn’t killing me enough, the air conditioning in my apartment thought it would be great time to conk off. A old wooden townhome (but with really cheap rent) that must have sprung a thousand leaks since it was built, just sitting around can be an arduous task. Even with two table fans bellowing limid air toward you, it doesn’t get any better. The landlord is accesible only via email and a phone call always goes to his voicemail.

But eventually the word of our misery gets around and the handyman comes calling. ‘Charges’ up the AC and vanishes, the AC promptly conks off the next day. Yet another night spent, dripping in sweat and swearing at the Texas heat. The days thankfully are spent in the cool environs at work (never was I this relieved to be at work) and in the surprisingly frigid air at Barnes and Nobles. I try to console myself by thinking that I got through similarly hot summers in India without an AC and of course, our ancestors did so too but then ‘getting used to’ is an experience that cannot be passed down generations.

Thankfully, I have a ‘second home’ in Houston where there seem to be no such problems. It has already happened here before. I am hanging around here until the AC is fixed back home, which the AC guy says involves some major work; either digging up the floor or ripping out the ceiling.  But such ‘heating’ problems hardly seem restricted to an old college town. Los Angeles recently lost power due to the unexpectedly hot summer bringing MySpace to its knees. Order has since been restored to millions of child predators but this isn’t a good precedent. If India had to sign an agreement with the United States to employ nuclear power for its energy needs, I wonder if United States is contemplating invading another country. Nah! not for its energy needs but just to ‘spread democracy in the world’. No use sulking in the heat, right?