In heat

The weekend brought temperatures of one hundred degrees to parts of San Diego, and the temperature inside my apartment reached the mid-nineties. Sunday afternoon I spent too much time out in the blazing heat, and hence seem to have acquired for myself a solid case of heat sickness. I spent Sunday evening lying on the floor in the path of the fan and dreaming about air conditioning.

As I lay there trying to use telepathy or telekinesis to lower the temperature, the power in my building went out, for the second time in as many weeks, making me re-think my fantasy of buying an air conditioner, since I'm not sure the grid in my dorky old building could handle it. And I would feel tremendously guilty for wasting so much energy -- I live less than one mile from the waterfront! I should not need air conditioning!

One lovely thing I have discovered in these recent brown-outs is that the low-energy fluorescent bulbs I purchased from Ikea produce just as much light in a brown-out as they do on a regular day. It seems they draw so little power that they are able to fully brighten themselves even when no other device in my apartment is sufficiently juiced.

Lying there in the heat on the floor, staring at my no-longer-spinning fan, I decided to go out for a night walk, in hopes that I might find ocean breezes circulating through the canyons to cool my tired body. I slipped on my sandals, grabbed a flashlight, and went out into the darkness for a stroll. Only my building seemed to be affected by the outage, though clearly everyone was affected by the heat.

At some point during my childhood I read a book about nature survival that taught all kinds of useful things like how to build a lean-to, and all sorts of ridiculous things like how to tell the temperature with cricket chirps. I was reminded of this by the orchestra of crickets frantically chirping away in the night.

I walked up a nearby hill, past houses with windows open, people sitting quietly in their homes and trying to stay cool. I heard no televisions nor radios; nothing but silence on this unseasonably hot April Sunday night. As I walked, I passed through warm and cool spots nestled in pockets; warm winds whipped around me, circling up and down the canyons so that, but for the dryness, it was impossible to tell the direction from which it originated.

Reaching the bottom of one winding canyon, I circled around to come up another back to my apartment. I passed a group of eight or so young Mexican men, smoking cigarettes and drinking Coronas, and gossiping about women to pass time in the heat. A few yards later, I passed a group of their female counterparts, beer bottles clinking in the night heat, laughing and talking.

Tonight the heat is still on, and the power is still out (my landlady tells me for the third day in a row). I can hear my fans try to revive their cooling hum; the neighbors murmur in the courtyard about what SDG&E said when each one of them called to complain; slight variations on the same story; threats to report this to 'Turko' (our local sensationalist reporter of mundane happenings, who makes rising bread prices sound like the work of a liberal conspiracy to overthrow the government). Apparently, only the 25 units in our building and maybe half a dozen other customers are without power right now, which is impressive evidence of the socioeconomic influence on the quality of customer service, since I live in the World's Most Ghetto Apartment Complex Ever.

And so, I sit in the dark, not because my eco-friendly lights don't work, but because everyone else sits in the dark. There is enough power to run my network and my laptop (thank heaven for surge protectors, which have clearly prevented the death of my electronics), so I spend my evening in the dark, languishing in the heat, ears open to the sounds of the building, eaves-dropping on the conversations of neighbors. It is amazing how even the stupidest of crises brings people together; I have exchanged friendly words with more neighbors this evening than in the past nine months of living here.