There Will be ZERO Woo-Pitching

A flaming orange ball of gas

Even if I had a baby with whom to pitch it.

In fact, I would probably pitch them... into a separate room.

But not outside; I'm not a monster.

My neighbor is a weatherman. Weatherwoman? (No, wait...) Weatherperson? Ooo, I know: Weather Nerd! So I asked her what the temperature is in our neighborhood, as I was getting a variance of several degrees Fahrenheit, depending on which nearby weather station I was pinging. She didn't answer my question. She just sent me a link to her weather page. Stand up and take a bow - if you can stand to move at all - because this web page has awesome up-to-the-minute data. When I started writing this post, the temp was down to 98F (from a high of 101). Now it's something like 97.1 and falling. 

In any case, as with everything else in life, I cope with the stress of X - in this case, a completely unreasonable heatwave - by a) writing about it, and b) assigning music to it.

It is possible that this is a weird little neuro-quirk. The assigning-music part of it, anyway. Writing about it is a pretty widely accepted mainstream journaling mental health kind of coping mechanism thing.

So I spent all day yesterday being Extra Anxious™ about the upcoming heatwave. I think. At least I was simultaneously twitchy and wiped out, in that lovely state I call Wired and Tired, and there was no other immediately obvious reason for same. Just me fretting about the state of the planet, the state of my country, friends and family, etc. Anxiety is like that sometimes.

You know, the usual.

But this morning, I was fine. I suspect this is because the heatwave has arrived, and while it's fairly awful, the world did not immediately stop turning.

It is, however, still Too Darn Hot.

And with that tune in my head, I enlisted Liz to help me think up songs to associate with this 100F nonsense we're expecting for a couple more days at least. 

My first go-to, is, naturally, Star Trek. In this case, a Next Generation episode called The Inner Light, one of the best episodes in my opinion, and evidently many critics and fans think alike. It's no Darmok, but that's another post entirely; entire linguistics curricula have been written about that one. Season five had a lot of awesomeness. 

Anyway, back to The Inner Light - for those of you who did not click the link, it's an episode where the Enterprise comes across a probe, Picard collapses, and the rest of the episode is him living out the memories of a man's life on a planet that is nearing the end of its habitability due to heat.

One would think this would not be a comfort for me, but here we are. 

So... for the You Have Got To Be Joking - Some Still Think Climate Change is a Hoax playlist...

• The tin whistle tune from The Inner Light
• The aforementioned Too Darn Hot
• Sesame Street's Hace Calor - always a favorite
• Again Sesame Street, from the Fiesta! album - Hot Hot Hot
• Foreigner's Hot-Blooded

There are a few others but we're going to move on to the counteracting-the-heat playlist:

• It wouldn't be a proper playlist without Dr. Horrible and his Freeze Ray
• And more musical theater with Heathers: The Musical
• Foreigner's Cold as Ice, just for balance
• Ha! We found Sesame Street's Hace Frio

And now, guess what?

I feel better.