heated conflict

If you happened to see a tired-looking crazy lady carrying a ginormous box with a fan under her arm while wearing a shirt that says "Baby Yourself" on it around Nordstan mall today, that was me. While it is perfectly lovely outside, our apartment heats up at the butt crack of Dawn (and do remember that Dawn's butt crack sinks a bit deeper here in Sweden than it probably does in your neck of the woods) and there has been NO WIND to swirl things around, so basically it's miserable 24/7, and extra-miserable from the hours of 6 am to 11 pm.

Last night around dinner time as Keith and I lay as still as we could without ceasing to contain life, I told him I felt conflicted. Thinking I was still pondering what to do with the evening as we had been earlier, he asked if I'd rather eat dinner or watch a movie.

[** Slight Derivation: This reminds me of the morning of our rehearsal dinner, the day before our wedding, when Keith called to see what needed to be taken care of. I uttered to him, "I'm sick!!" and he so kindly and innocently replied, "Oh, baby! Do you need some DayQuil or ColdEase or something?", not quite understanding the seriousness of which my bridesmaids had taken it upon themselves to properly unbachlorette me, a task which led me to spend 14 hours letting the reflex that is the opposite of swallowing introduce me to my toilet over and over and over. Despite the evidence, we actually do communicate fairly well. **End Derivation]

No, no, I said, feeling a far deeper conflict than dinner or movie. Sometimes, I explained, I want to do good things for the world and save all the children from a hut in Africa while my brilliant, altruistic husband disperses the cheap medicines he's created. But other times, like today when it is 79 degrees out, I want to move back to a land that believes in air-conditioning and have a giant house with a giant coolant system that hums so loudly I can't even hear myself think which is totally okay because all I need to do is drink mojitos all day by the pool. And therein, my friends, lies the conflict.

So anyway, we are now the proud owners of a Really Powerful Fan that has made my life bearable again. I don't usually think of myself as so unadaptable to temperature, but every now and again I am poignantly reminded that I am truly my Father's Daughter and in this case that means I also possess a less diverse range of temperate comfort. Tomorrow we will go to the lake (er, A Lake, since I don't actually know which lake we will go to but there are thousands of them so it doesn't matter) before which I will entertain My Other Conflict that is No Skin Cancer vs. Tinted Skin, a battle I so strongly fight for in each summer's beginning, but usually defect to the enemy by summer's end.