(or What To Do When The Humidity Gets Really Ridiculous; Seriously, It’s Like The Air Is Liquid Or Something)

1. Proceed directly to the Greenmarket in Union Square. “But Emma, that’s outside, in the sun!” I know, I know, but we’re talking long term benefits here. These benefits will become apparent once you get back home with your bags of fresh salad greens and OH MY GOD those pea pods that you can really just eat raw they’re so good and for once you don’t have to cook anything for dinner, you can make strange large salads with very little dressing because they don’t even need it and everything is cold and moist and fucking crisp and there’s no ovens involved at all.

2. When inside, at your house, don’t bother with clothes unless you’re expecting the UPS guy, in which case wait at the window until he shows up (thank you David) and then run back inside and immediately strip down to a bra and/or boxers (as the case may be). Leave your windows open and your blinds closed for maximum breeze with minimum gawking.

3. Get a god damned Brita pitcher. Seriously, these are the best things ever. As long as you remember to actually refill it after you drink THE ENTIRE CONTENTS AT ONCE, there’s always this huge receptacle filled with unbelievably good water that’s cold. Colder than tap water and it doesn’t even need ice, and I think they put crack in the filters or something because it tastes so good that you’ll be drinking it constantly which is probably beneficial anyway what with that drink eight glasses of water a day thing that everyone was talking about a couple years ago.

4. I’ve been told chewing on ice is bad for your teeth, but that smacks of one of those things that everyone says (like “drink eight glasses of water a day”) but nobody knows what source, exactly, this really valuable information is coming from. I like chewing on ice.

5. If sitting around naked (full of salad and Brita water and chewing on ice) isn’t enough for you, I guess you could try getting drunk enough that you don’t care how hot it is. I guess I could try that, actually.

<drew> what’s your middle name
<emma> elizabeth
<drew> EES
<emma> i am like ee cummings only cooler and with boobs
<drew> HAHA
<drew> e e story
<drew>

there’s something really unsettling about my air conditioner. maybe it’s the fact that it doesn’t actually work very well, or the noise it makes, or the fact that i have to have my bedroom door closed to produce any sort of noticeable difference in temperature. i’m not sure, exactly, but i’ve decided i prefer having all my windows open, although that’s even less effective than shitty air conditioning.

what’s more fun than uncomfortable temperature regulation? lots of things, but rstevens’s clango club in particular. i joined early and got the crazycool skull pack a few weeks ago - if you haven’t already, you should join now in time for rocker month. it’s only a couple bucks and it’s superfun getting stuff from rstevens in the mail.

to whomever sent this anonymous case of joltspresso: i appreciate it. i really do. however, arriving as it did just after i purchased a pound of surprisingly good ground hazelnut and well before the depletion of my supply of doubleshot free samples, this essentially means i won’t sleep again ever. not that this is a bad thing - think of all i could get done in those extra six to eight hours a day, after all. i’ll be increasing my potential productivity by leaps and bounds; while all those foolish mortals spend their nights asleep, i can stay awake, scheming and plotting and taking over the world. there will be blueprints taped to walls, i’m sure of it. there will be protractors and binoculars and machines that go ping, and at the end of it i will rule you all. so: thank you, mysterious benefactor, you are a credit to your species, much like scott before you.

i slept really well last night thanks to the cooler-than-expected weather. woke up slowly and groggily, trying to make sense of my dreams before i forgot them all - which i invariably do - and remembered only something about shopping very urgently for the perfect set of martini glasses. a friend was with me and we wandered through store after store finding martini glasses that were nice or very good but not perfect, which was frustrating but less so than you might expect.

drinking some surprisingly decent coffee, finalizing shirt orders. i’ll let you know when they’ve been printed and shipped, like last time. i’m rather looking forward to them, i have to admit. hanes beefy tees are way comfy - i’ve noticed that my kompressor shirt and my violent shirt are softer than a lot of my other tees. hurray!

re bottles: an astute reader noted that my apparent photographic affinity for them is not a recent phenomenon, after all.

re movable type: looks like kottke too has made the switch from manual updates to mt. i remember when i first switched to newspro, i ended up being inclined to post much more frequently, which i hadn’t expected - it’s not like copying files is all that much work, really, but simplifying the process even a little bit turns out to be a huge relief. mt is a much more powerful content management tool than was newspro, as much as i loved newspro, and i wonder if that too will have an effect on my posting. i suspect not, actually, or at least not as much as when i changed to newspro, but i suppose we’ll see. there’s a lot more that i could do with mt, but it remains to be seen if i’ll find it necessary to actually do so. right now it’s doing more or less everything i want it to, which is as it should be.

apparently, i’ve got a thing for bottles. i wonder if jolt gets jealous? seriously, the skyy meant nothing to me, i promise. you know i’ll never leave you, baby. not even for a doubleshot.

it’s officially too hot to eat ramen now. i don’t care how cheap it is, ramen is just not summer food. when it gets above seventy degrees all i can think about are huge salads and cucumber slices and possibly yogurt, but definitely not hot noodles. once it’s warm all the time i end up doing most of my grocery shopping at the greenmarket in union square. i used to live right across the street from it but now that i’m almost an hour away i still go there because most of the produce in my neighborhood is uninspiring at best. i head in once a week or so and come home with bags of salad greens and fruit and homemade bread and mmm. it’s a little pricier than ramen obviously, but it’s actually still quite cheap, at least compared to most grocery stores in the area. and of course infinitely more appealing.

despite my earlier bitching about the heat, though, this week hasn’t been all that bad. it feels more like early may than early june today, which is fine with me. i’ve got all my windows open, which means everything on my desk is blowing around but at least the apartment’s getting aired out. cloves smell great when you’re smoking them, but stale cigarette smoke of any variety smells rather less so. i know it will probably get disgustingly hot within the next couple of weeks but i’m savoring the mild weather while it lasts.

tonight i’m wavering between finishing up the ramen i bought weeks ago because i know i’ll never eat it otherwise or giving in and making mushroom tortelloni. leaning towards the latter at the moment. film at eleven.

i think i’m going to try and hit a couple yankees games this summer. i was otherwise occupied last year and didn’t get to any, but there’s still tickets for plenty of stuff i want to see this season.

spencer and i caught spider-man again last night on a whim, and it was just as entertaining the second time. definitely just escapist fun, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. not every movie can be - or indeed should be - an amelie (although that was also undeniably fantastic). i can’t wait for the score to come out; danny elfman’s music for it is as perfect as you’d expect from him. the theme has been running through my head for weeks.

today was hot but not terribly humid, and in the shade it wasn’t bad at all. i sat on my fire escape drinking cranberry juice and reading, which all in all was more or less ideal for this particular saturday afternoon.

very early morning is the one time that summer is actually bearable, even pleasant. when i stretch and wake up at five or six and can actually manage to untangle myself from the sheets and get out of bed, it’s great. i feel like i’ve somehow cheated the weather by sneaking in a few extra hours when it’s still cool and walking to the kitchen doesn’t involve breaking a sweat. of course, that involves actually waking up at five or six, so it’s relatively rare.

i managed to get up at five thirty this morning, and while that will probably necessitate a nap later, right now it’s great. i slipped on some shoes, walked down to the water, and had a clove. quick shower when i got back and now i’m making coffee that i’ll actually be able to drink hot because it’s still only maybe sixty five or so. delicious.