Turning the air conditioning on full blast cannot eliminate the scorching stuffiness found in a car in the summertime. The wheel’s hot, the air is initially hotter, and after you’ve been driving for ten minutes or so, the air becomes stale and dry thanks to the arctic blast.
If we accept the fact that there’s no way to avoid the heat entirely, why not embrace it? Go to a place where heat is desired and people even complain when it’s absent. Namely, the neighborhood pool.
Take your pick from one of twenty vacant lounge chairs on which you can place your towel. Make sure the towel is high enough on the chair so it covers your face when you lie down, but is low enough so your legs won’t be indented with lines. Next, remove anything covering your bathing suit before sitting down. Trust me when I tell you that failure to do so will result in awkward tan linage that someone will comment on the next time you’re in said bathing suit. After putting your clothes back in your bag so some middle school kid doesn’t run over them as he’s attempting a triple-tuck-twenty-flip dive from fifty feet away, you are ready to sit down at last and enjoy the peace.
If you’ve brought a friend with you, this is a prime opportunity to converse and gossip (not about the people in the vicinity, of course). If you haven’t, however, you have several options.
You can open the book you brought to read, because the pool is a great place to sit in solitude. However, finishing any one page may take up to five times longer than usual due to one or more of the following:
- Loud Rihanna rhymes or Stones songs, depending on the lifeguard and the time of day. In any event, you know all the lyrics to every song, so you mentally sing and become confused when Howard Roark says the DJ’s got him falling in love again.
- Overheard conversations of surrounding members that happen to catch your attention. Like a soap opera, never has another’s life in suburbia been so fascinating. And mothers do tend to talk about their children who are only fifty feet away.
- Adults who start conversations with you that stem from physical objects surrounding you. I really don’t mind talking to adults, though, which is good since I’ll officially be one in a month.
- Middle school boys who strike up conversations with you that end abruptly when they realize that you’re just being nice and you are too old to ever, ever date them.
- Quick, moving figures, also known as the lifeguards diving during adult swim. I’m like a little boy with ADD; if it’s moving, I’ll watch it. Plus, they’re pretty decent.
Once you have spent adequate time at the pool, marked by feeling your warm back, finishing the last bit of water in your Camelbak, and running out of new positions in which to put your head while reading, you must pack up your belongings and depart with happiness, serenity, and perhaps sunburned skin. Drive home in your stuffy car, enjoy your tan, and come back someday soon.