It is August and here I am wearing a long sleeved shirt, I even turned off my fan last night before I fell asleep, because I was getting cold. If you weren’t already aware of my strangeness here is another quirk. As if personal space issues weren’t enough I have cold issues too! Meaning I am almost always cold or on the brink of being cold.
And my new apartment doesn’t have air-conditioning! I think that this statement would appall most people, but it really doesn’t bother me too much. I think it’s because I am usually gone during the heat of the day and it is always cooler at night, plus you aren’t really moving around much at night anyway. So on that subject, the air-cooling one, I have a 2-speed twin window fan that is currently installed in one of my three street facing windows. This fan is quite sufficient.
I have, on a number of occasions been laughed at for wearing cold weather clothing in the summer. One of these times was earlier this summer, sometime in July. (apparently the hottest month of the year! Especially in Oklahoma.)
The incident occurred one Friday when I was leaving work, I was fortunate enough to be able to leave at noon on Fridays, but one caveat to this was that I was unable to go to lunch with everyone in the office, because they always left at 11:15am for lunch and I left at noon.
So anyway, I was headed out the door in my Banana Republic, dark wash skinny jeans, a pastel colored plaid old school 3 button cotton pullover with a mandarin collar, Black ballet flats with a cute button on the side, and a new Powder Blue Pashmina that my sister had just brought back from New York City for me.
I had the Pashmina wrapped loosely around my neck as I was walking out the front door of the office and the moment I pushed open the door…there was Brad (my good friend who I’ve known since we attended High school together and now, oddly enough working together) coming back from lunch. He look one look at me and said something like “What are you doing?!! It is like 1,000,000 degrees exactly, out here!” I must admit, he did look a little warm upon opening the door, but I was coming from the downstairs office Library( where I was setup doing computer work for the summer ) The room I worked in was always 20 degrees below, and for a person, such as myself, who has almost no body fat and a predisposition for the abhorrence of cold, there really was no hope. I turned my car’s air-conditioner on exactly 3 times the entire summer, two of those times purely for the benefit of others rather than myself, and then once on a day it hit 109 or something.
Back to the point, said friend Brad , just stood there while I tried to explain the reasoning behind the aforementioned outfit of choice, the cold, the new Pashmina I wanted to wear etc.. But this wasn’t good enough, Brad continued to berate me while Dennis (the company moneyman, not the CEO or President but still pretty high up the ladder) walked up and laughingly said “and she’s got a jacket under her arm, too!” This as you can imagine was quite embarrassing to me and I continued to plead my cold case, but to no avail… all was lost.
I stepped back and allowed Dennis to enter the building while I conversed momentarily with Brad, at which time I unwound the Powder Blue Pashmina from about my neck and tucked it into my capricious tote bag, slid my tortoise shell sunglasses into place, gave Brad a withering, but slightly bemused glance, turned and walked to my car, heading off to unwind at Double Shot.
Double Shot Coffee Co. my favorite place to be, next to Church and with family, but more on that later, Double Shot deserves more than one post of its own. After that day, the term “1 million degrees exactly!” was added to my repertoire and Brad and I both, use it to describe something totally outrageous and unpredictable, and am continually teased about my propensity for being continually cold.
This propensity is not really a good thing, it makes life difficult, you have to always carry about a sweater (In my car at home I usually had a collection of 3 or 4 sweaters and jackets lying about, in the back seat, just waiting for me to get cold) and if you ever clean out your car, watch out, you’ll be cold for a week.
Because you’d forget to bring another one out to the car, or you left the other one at work or on the couch…and then you’d be out somewhere and the weather outside would be fine but the second you walked inside you’d be hit with an artic blast of air-conditioned air, and where would you be then? “Up a creek” and then someone might lend you their sweater or something and I’ve found that this is not always the best idea… for reasons obvious only to myself and a few others. So…don’t take it personally if I refuse the sweater and choose to freeze in my own unprepared-ness.
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