Inside the bubble

[mellicious]

My weekend up north got me thinking about air conditioning. Now, air conditioning is an amazing thing, don't get me wrong. Life in this climate wouldn't be tolerable without it. If you live up north, you may not fully understand this. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, who has a choice lives without air conditioning down here. It would just be insane.

(Having never lived outside of Texas, it took me a long time to understand that there are parts of the world where air conditioning is considered optional. The first time karen_d came down to visit me, she said something about renting a car with air conditioning, and I laughed. Because down here, you can't rent a car that doesn't have it. They all do.)

I was driving down the freeway today, and I rolled my window down some, because my air conditioning is being sort of cranky and right now we're still at the point where the outside air is sort of tolerable anyway - at least when you're hurtling down I-45 at 70 mph. What I immediately noticed was how much noise certain vehicles make. Pickups with diesel engines (very popular in these parts) and motorcycles seem to be the biggest offenders. And I was wondering if they get away with this partly because everybody is driving around with the windows up and the a/c blasting anyway, so they don't notice.

We tend to live in our own little worlds around here, at least this time of year. All over the southern half of this country, people go rushing from their air-conditioned houses to their air-conditioned cars, from their cars to the stores, with as little time outside as humanly possible. I'm not exactly advocating that we all stop and smell the roses or anything, you understand, because frankly, it's hard to enjoy smelling the roses when it's 95 degrees and 80% humidity. And it doesn't take but a few minutes of that before you smell a lot stronger than the roses yourself. But there's got to be some side effects of living in the bubble that we're not really aware of.

(I don't know if there's any real point to this little rumination. I was just thinking.)

Comments

[a-chara.livejournal.com]

coming from an area where air conditioning isn't the norm--I think what you described is more of a societal thing.

we're just more disconnected (at least physically) now than in the past.

my 2 cents...:)

of course, I'm in Seattle and we tend to be distant people, so maybe I'm wrong.