Here’s how to get from point A to point B: stick one ice pack under your hat, stick another icepack in the laptop compartment of your backpack. Shut all the windows of your house, because you don’t know what you’re doing anymore. Does this keep the cool air from the night before in, or just create an oven of stale air? Don’t bother with google; that will just make your computer hot. Congratulate the cat for peeing on the only fan. Grumble to self that fans don’t do anything anyway, except blow down the aforementioned stale hot air. Put the pee-fan outside, to aggravate the neighbor’s cat, aka your cat’s arch nemesis. Remember to not get mad at any of the cats, because mostly you’re worried about whether they’re drinking enough, and you really wish they would cooperate like other cats that accept icepacks. This is a good reminder: check the cat water. Overdo it. Feel bad about the neighbor’s cat who is outside, and leave a bowl of water out there, too.
Now, sunscreen: how do you feel about it? One website will say that you will absolutely die if you don’t slather yourself in a tennis ball sized goo cannon twice a day, even indoors, even if there are no windows and no doors and it’s raining and winter. Another website will swear that sunscreen doesn’t actually work anyway, and that scalding beet-red burn you’re experiencing is actually the conspiracy, rubbing your nose in your own titanium dioxide. Now comes the means of answering this question: what would Australians do? You slather on mineral sunscreen (aka Zinc) and adjust your complaint filter so that the long stream of whining remains an internal lubricant, and not a strategy for getting out of a meeting sooner.
Clothing. This is not about fashion, or function, but what the skin is willing to tolerate. Shoes are the only essential article of clothing for admittance into most convenience stores, as well as something to cover the genital region enough to avoid arrest. Of note: a bikini is a totally acceptable outfit, especially if you intend to ride a bike. This wisdom applies to all genders. You settle on something that straddles the line of conventional decency, and is least likely to inspire heat rash. Science.
Putting things in a bag: this is hard. It’s important to give the icepack premium placement over your kidneys.
Time to go. One step outside, and you’re overwhelmed by the strength of your own genius. Icepack under the hat? There should be an award for that. At the ceremony you would thank your cats, your Polish genes that leave you armored against cold and defenseless against heat, your partner who somehow left the house in Carhartt’s that day, and the heat stroke you didn’t have. Icepack in the laptop compartment? You need to secure a patent for that one. With every step, you consider yourself more of a fashion pioneer. Everyone looks miserable, and you gobble it up like the vampire you are, swallowing their salty sweat and turning it into personal glee. No one knows of the genius happening all over your body. This is amazing. You are a terrible person, and an excellent imp.
You will hide in an air conditioned hovel as long as imps are permitted. Then you will enter the oven all over again, the fist of the drought more brutal when it delivers its second blow.