Posted in an obscure corner of my dorm’s bulletin board I found an interesting announcement yesterday. It read, simply, “All air-conditioners will be turned off as of October 1st. Heat will be activated as of November 1st.” Here in the AP Houses we have both hall aircons (as they’re known in Japan) and room aircons. I naturally assumed that the halls were about to get a little warmer, and thought nothing more about it.

Of course, at precisely 12:00am October 1st, my air-conditioner fell silent and would stir no more this year. You may or may not be aware of the high level of technology to be found in the local cooling devices.

These things can either be a blessing or they can bite you in the ass… At the moment my ass hurts. Unbeknownst to me, while I was merrily freezing myself to death in my 68 degree icebox, the campus air-conditioning police were just biding their time before pushing the big red button and silencing my lovable frosty friend. It seems to me such a system would just beg to be messed with. Imagine setting some unsuspecting fellow’s heater to maximum while he was in class. Upon returning home and opening his door, he’d be hit with such a blast of heat that his very eyeballs would crumble into dust right in their sockets!

In reality, this lack of A/C would not have even been news had we not had a lovely 88 degree, breezeless day today. People, in a word, were suffering. While I indeed missed my cool breeze of love, coming from Florida I fared much better than some of my northern brethren. The Mongolians in particular took it hard. Slumped on couches in the coolest parts of the first floor, they lay like beached porpoises, their psyches mere shadows of their former ebullient selves…

When I awoke this morning I had a long slate of cleaning tasks to carry out in my room, and did I ever pick a terrible day to do it. My window faces directly south, and the breeze, when it does blow, comes in from the water from east to west – thus not into my room. My quaint little pigeon hole was a full-fledged pigeon oven by 1pm. Drawing the shades only served to lesson the visual impact, the glass of my windows still did their best to make this room a greenhouse.

There is something to be said for adhering to a schedule. But in terms of climate control I think a little administrational flexibility should be in order, don’t you? As it stands, we have all just experienced the first day of the 31 day thermo-limbo-marathon. It is still hot, and yet we cannot be cool. It only stands to reason that once we are cool, we will not yet be able to heat ourselves…

Our grandchildren will talk of this hardship with hushed voices and tears in their eyes…

Mercifully, as I write this it is evening and things have begun to cool. The only thing worse than a stiflingly hot day, is to have nowhere to go on a stiflingly hot day. Today was such a day. Tomorrow, the eve of my first graduate school class, promises to be better – at least one can hope!