The mystery of "Himmmm"

I hate heat. 

Normally I write these things at 2 am because that's when I'm awake. I'm writing this particular thing at 2 am because that's when it's not 95F outside. It's not quite 95F inside, but it gets stupidly close. My room only has one window -- so, still legally rentable as a bedroom in the state of Massachusetts -- and for some reason only the upper sash will open. I'm not dumb enough to wedge an AC unit into the top of a busted antique double-hung window, so my bedroom has been temporarily converted into a large solar-powered oven.

The rat has been spending his days in the living room, where it's climate-controlled. (Rat, singular. I am down to only Tseng at the moment. If you don't keep up with my Facebook, Errand, the remaining old man foster, finally got to go back to his original mommy. He was very weirded out by being packed up into a carrier and trundled out to the Fenway, but happy to be returned to someone who is home enough to satisfy his codependent little ratty heart.) I don't quite trust him in his soft-sided carrier all day, so he gets the real metal travel cage, with bedding and boxes and covers and a bowl of Cheerios and everything. His vacation home sits pretty much right underneath the air conditioner. 

One of my friends proclaimed it "glamping". That's fair. He has his own Pepsi box to sleep in. By rat standards, it's pretty bougie.

(I cannot bring myself to spell it "boojee". I know that's how the children on the tik-toks write it now, but I speak actual French, and they probably think I'm old enough to personally remember the revolution that made it relevant, so I'm going to be a cranky old bat here. Now go get gramma another gin and explain what the fuck "cheugy" is.)

I especially hate the weather because it makes breathing difficult. You all might remember that it was around this time last year that we had our first panic-run on face masks, and I bitched that I was suffocating. I assumed I was being a wuss and coped mostly by not doing anything, which was easy, because nothing was open. Nope! The Commonwealth has dropped all of its COVID restrictions, but the dance studio where I do my work dragged its feet on letting us take off the masks, and it has been hell. It turns out that I have "mild intermittent asthma", which was not enough to get me bumped to the front of the vaccine line even if I'd known that when they were first being given out, but is more than enough to make my life goddamned inconvenient sometimes. 

I have some trouble with it every year, but it kicks up the same time of year my allergies get really awful. Knocking back some (real, OTC-controlled) decongestant for that also takes care of the breathing problems, so I assumed that's what it was. It's tripped by heat and/or humidity plus some kind of bronchial irritation, usually from the aforementioned hay fever. The amount of airflow I can get through a mask is irrelevant; the problem is that it's hot and squishy outside, and even hotter and squishier inside the mask, and my lungs cannot cope. Per the usual, my presentation is not quite normal. I don't do the customary wheezing on the way in, I just can't exhale all the way, and no matter how much air I do suck in I feel like I'm not getting enough. I can heave and flail for quite a long time without getting any symptoms of hyperventilation, so clearly there is something going on with my O2 sat. I don't know how much of it is bronchospasm and how much is just my usual catastrophically low blood pressure, but the end result is that I've spent a lot of the past couple of months lying face down on the floor trying to re-perfuse.

In retrospect, that probably explains why I hated exercise as a kid. That feeling of "I cannot get enough air" was right up there with "I keep whacking things out of place and it hurts a lot to use them" on the list of reasons why I was willing to do just about anything short of amputate limbs to get out of gym class. I took two years of Air Force ROTC in high school, despite a crippling allergy to stupid bureaucracy, because 1) I like airplanes and 2) it got me out of running laps around the football field. I wonked out something in one of my feet (again) in junior high, and rather than ignore it until it went away like normal, I whined until I was given a pair of crutches to ward off anyone who tried to make me participate in PE. Even in elementary school, there were a few times when I just sat the fuck down and refused to do whatever it was they wanted me to do, because it was too hot, and I couldn't breathe, and I hurt something, and just no.

What did the adults in my life do about any of this, you ask? Nothing, really. Most reactions were somewhere between an eye roll and threatening to call my mother. (So far as I can recall, they never did, probably because that would mean they'd have to talk to my mother.) The kindest responses I remember getting were the adults who assumed I was a clumsy kid suffering from a lack of confidence, and if they could just convince me to believe in myself, I would magically be able to do the thing. The fact that I didn't want to do the thing didn't seem to interest anyone in the slightest. 

[I will note that dance classes were an exception to this, even as a kid. There wasn't a lot of different stuff on offer where I was, out in Edward Scissorhands suburbia, and I did put my foot down and quit ballet around age 10 on the grounds that it bored me senseless, but I kept going to tap and jazz as long as my mother kept signing me up. I dimly recall that at one point she had a work-share agreement with a local studio, where she taught a couple of the peewee classes in exchange for another instructor giving private lessons to me and my sister. Ironically, one of the reasons I quit dance for a while was that she stepped up the boundary-smashing when I left for college, and if I'd been taking any dance classes at that point, she'd never have stopped trying to stick her nose in.]

I had no interest in fitness for its own sake. As far as I could tell, the point of exercising was to eventually do more exercises for a longer time. My only experience of exercise was "this feels like dying", so why the fuck would I want to do that? I knew adults exercised to make themselves look a certain way, but I kind of always thought I looked fine? So no motivation there, either. On top of that, I tend to learn physical skills in this weird, lumpy, uneven fashion, which means large dance/fitness classes -- where you cannot realistically hold up thirty other people to ask the instructor one dumb question -- are not super fun for me.

My sister did sort of care about sports, so my mother cast her in the role of Family Athlete and took her to a damn doctor somewhere around middle school. She ended up with a rescue inhaler -- the same kind I hiked down to CVS to buy about a month ago, in fact, modulo the CFC propellant they used to use back in the '90s. This is one of those family stories I think I'm just going to huck onto the pile labeled "medical neglect(?)" and not think about too hard for the remainder of my life.

I still refuse to "work out" just for the sake of working out, but I do a lot of moving in pursuit of other things I do care about, so this not-breathing thing is really pissing me off. I found out at one point that the actual reason the studio hadn't dropped the universal mask requirement at the same time as the state (and, more relevantly, the rest of the local gyms and activity spaces) was that a couple of the instructors had thrown tantrums and refused to come back unless everyone kept their faces swaddled at all times. After the urge to hurl something at the nearest wall subsided, I used my best formal business English -- which, despite what you see here, is actually pretty good -- to write them a long-ass email about how I have seen more rescue inhalers this year than in my previous nine years of working there combined (INCLUDING MINE), which suggests the masks are now starting to be a hazard in their own right to a pretty large segment of our clientele, and also that it is complete bullshit to let our policy be dictated not by reason or even by an overabundance of caution, but by whoever is best at offloading management of their anxiety disorder onto the other people on the Zoom call. 

I assume by default that no one listens to a damn thing I say, but I actually got a personal response from our executive director, which was also in formal business English but boiled down to "we had a long discussion and we'll be letting teachers set their own class policy as soon as we can get the Luddites to acknowledge their email". I am fully vaccinated, and all of my instructors have gone for 'mask optional', albeit in one case this is solely because they did not give him a checkbox for 'brb will be out in the back courtyard setting mine on fucking fire', so in about a week I will no longer have to care.