During the summers when we were growing up, my brother and I thought my mom was insane because she never wanted to use the air conditioning, and when she finally caved (because it was 97 degrees outside, 105 degrees in our house, and our cheeks were permanently flushed) there were all these stipulations, like we could only start the air conditioner at night and it wasn't ever set to 72 degrees like at "other people's houses" (read: my dad's car) but was instead set to something balmy like 80 degrees -- a temperature at which "other people's parents" (again, probably mostly my dad, in his car) would already have turned on their air conditioning. I'm sure we went so far as to suggest this was child abuse, and the first time I visited my mom's house after starting my job (in a hyper-refrigerated corporate office), I suggested that she could only afford to be so blase about the A/C because she spent all day at the hyper-refrigerated hospital, while her two fragile children were sweating bullets or taking illicit shelter in neighbor's homes ("Of course her parents are home, Mom. Geez, do you think they have jobs or something!?").

But at the ripe old age of 23, I find I'm becoming my mother, in this case by taking up the role of air-conditioner Nazi in my apartment (ostensibly, because I own the window air conditioner that we installed in the kitchen because there are bars over my bedroom window, but really because I'm a monstrous neurotic control freak who cannot abide temperature-related discomfort of either the too-hot or too-cold variety). Because I am a benevolent dictator -- and because it's been 90 in Brooklyn for the past two weeks -- I've allowed the air conditioner to be run. But because we only have the one unit, I've also instituted an elaborate fan rotating system (facing out during the day, facing in during the night), covered the one source of natural light in our garden level apartment, and switched religiously from "Fan Only" to "Low Cool" at various points throughout the day (the algorithm for when and how this switch occurs is mysterious, known only to me and not at all random or based on whether I want to take a nap or will be out of the apartment all day).

I'm sure when our electric bill comes in 4x as high as it was in the spring, I will explain to my roommates that we're lucky, because it could have been 8 million times higher if I hadn't turned off all the lights, unplugged all the electronics, and rocketed us back to the Stone Age during daylight hours.