DEAR DUMB DIARY

hypergamy, heatwaves, and matters of the heart

HOUSEKEEPING

Hello! To all the new faces: I publish one free post per week and one paid post biweekly.

Without further ado, please behold my newest column: Dear Dumb Diary.

Did you know they made a movie musical out of this? Is nothing sacred?

6:30am

I have awoken in hell. Again. Western Europe is in the midst of another heatwave, and in the two weeks since the last one, we’ve unfortunately not prepared ourselves enough to cope. I’ll give our governments grace: it’s hard to update all infrastructure, send the oil and gas CEOs to jail, create an adequate number of public cooling stations, and install millions of air conditioning units within a 14-day period (DO NOT DEBATE ME ON AC; I’d rather people not die overheating than hand-wring over a carbon footprint that is negligible compared to that of the oil and gas industry’s).

But let’s check back in five years and see if anything’s changed. What are the odds: will our likely far-right parliaments¹ prioritize the health of their constituents, or will they whore themselves out to fossil fuel and data center companies? I’m feeling hopeful!

I try to go back to sleep. Though I woke up at 6:30am due to the sunlight beaming into my eyes and raising my room’s temperature by 500 degrees, I was supposed to wake at 8:30am because I could not sleep until 1:00am last night due to the heat. I refuse to get out of bed until the alarm goes off.

Toni Collette in Hereditary, or ME in MY ROOM this morning?

8:30am

I have not slept at all. My room has only grown hotter, the sunshine brighter; my fan is doing nothing to improve the situation. My clock beeps. I get up, hack my dull bread knife through a sourdough loaf, and eat a slice with some hummus. I take my medication and check the weather app. Approaching 100 degrees this afternoon. I better enjoy the morning chill while it lasts.

10:00am

I’ve done some busywork whilst laying in bed—the immediate post-medication nausea makes sitting at my desk unpleasant. My meetings have been cancelled today. I feel sluggish, but am surprised when inspiration hits and I pump out an essay about the Homestead Act of 1862, sharecropping, and agricultural imaginaries? I regard my computer curiously. I did not know I had thousands of words in me about farming. Must have been my ancestors moving through me. Sometimes I feel my computer is a Ouija board, and I am but the Spirit’s automaton.

sometimes I feel like they do

12:00pm

My stomach tells me that I need to eat now.

I dash to the kitchen, throw open the refrigerator and plunge my hand into a bag of arugula. After I stuff a fistful of leaves into my mouth, I note that something tastes a bit off. I peer into the bag. Bits of the arugula have turned dark and congealed into a sort of mush. It is rotting. But is its sell-by date not July 10th? I then realize that despite the fact that I am standing before an open refrigerator, I have registered no chill upon my skin. I check the temperature dial: it is set at maximum coldness.

Our refrigerator has broken during a heatwave.