(no subject)
This. Is. Ridiculous.
New York City summers are bad enough. Years ago, I read in Carrie Fisher's Postcards From The Edge where one character said the most astute thing I've ever read about New York City in the summer: "It's like a cough. It feels like the whole country came here and coughed." On the really hot days, the humidity from the rivers mixes with the soot from the cars and the pollen from the trees and builds into a steam blanket that overlays everything, with the hot black asphalt keeping that layer of steam nice and thick, and it keeps building and building...
And then we get huge sudden enormous thunderstorms. I've always love thunderstorms, but here it's even more welcome because it's finally a respite from the heat and the smog. It's the city's fever breaking, and after a couple hours of huge, drenching, holy-god-the-subway-is-gonna-flood-I-know-it thunderstorms the temperature drops and the air cools and it is beautiful for the next couple days. Still summer-warm, but much more comfortable, and brilliant blue in the sky and the kind of weather that makes people curl up on blankets in Central Park and think "this isn't so bad, actually."
But that's a normal summer. Usually, the heat on the steamy days only gets up to about 90 or so. Today -- it got up to 100. And they factored in how hot the steam would make everything feel -- that got up to 112.
It's been like this for about a week now -- I haven't cooked a damn thing all week; I've been making big pitchers of iced coffee for my fridge to have instead of hot coffee in the morning, and sometime Sunday I got a loaf of bread and some cold cuts and I have been living on sandwiches for dinner for the past five days. Tempers are short -- I took a cab home today, figuring "sod it", I didn't want to take subway - and ended up in a bit of a pissing match with a woman who tried to fight me for a cab. But then the driver kicked both of us out because he was going off shift.
There's supposed to be storms tomorrow and Sunday. But the last time we had the promise of storms, we only got spitting showers, nowhere near enough to cool things. I only hope it's all been saving itself for osmething tomorrow.
New York City summers are bad enough. Years ago, I read in Carrie Fisher's Postcards From The Edge where one character said the most astute thing I've ever read about New York City in the summer: "It's like a cough. It feels like the whole country came here and coughed." On the really hot days, the humidity from the rivers mixes with the soot from the cars and the pollen from the trees and builds into a steam blanket that overlays everything, with the hot black asphalt keeping that layer of steam nice and thick, and it keeps building and building...
And then we get huge sudden enormous thunderstorms. I've always love thunderstorms, but here it's even more welcome because it's finally a respite from the heat and the smog. It's the city's fever breaking, and after a couple hours of huge, drenching, holy-god-the-subway-is-gonna-flood-I-know-it thunderstorms the temperature drops and the air cools and it is beautiful for the next couple days. Still summer-warm, but much more comfortable, and brilliant blue in the sky and the kind of weather that makes people curl up on blankets in Central Park and think "this isn't so bad, actually."
But that's a normal summer. Usually, the heat on the steamy days only gets up to about 90 or so. Today -- it got up to 100. And they factored in how hot the steam would make everything feel -- that got up to 112.
It's been like this for about a week now -- I haven't cooked a damn thing all week; I've been making big pitchers of iced coffee for my fridge to have instead of hot coffee in the morning, and sometime Sunday I got a loaf of bread and some cold cuts and I have been living on sandwiches for dinner for the past five days. Tempers are short -- I took a cab home today, figuring "sod it", I didn't want to take subway - and ended up in a bit of a pissing match with a woman who tried to fight me for a cab. But then the driver kicked both of us out because he was going off shift.
There's supposed to be storms tomorrow and Sunday. But the last time we had the promise of storms, we only got spitting showers, nowhere near enough to cool things. I only hope it's all been saving itself for osmething tomorrow.