guest post 11

More from Kep:

Is it only me who is sweating it out today? The Dew Point – a summer match to the wind chill index, except, take note all you weather people, it is way less comprehensible, so quit acting as if we understand what it really is – it’s high though. That means my shirt and my skin are stuck in some infernal way, bonded through the heat and humidity. (I am offering up a better marker here: why don’t you, weather types, instead of measuring Dew Points, measure how many men it would take to pry the shirt off my damp back? So much easier to visualize than Dew Points. Who the hell cares about Dew Points.)

Nina once proclaimed (that is a verb that sooooo suits her) that she hates air conditioning. So I was going to ask her to have a late night drink this week but I remembered how unpleasant it is to sit next to her at a bar in summer hell weather days. She pulls on sweater after sweater and complains how the coldest day in Wisconsin is actually right now just because the inside temperatures are hovering near 49 degrees F., thanks to this state’s love affair with the AC.

Of course, this is all one of those Nina-ggerations. I happen to know that she has snubbed the Polish way of controlling the heat inside as well. She tells me Poles pack in a bunch of people, turn off the fans and leave you to take a whiff of the ten different types of body odor that quickly fill the space. Fun! And the much adored by her (okay, and by me) French? Obviously they love to feel warm and French toasty. They’re forever choking themselves in scarves and wearing tailored coats and it’s hard to ever lay eyes on that awesome, curvaceous French shoulder because it is always hiding under some silky number or other. Indoors, they sit tightly together and smoke cigarettes and do all sorts of things to ensure that there is no flow of cool air anywhere around. So Nina, let me say this much: all countries seem to have their own issues with temperatures, inside and out.

I find myself lapsing into silence when Nina goes on one of her “in this country” or “in that country” spins. There's this desperation about it, have you noticed? I'm thinking that she is really culturally confused and always evaluating these easy clichés to help her sort through the muddle she is in. I’m silent and I am also sorry for her. I would hate not having a home base. She talks about having roots in Poland, but what kind of roots are we looking at? Pretty thin roots if most of her years have been in Wisconsin. Next time you see her, go ahead: ask her where she’s from. She cannot answer that without pausing for ten minutes and looking pained. She will not just blurt out Wisconsin, or Poland, or New York, or America. She deliberates, she qualifies and she looks stupid doing it. She should just pick a place, say Greenland, nice and exotic, and stick with it.

Hey, let me offer my own generalization: here in America, we don’t really care where a person’s from anyway when we ask, we’re all just making polite conversation, biding our time until we can get to the real stuff that’s troubling us – whether the person voted for Bush, or whether they share our deep-rooted fears of communism and naked bodies. Whereas for Nina, the question of “where you’re from” brings on the beads of sweat and causes her internal organs to convulse.

Which brings me back to the beads of sweat. Hey, Nina, let’s wait with the drink until the heat breaks. Or if you don’t want to wait – no more about the air conditioning already, okay?