raffertyesque

Two weekends ago I played host to a German girl who didn’t like air conditioning.

She was not unique. I mean, we’re all unique, we’re all snowflakes, blah blah blah. But she was not unique in that she was a German girl who did not care for air conditioning.

In my experience, Europeans generally don’t care for air conditioning. They don’t really seem to know what to do with it. Not in the “FIRE BAD” caveman sense of not knowing what to do with it, but just in the “what’s with you candyasses and the air conditioning, just deal with it already” sense.

Being only vaguely European myself (I don’t own any cigarettes), I can only guess as to what this character flaw can be attributed, but I think it stands to reason it’s an exposure thing. Here, air conditioning is ubiquitous, but across the pond it’s rarer than relaxed fit jeans.

Regional trains in Italy? No air conditioning. Medieval castles in the Swiss Alps? No air conditioning. City Archives in Slovakia? No air conditioning. Computer labs in Berlin? Air conditioning. But that’s more for the computers than the humans.

My first summer in New York City, the apartment in which I was living was rocking it out Euro-style, sans-AC. My move to New York coincided with what must have been some sort of record-breaking summer… the kind where just when you thought it couldn’t get any hotter, it got hotter than you could have ever possibly imagined. Rumor has it Spike Lee was thinking about making a sequel to Do The Right Thing that summer, but instead he just stayed indoors eating ice cream watching The CW for three months. (Dude loves his Cherry Garcia and Smallville.)

The New York Times seemed to delight in reporting the absurdity of the heat wave. One morning the front page weather report read: “Today - Stiflingly Hot, Tomorrow - Oppressively Hot.” You could almost hear the Times’ weather guy reading his six word forecast aloud to his colleagues, everyone laughing along as he did so, wearing scarfs and drinking hot chocolate in their air conditioned office building.

By the time August rolled around I was resorting to putting my sheets in the freezer before bed and then taking them out and laying down on them hoping to fall asleep before they warmed back up. It did not work very well.

This summer has not been so bad in contrast. Sure, the 34th Street subway stop is still the Seventh Level of Hell and it feels like you’re standing in Satan’s mouth while you wait for your train, but that’s par for the course at this point. Sure, we’ve had some hot days, but I’ve yet to be tempted to freeze my sheets.

Admittedly, this may have something to do with the fact that in my current apartment I have an air conditioner in my bedroom window.

“So Pat, you made it through the stifling summer without an air conditioner, but this summer you couldn’t sweat out a couple days in the triple digits? You candyass.”

Woah there, disembodied voice, watch the language. True, I have an air conditioner now, but let’s not focus on my flip-flopping stance on the cooling of air and let’s instead talk about bringing the honor back to America.

“Wait, what? That’s not what we were talking about at all.”

Exactly.

What I’ve been trying to say all along is that air conditioning is as American as apple pie. It’s a cool (artificial) breeze on a hot summer day. It’s a big screw you to The Man Upstairs. It’s a brownout-inducing shared experience designed to bring neighbors who don’t even know each others’ names closer together to see if everyone’s electricity is out or if it’s just their place. When Willis Haviland Carrier invented the modern air conditioner in Buffalo New York in 1902 (educational quotient for this week: filled), what he was really inventing was a way to make America great(er).

(Cue “The Star-Spangled Banner.”)

Air conditioning is the American way. We park our air conditioned cars and walk briskly across the parking lot to the office to bask in the air conditioned coolness of the workplace. After work we meet up with the missus and go out for an air conditioned dinner at an air conditioned restaurant before going to the air conditioned theater and taking in an conditioned movie (preferably a long one to maximize our dollar-to-AC ratio). After that we get back in our air conditioned cars and drive back to our air conditioned homes to sleep under our down comforters. And we feel comforted. And that my friends, is what makes the United States the greatest country in the world.

So when you’re hanging out with your friends from foreign lands and they start talking about how cold they are because the air conditioning is on, tell them this country was built by people not like them. People who said, “You know what, it’s too damn hot out, let’s go indoors and come up with some contraption that makes the inside cooler while simultaneously making the outside even hotter for everyone else.” People who said “Thank you God, for this glorious planet which you have bestowed upon us, it’s a great start, but we’re just going to tweak a few things here and there. Oh, and we’re also going to plunder this beautiful blue marble of its natural resources to a point beyond repair and in so doing screw ourselves over thus bringing about our own extinction. That’s cool, right? Kthxbye.”

Moral of the story, if you question my air conditioner, then you must hate America.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, next order of business: booking a flight to Germany so I can visit my new friend in Berlin. I’ve got big plans.

Mostly involving computer labs.